Defiance grows in Nablus after latest raid by Israeli forces

Palestinians posed for photos Friday at a new landmark — the rubble of a house that was the site of the deadliest raid by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank for nearly two decades.

Israeli forces killed 11 Palestinians and wounded more than 80 others by gunfire while raiding Nablus in the broad daylight of Wednesday morning, in what the Israeli army said was an operation based on intelligence of an imminent threat from Palestinian militants.

Only 48 hours later, a Palestinian family gathered to take snaps in the ruins of the house that has become a memorial among the ancient Ottoman mosques and cobbled streets of Nablus' Old City.

A saber of light cut through a gaping chasm in the ceiling — an artificial porthole left by an Israeli rocket fired during the operation.

"How is it possible that ... hundreds of soldiers armed with rifles and missiles enter an area inhabited by 200,000 unarmed civilians in order to arrest or kill a person?" asked Nasser Mahamadeh.

"The people here are all with the resistance, and these incidents make the resistance more powerful and make people turn more towards the resistance," the 57-year-old said as he surveyed the destruction.

"If there were 10 resistors before, now they will become 1,000 resistors, and so on."

A spokesperson for the Israeli military said that "about 150 personnel" were involved in Wednesday's raid.

Nablus' Old City has become a focal point of increased tension in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the emergence of a new militant group known as the Lions' Den last year.

Israel has accused the group of carrying out attacks on Israeli targets, including the killing in October of a soldier in the West Bank.

Wednesday's raid was just the latest in a string of deadly military operations in the West Bank which have seen scores of Palestinians killed.

'Lions' Den' 

In January, Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians, including children and militants, in a raid further north on the Jenin refugee camp. Another five, alleged Hamas militants, were killed in an operation in the Dead Sea city of Jericho.

Among the dead in Nablus on Wednesday was 72-year-old Adnan Abu Ashraf.

Outside his bolted shop, his cousin Umm Tayseer al-Asalia, 60, described how he did not return after he headed "to the municipality to complete some paperwork."

"Killing the leaders of the resistance in Nablus does not weaken the resistance, but rather strengthens it, because there are always new youths joining the resistance," she said.

Ameed al-Masri, a local Fatah official, said the fighters even had the support of the representatives of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas' secular Fatah movement.

"The Lions' Den is a group of young people from various factions who chose the struggle, independent of any faction," he said.

"We in Fatah respect that. We are with anyone who wants to resist" the occupation, he added.

The Islamic Jihad said one of its commanders was also among those killed in Wednesday's Israeli raid.

Yet while Israel's military lauds its own efforts to fight the group, in the Old City, locals said that regardless of how many fighters they claimed to have killed, Nablus' resistance had only hardened.

Asalia pointed to her eight-year-old grandson, Karim.

"He asked me to buy him a gun because he wanted to join the Lions' Den and become hunted like the martyr Ibrahim al-Nabulsi," she said, referring to the group's late leader, as her shy grandchild scuttled away.

Surrounded by rubble, a furious Mahamadeh cleaned the dust off his boots.

"The Lions' Den is an idea," he said.

"This idea is now spreading to all of Palestine, and every person has become a resistance fighter."

In a statement posted to the Telegram internet channel late on Thursday, the Lions' Den claimed that "nearly 50" more fighters had joined the group since Wednesday's raid.

AFP was unable to confirm the authenticity of the statement.