Two young Palestinian boys walk across the site of an Israeli airstrike that killed a group of militants in Jenin on July 5. Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post

JENIN, West Bank — Israeli raids targeting Palestinian militants in the West Bank are taking an enormous toll on daily life in the territory, leaving hundreds dead and neighborhoods destroyed, tactics residents and local fighters say are feeding resentment and causing more unrest.

Since the Oct. 7 attacks, Israeli forces have killed 554 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the United Nations, whose tally does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but is higher than any annual total since the United Nations began counting in 2005. Thousands more have been arrested or wounded, in sweeping operations backed by drones, warplanes and helicopter gunships.

Israel, which occupies the West Bank, says the firepower is necessary to prevent attacks on Israeli citizens. “In order to thwart terror activity in the region, the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] deploys all the capabilities at its disposal,” including airstrikes, the army spokesperson’s unit said.

But the forays into Palestinian cities and refugee camps have done little to subdue the militants. Instead, the violence is helping grow their ranks, furnishing new recruits angered by the conflict and driving rival groups together to plan joint attacks.

In the northern West Bank city of Jenin, a longtime hub for Palestinian factions and a central focus of Israel’s recent operations, the impact of the raids, and their role in fueling militancy, is especially stark. Here, in the rubble-strewn alleys of the Jenin refugee camp, residents say they have been hardened by the incursions and have watched for months as local youth increasingly take up arms.

“They are destroying all the infrastructure, the electricity, the shops,” Ashraf Jaradat, 42, said just hours after Israeli forces withdrew following a raid on July 5. An airstrike targeting five militants that day shattered Jaradat’s windows and cracked the water tank on his roof. “We get sick and tired of this,” he said. “The children are traumatized.”

The IDF spokesperson’s unit, in response to a list of questions about the West Bank raids, said its counterterrorism operations “are carried out on the basis of concrete intelligence information” and in specific areas “where either terror activity or the preparation of such activity is taking place in a way that risks the lives of our forces or Israeli citizens.”

But some of the operations have lasted days, knocking out power and water and confining residents to their homes as battles rage outside. Nearly every house here is pockmarked by bullets and the streets are torn up by Israeli bulldozers searching for explosives. A new crop of Palestinian fighters, organizing loosely under an umbrella group, the Jenin Battalion, now patrols entrances to the camp.

The battalion, which was founded three years ago during another bout of violence, is led by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a hard-line faction opposed to Israel. But it also includes fighters from other armed groups and cooperates regularly with Hamas, making it “the cornerstone” of the armed struggle in the West Bank, said 22-year-old Samer Abu Murad, one of the battalion’s more prominent fighters.

After the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran on Wednesday, the battalion marched in the streets of Jenin that night, congratulating Hamas’s armed wing on the “martyrdom of the great leader … Ismail Haniyeh.”

“We say to the enemy that we in the Jenin Battalion will continue on the same path of the martyrs,” one commander said, according to a video of the demonstration.

The funeral of Hamas militant Hareth Hashash, killed by the Israel Defense Forces during a raid in Jenin on July 5. Moath Hashash, right, carries the remains of his brother during the procession. Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post

The group has already “lost a lot of members” since October, Abu Murad said, estimating that between 70 and 80 operatives have been killed by Israeli forces. “But at the same time, the more we lose, the more it reinforces our determination,” he said, claiming the battalion has since recruited double the number of fighters lost.

During the raid in Jenin on July 5, Israeli forces killed six militants, including three from the battalion, and shot dead a civilian bystander, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Another militant injured in an airstrike died two days later. Also among the casualties were two Hamas operatives, brothers Hareth Hashash, 19, and Hamam Hashash, 23.

Hamam Hashash was one of two militants responsible for a roadside bomb attack that killed an Israeli sniper team commander in June, according to an IDF statement and a video released by Hamas. The other suspect, 22-year-old Nidal al-Amer, fought for Palestinian Islamic Jihad before Israeli forces assassinated him in Jenin on July 3.

The joint attack on the convoy, which also injured 16 soldiers, was an example of how armed groups are cooperating and adapting in the West Bank, Abu Murad said. Fighters are operating in smaller, more nimble cells, improving their tracking, observation and bombmaking techniques, he said. They are also thriving in close-quarter gunfights, and slinging tarps across the camp’s narrow alleys to shield themselves from drones.

The military “operates within a complicated security reality” in the West Bank, the IDF spokesperson’s unit said, adding that security forces have “increased the number of operating checkpoints and monitoring efforts.”

Outside the blackened ruins of their family home, on a hill looking over the city, 28-year-old Nusayba Hashash said she hadn’t known her two brothers were involved with Hamas. Hamam worked as a courier, delivering food on his motorbike. But they were among Jenin’s “shadow soldiers,” Abu Murad said. “They fight … and the day after, they go to work normally and nobody knows what they do.”

While the militants are still relatively undisciplined, their growing capabilities, including the use of roadside bombs, have “prompted top [IDF] commanders to rethink the methods of operation in the refugee camps,” Israel’s largest daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, reported on July 2.

“The IDF is seeing a very fast learning curve among the Palestinians,” Israeli journalist and security analyst, Amir Bar Shalom, wrote for the Times of Israel last month. The militants are burying explosive devices deeper in the roads to evade Israel’s backhoes and bulldozers, he said, causing the army to consider reinforcing its vehicles and to work on strengthening intelligence gathering in areas where the bombs are made.

For years, Palestinian militants laid low in the West Bank, battered by Israel’s crushing response to the second intifada, a mass uprising that began in 2000 and included suicide bombings and other violent attacks in Israeli cities. Military operations were more limited in scope, even as Israel gobbled up more territory by expanding Jewish settlements across the West Bank.

It wasn’t until 2021, as tensions rose in East Jerusalem over the eviction of some Palestinian families, that the dynamic began to shift. Over the next two years, violence spiked, the military cracked down, and the number of active armed groups in the West Bank soared.

The Israelis “were very heavy-handed going in and that’s where the protective instinct started,” Tahani Mustafa, senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, said of how the Jenin Battalion and other cells were established.

In 2022, the IDF launched Operation Break the Wave, carrying out more than 2,000 raids in just six months, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a nonprofit research group that collects and maps political violence.

Israeli forces are using drones, fighter jets and helicopter gunships in sweeping operations targeting Palestinian militants in West Bank cities such as Jenin. Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post

By October 2023, ahead of the Hamas attacks, “there really wasn’t much left” of the battalion in Jenin, Mustafa said. “But as soon as there’s an immediate catalyst, these groups will re-form.”

“That’s something the Israelis willfully refuse to really learn,” she said. “That this isn’t something you can clamp down on with coercion.”

In Jenin, a city of roughly 68,000 people, the raids have failed to turn residents against the militants, pushing them instead to come together to support the battalion. Some women feed and hide the fighters. One man in Jenin, who identified himself only as Osama because of security reasons, said he runs a Telegram channel to alert residents to approaching military vehicles.

“There is no safe place in the camp,” Mujahed Abadi, 24, said from his hospital bed last month, two weeks after Israeli forces shot him during a raid in Jenin. The IDF had tied an injured Abadi, a vegetable seller with no ties to the militants, to the hood of a military jeep in searing hot weather, causing him to sustain severe burns in addition to gunshot wounds to his arm and leg.

“The anger now is inside me,” Abadi said. “I believe the resistance is right in defending the camp.”

The military said in a statement that Abadi’s treatment “does not align with IDF values.” But, Mustafa said, “these raids are having a counterproductive effect,” elevating militant groups “that started out more like community defense mechanisms.”

When asked whether the IDF had degraded the militants’ capabilities, the spokesperson’s unit responded by saying the military had “eliminated hundreds of terrorists” in the West Bank over the past nine months. More than 1,800 “operatives” affiliated with Hamas were also apprehended, the IDF said.

But even as fighters are arrested or killed, the violence in Jenin has drawn a steady stream of recruits from surrounding villages. One of the militants who died in the July 5 raid – 30-year-old Yaseen al-Areedi – was a Hamas commander from Jalqamus, a village roughly 12 miles southeast of Jenin. His father, a soft-spoken cucumber and tomato farmer, said that his son had been hiding in the Jenin refugee camp for nearly a year.

Areedi “wanted the same as anyone – to live simply,” his elder brother Samer, 46, said at a memorial in the village. But he “saw the damage, the killing” and decided to take up arms.

For Amer, one of the alleged perpetrators of the roadside bomb attack, the fight “was in his blood,” his aunt, 50-year-old Dalal al-Amer, said.

Amer’s father, Ziad, who helped lead the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade during the second intifada, was killed during a 2002 battle in Jenin when his son was just an infant.

“We were telling him: ‘You have a history of fighters in the family – your uncles, your father. You have the opportunity” to live a normal life, said Dalal. “It was useless.”

Amer was buried in Jenin, in a parking lot residents converted to a cemetery last year after the old one ran out space. Dalal’s 16-year-old son – Amer’s cousin – served as a pallbearer. Before he was “a little boy,” scared of the violence around him, she said. But after that day, “he defeated the fear inside him. I saw it in his eyes.”

If he doesn’t end up following his relatives’ footsteps, she said, “he will be an exception.”