The streets of the occupied West Bank city of Jenin were awash with black-clad men wearing balaclavas and toting M-16 rifles, a model apparently favoured because the ammunition is cheap. The crack of near-constant gunfire was deafening, almost drowning out chants of: “We will teach Tel Aviv a lesson.”
On Wednesday, the bodies of two militants killed in an Israeli army raid the day before were wrapped in Palestinian flags and carried through the centre towards the refugee camp on the city’s western edge. The huge number of armed men, and the mingling of flags belonging to several different militias – Hamas, Fatah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – spoke to a new dynamic in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
