Terrorists turned Jenin mosque into a hideout, with underground tunnel and cache of weapons, explosives

Israel Defense Forces gained control of the Al Ansari Mosque in the West Bank on Monday afternoon, following a shootout with Palestinian gunmen in the area.

The encounter came amid IDF’s Operation Home and Garden counter-terrorism operation against terrorists in the Jenin refugee camp. The IDF said it carried out a drone strike against the armed Palestinians outside the mosque and later managed to break in.

The IDF reported that the gunmen in Jenin turned the Al Ansari Mosque into a “fortified” hideout, complete with an underground tunnel and a cache of weapons, explosives and other military equipment, which were found inside the holes of the tunnel and scattered across the mosque.

The equipment was seized, the weapons were destroyed, and the tunnel was rendered inoperable, the IDF said.

Video footage released by the army showed dozens of sandbags and stones piled up across the ground floor of the mosque that the IDF commander said would have taken a long time for the gunmen to fortify.

“All of this excavation work in the mosque has turned it into a fortified site,” said Lt.-Col. “Mem,” the commander of the elite Egoz military unit, who is only permitted to be identified by his rank and initial.

Israel launched the major operation in the early morning hours of Monday, focusing on a local wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group known as the Jenin Battalion, in addition to other smaller armed factions in the vicinity. These groups, which the Palestinian Authority appears to have little control of, have carried out several terrorist attacks on Israel in recent years.

On Tuesday morning, Palestinian health officials reported that ten people were killed in the operation, and at least 100 others were wounded during the airstrikes and clashes the previous day.

Israeli troops began questioning over 120 Palestinian suspects early on Monday morning. Some were released, while others were taken in for additional questioning.

The IDF believes there were some 300 Palestinian gunmen in the Jenin refugee camp, with IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari stating that the Israel Security Agency, Shin Bet, had intelligence on the identities of at least 160 armed Palestinians.

As many as 3,000 Palestinians streamed out of the Jenin refugee camp on Monday night to escape the fighting, although the IDF said it had not ordered an evacuation and that there was no closure on Jenin.

The targets of the airstrikes included a joint war room shared by various armed groups, where according to the IDF troops located and demolished weapon storage sites, explosives labs with hundreds of primed devices, war rooms used by Palestinian gunmen for observation of Israeli troops and other “terror infrastructure.”

Military troops also clashed with armed Palestinians as they carried out some 20 drone strikes against various targets in the refugee camp.

The military named the operation “Bayit ve Gan,” literally Home and Garden, a reference to Jenin’s biblical name, and the term has been used by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well. However, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit insists that the operation has no official name.

For several weeks prior there had been speculation about a major Israeli military operation in the West Bank, following a string of shooting attacks and intense resistance to IDF raids in Palestinian cities.

The northern West Bank, and the city of Jenin, in particular, has been considered by the IDF as a hotbed of terrorism with a string of some 50 shooting attacks there since early 2022, many of which were carried out by residents of the city. In addition, as many as 19 Palestinians on Israel’s suspect list escaped to Jenin to seek refuge.

Some 144 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed since early last year, most of them during clashes with security forces or while carrying out attacks, according to The Times of Israel, however, some were uninvolved civilians and others were killed under unclear circumstances.

It’s estimated that over one thousand IDF troops took part in the Jenin counter-terrorism operation, reportedly the largest operation in the West Bank in the last 20 years.