Jenin, Palestine– Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas is due Wednesday to visit the northern West Bank city of Jenin for the first time in over a decade, a week after the largest Israeli raid there in years.
Twelve Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed in the two-day raid on Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp, a regular site of fierce fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups.
The raid on the camp, which Israel views as a “terrorism hub”, employed hundreds of troops as well as drone strikes and army bulldozers that tore up streets and damaged scores of houses.
Soon after the raid, several top officials of Abbas’s Fatah party, including deputy chairman Mahmoud Aloul, had visited the camp only to be heckled by crowds of angry residents.
On Wednesday, Abbas was expected to visit the city as well as the camp, along with the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
He was due to review “progress of work in the reconstruction of the camp and the city”, his office said in a statement.
Ahead of Abbas’s arrival, hundreds of soldiers from the presidential guard were seen patrolling the streets of the camp, an AFP journalist said.
The Jenin camp was established in 1953 to house some of those among the 760,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948 when Israel was created, an event Palestinians call the “Nakba” or “catastrophe”.
Over time, the camp’s original tents have been replaced by concrete, and it now resembles something closer to a neighbourhood.
The camp, which houses some 18,000 people, was also a hotbed of activity during the second “intifada” or uprising of the early 2000s.
Over the past 18 months, the security situation in the camp has deteriorated, with the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority having little real presence there.
Abbas, 87, last visited Jenin in 2012 but had not toured the camp at the time.
While the PA remains somewhat present in the city, it has largely abandoned the camp to local armed groups such as the Jenin Brigade, which Israel alleges is backed by Iran.
Abbas had previously visited the camp itself in 2004 while running for the Palestinian presidential election after the death of leader Yasser Arafat.
During that trip Abbas was famously embraced by Zakaria Zubeidi, a senior militant in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, who for years was on Israel’s most wanted list.
Experts were however sceptical of Abbas’s visit on Wednesday.
“Through his made-for-camera visit, Abbas wants to show that he and his Palestinian Authority are firmly in control of Jenin,” Hugh Lovatt, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told AFP.
“In reality, making a rare visit outside of his Ramallah fiefdom will do little to re-establish the Palestinian Authority given the deepening crisis of legitimacy it is facing and the rise of Palestinian armed groups.”