Operation Defensive Shield

In the spring of 2002 Israel was at the height of a wave of suicide bombings carried out by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades of Yasser Arafat's Fatah. In March alone more than a hundred Israelis were murdered. On the night of 27 March, as some 250 guests sat down to the Passover seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya, a Hamas suicide bomber walked into the dining hall and killed 30 people, many of them elderly, among them Holocaust survivors. On 29 March the government called up some 20,000 reservists, and the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield, its largest operation in Judea and Samaria since 1967.

Troops entered Ramallah and besieged Arafat in his compound, the Muqata, then Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Bethlehem, Nablus and the camp of Jenin, a center of the bombers. In Jenin the IDF fought house to house rather than bomb from the air, and 23 soldiers fell, 13 of them in a single ambush; claims of a massacre there proved false. The operation, which ended in May, dismantled bomb workshops and terrorist cells, and with the security barrier begun that June, the suicide bombings fell sharply.