As Israeli tanks and troops stormed into Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank this week — one of the largest such military operations in years — a comment by the country’s foreign minister reverberated loudly across the region.
Israel should resort to the “temporary evacuation” of Palestinian residents from the West Bank, if need be, to facilitate the fight against terrorism, Israel Katz wrote on social media, as Israeli bulldozers dug up roads, destroyed buildings and left a trail of destruction behind them.
For many, it raised the spectre that Israel might be adapting the kind of scorched-earth tactics it has employed for almost a year in Gaza to the more populous and politically sensitive West Bank.
And that forcing West Bank Palestinians out of their homes might be the first stage in pushing them out permanently.
“The Israeli major military operation in the occupied West Bank must not constitute the premises of a war extension from Gaza, including full-scale destruction,” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, responded.
Other veteran observers of the decades-long conflict concurred.
“It looks very much like Israel is not only not ending the war in Gaza, but they’re expanding it to the West Bank,” Khalid Elgindy, a fellow with the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., told CBC News.
Most of the 2.3 million people in Gaza have been driven from their homes by Israel’s military and forced to live in tents in filthy conditions, creating a public health disaster that has allowed diseases such as polio to fester.
Gaza health authorities say more than 40,000 people have been killed since Israel’s assault began last October, with tens of thousands more wounded.
As of Thursday, at least 17 Palestinian civilians and combatants have been reportedly killed in the recent West Bank raids, including a leader of Islamic Jihad in Tulkarem.
Israeli settlers have gained political power
Israel claims the assaults on West Bank cities such as Tulkarem, Jenin and Nablus were aimed at preventing imminent attacks on Israelis, and that the militants purportedly responsible are being funded and supported by Iran.
Israel launched a large-scale expansion of its military efforts into the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, calling it a counter-terrorism operation. Palestinians are accusing the Israeli army of expanding the tactics it has been using in Gaza.
This week’s raids came roughly 10 days after a man with a bomb blew himself up in Tel Aviv, in what the Palestinian militant group Hamas later acknowledged was a failed attack by a suicide bomber.
Katz, the Israeli foreign minister, accused Iran’s leaders of supporting a “terror front” against Israel.
While Israel’s military thrust into the West Bank has been on a much smaller scale than the one in Gaza, there are more than 270 Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
In July, the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a landmark ruling in which it said Israel’s 57-year occupation of the West Bank is illegal, that its settlement policies violate international law and that existing settlements should be removed.
Israel took control of the Palestinian territories following the 1967 war, and the Israeli government has repeatedly refused international calls to negotiate the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Indeed, many ultranationalist Jewish Israelis, especially members of the settler movement, have openly flaunted their goal of fully annexing the West Bank — which they refer to by an ancient Biblical name, Judea and Samaria — and either expelling Palestinians who live there or otherwise making them leave.
Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the settler movement has grown politically powerful, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich acting as the de facto governor of the Israeli settlements.
Crucially, Netanyahu’s governing coalition has relied on the support of Israel’s far-right parties to stay in power.
Settler violence increasing
The human rights group Peace Now says settlement building has surged, with 28 new Jewish communities established on Palestinian land last year, and another 16 so far in 2024.
The settler population in the West Bank has grown to more than 478,000, with an additional 229,000 in occupied East Jerusalem, a three-fold increase in just 20 years.
Elgindy says while Netanyahu has ultimate authority, ministers such as Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir are driving Israeli policy in the West Bank, and that their aims are clear.
“[Smotrich and Ben Gvir] would like nothing more … than to remove the Palestinian population from large swaths of the West Bank,” said Elgindy.
“Whether this operation is going to lead to that, we don’t know. But it’s definitely, I think, a cause for alarm.”
Tahani Mustafa, a senior Palestine analyst with the International Crisis Group, said this week’s military assaults amount to an “acceleration” of a pattern of violence that had become a feature of Israel’s government long before the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, which killed 1,200 people in Israel.
“The situation has incredibly deteriorated and the violent trends have gotten worse, in terms of the uptick in violence, the search-and-arrest operations, the attempted land grabs and making life unbearable for residents of the West Bank,” Mustafa said in an interview from Amman, Jordan.
More than 600 Palestinians killed in West Bank since October: UN
The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that between Oct. 7, 2023, and Aug. 19, 2024, 607 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem. That number includes 589 who were killed by Israeli forces and 11 by Israeli settlers.
In that same period, 15 Israelis, including five settlers, were killed by Palestinians.
OCHA says over the same 10 months, Israeli authorities demolished more than 1,400 Palestinian homes and other structures across the West Bank, which is more than double compared with the same period before Oct. 7.
While the leaders of some settler movements have been slapped with foreign sanctions, so far, the United States, Canada and European nations have not imposed any penalties on the Israeli cabinet ministers most responsible for the expansions.
“The international community has not put any red lines on Israel,” said Mustafa.
Israel’s government has accused Iran of stepping up financial support for militant groups in the West Bank, as well as of arming them, but has not provided evidence.
“There is some level of truth [to this claim], in the sense that Iran is one of the largest financial backers of these groups, but that sort of misses the entire contextual rationale for why these groups have popped up and why they have gained momentum,” said Mustafa.
The reason these groups exist isn’t to serve Iran’s interests, but rather the desperate situation people face at home, she says.
“These groups do not have a serious political agenda other than fighting the [Israeli] occupation,” said Mustafa.
Risk of radicalizing more Palestinians
She says rather than eliminating or severely weakening these groups, Israel’s military action this week will likely have the opposite effect.
“If anything, you are going to radicalize more Palestinians.”
This also seems to be the view of some in Israel’s security services, as the desperation in the West Bank mounts.
Ronan Bar, the top commander of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, published an open letter to Netanyahu in the aftermath of a succession of settler attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank, warning that “Jewish terrorism” is endangering the country’s existence.
“The damage to Israel … is indescribable,” Bar wrote, claiming the perils include “delegitimization” in the eyes of the international community, and that the actions of settlers could serve as a recruitment tool in the occupied West Bank for Palestinians seeking revenge.
Elgindy predicts that in the absence of substantial pressure from Israel’s allies — especially the United States — to pull back, Israeli raids into the West Bank will increase.
“If things continue on their current trajectories, then we’re going to see more and bigger operations like what we saw overnight in the West Bank — and we’re going to probably also see more armed resistance by Palestinian groups.”
