Jenin Camp

This horse, at the entrance to the camp, was made by volunteers out of the debris of an ambulance that was blown to pieces by the Israeli army in 2002.

Jenin camp, which is about 1 kilometre outside the town itself along the main road, is not a camp as I imagined it before I came here. Originally when the refugees arrived in 1948, it consisted of tents. Since then concrete houses have been built, some of which are large. There are narrow streets, shops, schools and other public buildings. Two of the other volunteers and I are giving English lessons for local teenagers in a wonderful centre a few yards away from there. It is called the Rehabilitation Centre which specialises in treating people, especially children with physical and also learning disabilities. The staff, physiotherapists, experts in making prosthetic limbs, and other specialists are wonderful. We are shown around by Hisham, who has recently come back from England having studied for a masters degree at Southampton University. The dedication of the staff is amazing and humbling.


I am staying with Mustafa who has shown amazing kindness and hospitality, which I don't know how I can ever repay. He lost the use of his legs during the first intifada, when he was 16 and was shot by an Israeli soldier.

'I was running down the street, a soldier who was on the roof of a neighbouring building shot me in the back'.

He rolls up his shirt and I feel the scar on his back.

'It is funny. I didn't feel any pain. I knew I had been shot when I suddenly lost my sight. I knew that I would never walk again'.

He was in rehabilitation for two years. 'At first I was angry, now I am not'.

In 2002, after the second intifada started, the Israeli army attacked the Jenin camp over a 12 day period. 16 people died then, but incidents since that time, a total of over a hundred have died in the camp. Everywhere on the walls of the narrow streets here, there are pictures of martyrs, shaheeds, young men in their early twenties, some as young as eighteen, posing with guns in their hands. I have seen these all over Palestine, in Nablus and Hebron. But here there are rows of them. Last night Mustafa and I were having coffee with Marwan, the organiser of our volunteer program. He works for the Palestinian Authority. 'I saw my mother and brother killed by soldiers in 2002'. He says this in a tone of sorrow rather than in rage. Despite what he has experienced, he still believes in peace, although he doubts whether the will exists for it in Israel. With him are two colleagues from the ministry where he works. One is an elderly silver-haired man. He sees me studying a picture of a shaheed on the wall above us, a young man of about 26, again posed with his gun, and the date of his death, November 2002. 'That was my son', he tells me. I pass him again today. 'Good morning doctor', he says, courteously giving me an undeserved title.

I have been amazed again and again by the generosity and lack of rancour of people who have suffered so much here. Mustafa lives in quite a large house on one of the main streets (still quite small) of the camp. He has given over to me a bedroom, a bathroom and a sitting room. In the ceiling of the sitting room there is a large crack in the concrete. This was caused by a missile fired from a helicopter.

'There were two missiles fired at our house. And then the soldiers used the roof of our house as a sniping post'. Mustafa is good-humoured, still boyish in his manner. He is a member of a basketball team organised by a local organisation for people who are also disabled.
'I quite admire the Israeli soldiers', he says. 'They are well trained. You know one of them can kill two people with a single bullet'.