The Israeli military launched the largest, deadliest West Bank attack of the year on Wednesday, killing at least 16 people, including a high-ranking militia commander, over the course of several days. Violence in the West Bank — perpetrated by the military, Israeli settlers, and Palestinian fighters — has been steadily accelerating over the past 10 months.
Since the October 7 Hamas raid on Israel, at least 660 Palestinians and 15 Israelis have been killed in the West Bank, according to the United Nations. It’s a smaller number than the more than 40,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza over the past 10 months, but it is still a reminder of how intense ongoing violence in the West Bank is.
The Israeli military has conducted several raids in Palestinian refugee camps since the start of the war in Gaza. The latest operation started early Wednesday morning: Air and ground forces targeted Tulkarm in the northwest, Jenin at the territory’s northern border, and Far’a refugee camp in the territory’s east. Shin Bet, an Israeli security service affiliated with the country’s intelligence groups, and the Israel Border Police were also involved in the raids, which ostensibly targeted what Israeli officials called “terrorist infrastructure.”
Israel claims Mohamed Jaber — a commander of a group affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad — and Hamas commander Wassem Hazem were both killed, along with other militants during the raid. Israeli officials accused Hazem of plotting, along with other militia members, attacks within the West Bank. Like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad helped commit the October 7 attacks; both groups also claimed responsibility for a suicide attack in Tel Aviv earlier this month, which wounded one Israeli.
“If you think about it from this sort of tactical perspective, suicide bombers are most likely to be coming from the West Bank, more so than Gaza, probably because Gaza is already a war zone,” Raphael Cohen, director of the strategy and doctrine program of RAND Project Air Force, told Vox, adding that Hamas officials have called for increased suicide attacks against Israeli territory. That may be part of what motivated Israel’s recent operation.
There is also a rising number of Palestinians taking up arms in the West Bank generally, some due to anger and horror over the brutal destruction of Gaza, but also because military raids and attacks by Jewish settlers in the West Bank are increasingly violent and terrorizing. Saif Aqel, a youth leader with the Fatah political group, told the Washington Post that Jaber had been radicalized by Israel’s repeated West Bank raids, saying, “The environment he was living in made him like this.”
As part of its operation this week, the Israeli military has blocked and destroyed roads and blocked entrances to hospitals, according to witnesses, as well as shut off electricity, water, mobile, and internet service. The Israeli military has disputed that it blocked access to medical facilities.
Violence in the West Bank has been going on for decades
The West Bank sits to Israel’s east, bordering Jordan and the western shore of the Dead Sea. Before 1967, Jordan controlled the region; Israel then captured the territory and held it under military occupation until the 1993 Oslo Accords, when it was carved up into three “areas,” supposedly under the control of the Palestinian Authority. However, Jewish Israeli settlement of the area accelerated, and the Israeli military also moved in to protect them. Now, the Palestinian Authority, which is the nominal government, has little actual control in the West Bank.
Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank are recognized as occupied territory under international law, and therefore Israel is obligated to protect the people living there. Israel denies that it is occupying Palestinian lands, but just last month, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel is occupying Palestinian lands and should end that occupation immediately.
Under that order, which is enforceable by the UN Security Council, “Israel must withdraw its forces from all parts of the occupied territories, including the Gaza Strip and remove all settlers from the West Bank, including from the illegally annexed East Jerusalem,” Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, said in a statement. Israel’s allies on the security council, including the United States, have given no indication they intend to enforce the court’s decision.
That has allowed Israel to continue its war in Gaza, and left Palestinians living in the West Bank trapped in a cycle of violence: There have been at least five major Israeli military operations in the West Bank since October 7, and settler violence has increased as well.
These settlers are Israelis — often aligned with the country’s right wing and often heavily armed “to the teeth,” according to Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer specializing in international human rights law.
They have increasingly expanded the number of settlements into land the United Nations has said is supposed to be off-limits to Israeli control. Israel refers to them as “illegal” settlements but does not stop people from building outposts, or from forcing Palestinians out of their homes and off their land. Some settlers have begun to push closer to cities as well. Settlements are also frequently subsidized by the Israeli government, which provides them with higher-quality infrastructure, roads, water, and schools in their settlements than what the government provides Palestinian villages.
Some Palestinians have taken up arms against these settlers, and sanctioned Israeli military operations have encouraged vigilantism and new anti-Israel militant groups as well. Israel has sent in more troops in response, creating what seems to be an inescapable cycle.
“The cities [in the West Bank] are supposed to be free of army presence, but the army has been carrying out these raids, so these [militant] groups arose in response,” Joost Hiltermann, director of the Middle East program at the International Crisis Group, told Vox. “So then the army responds to these groups, and you’ll see an escalation.”
Jenin city and the refugee camp on its outskirts — two sites that saw fighting this week — are frequent targets since, as Buttu explained, they and all of Gaza are the main sites of Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories.
Overall, there’s little sign either the militants or Israel will change their strategies in the West Bank, and that has some countries — particularly France and Britain — worried that the increasing violence will turn the West Bank into another Gaza.