At least nine Palestinians have been killed in a widespread Israeli attack on the northern occupied West Bank, focused on the governorates of Tulkarem, Jenin and Tubas.
According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, four people were killed by Israeli forces in the Fara’a refugee camp in Tubas, three people in an Israeli drone strike on a vehicle in the village of Seir, near the city of Jenin, and two were killed in Jenin itself.
Jenin, with a population of around 39,000, is reported to have been entirely sealed off by Israeli forces. The governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Rub, said that Israeli forces had cut off access to hospitals and other medical facilities in Jenin, and Israeli media outlets reported that Israeli soldiers had surrounded hospitals in Tulkarem and Tubas.
The Israeli military has described the assault, which began early on Wednesday, as the largest in the West Bank in two decades, and has released a joint statement with the Israeli police describing it as a “counter-terrorism operation” targeting Palestinian fighters.
Lets take a closer look.
(Al Jazeera)
How often do Israeli forces attack Palestinians in the occupied West Bank?
Israeli assaults in the West Bank have occurred on an almost daily basis since 2022, predating the current far-right Israeli government.
They target Palestinian cities, refugee camps and villages, and have killed hundreds.
Between Israeli military raids and attacks by Israeli settlers, approximately 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since 2022 in the West Bank.
The military raids stem from Israel’s policy of dealing with the West Bank, which it has illegally occupied since 1967, through force rather than agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state. The focus is usually on ensuring that Palestinian resistance groups do not get strong enough to challenge Israel.
Palestinian armed groups in the West Bank have nothing like the firepower of those in Gaza, and Israel has long worked to ensure that remains that way, including by cooperating on security matters with the Palestinian Authority (PA), a practice that has made the PA unpopular among Palestinians.
Israelis living in illegal settlements regularly attack Palestinians, particularly those living in villages and rural communities, harassing them as well as violently attacking them, and sometimes forcing them to leave their land.
Both Israeli military raids and settler attacks have increased in their number and in the violence used since October 7, and the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza.
How unprecedented is Wednesday’s military operation?
This is clearly a big military operation, with Israel rolling hundreds of soldiers, as well as fighter aircraft, drones and bulldozers, into action in three West Bank governorates.
The Israeli media, quoting Israeli military sources, is expecting the attack to continue for several days, meaning the death toll is expected to rise sharply, particularly as the cities and villages being attacked are full of Palestinian civilians.
Israel itself is describing the assault as the biggest of its kind in the West Bank since 2002, when the Palestinian territory was in the middle of the second intifada, or uprising.
At the time, Israel was criticised for the heavy-handed nature of its response to an initial wave of non-violent demonstrations, civil disobedience and stone throwing.
By the end of the intifada in 2005, Israel had killed 4,793 Palestinians. Israeli casualties are estimated at around 1,000.
How connected are Israel’s assaults in the West Bank to the war on Gaza?
Israel has long painted its military operations in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, as well as with Hezbollah in Lebanon, as battlegrounds within the same conflict, against both the Palestinians and Israel’s primary regional geopolitical foe, Iran.
Israel views groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as many other Palestinian movements, as Iranian proxies.
Writing on social media after the attack on the northern West Bank began, Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz said that Iran was “working to establish an eastern terrorist front” against Israel in the West Bank, by “financing and arming terrorists and smuggling advanced weapons from Jordan”.
But, as mentioned previously, Israel’s large-scale attacks on the West Bank predate October 7, with a particular increase in the ferocity of Israeli attacks following the return of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power – backed by overtly anti-Palestinian figures in key ministerial positions – at the very end of 2022.
The presence of helicopter gunships during attacks in the West Bank also occurred before October 7, notably during a two-day raid on the Jenin refugee camp in July 2023. At the time Israel said that it had carried out 15 air raids using helicopter gunships and reconnaissance drones.
What does Israel want from the West Bank?
While technically under the control of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, much of the West Bank is policed and governed by Israel, and Israeli forces have the ability to enter any part of the occupied Palestinian territory.
Israeli soldiers are stationed permanently throughout the West Bank, and illegal Israeli settlements and roads serving only Israelis criss-cross the territory, leaving the prospect of a Palestinian state distant. The International Court of Justice recently declared Israel’s continued presence in the occupied West Bank, as well as occupied East Jerusalem, “unlawful”.
While Israel often frames its occupation of the West Bank as a necessity for security reasons, in reality Netanyahu and other leading Israeli politicians have rejected a two-state solution, and openly call for an increase in Israeli settlements, and the centrality of the territory they call ‘Judea and Samaria’ to Israel.
And control of construction and responsibility for policing in the West Bank is overseen by two of Israel’s most controversial and pro-settler government ministers.
Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich has recently assumed overall control over construction within the West Bank, while National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has responsibility for its policing. Both have spoken in favour of further Israeli expansion within the Palestinian territory and both have been repeatedly accused of supporting settler violence against Palestinian citizens within the territory. Both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are settlers themselves.
And now, with the attacks in the West Bank ongoing, Foreign Minister Katz has called for the “temporary evacuation” of Palestinians from the West Bank – raising the fear that Israel may be attempting to engineer the forced displacement of Palestinians from the territory.
For Omar Baddar, a Middle East political analyst, that is part of the wider Israeli strategy.
“I think the context of it is worth noting, which is the fact that Israel has been intending to annex and ethnically cleanse huge parts of the West Bank for a very, very long time,” Baddar told Al Jazeera.
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