When the ceasefire in Gaza was announced on January 15, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were delighted that Israel’s devastating war against the besieged enclave was finally over.
However, Israeli state violence has escalated rapidly across the West Bank in what local observers and analysts describe as an apparent attempt to formally annex more land.
The sudden increase in settler attacks and Israeli military operations has frightened Palestinians in the occupied territory, who believe they could now face the same type of violence carried out against their compatriots in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 46,900 Palestinians in Gaza since the war in the enclave began in October 2023.
“We watched a genocide unfold in Gaza for 14 months and no one in the world did anything to stop it and some people here think we will suffer a similar fate,” said Shady Abdullah, a journalist and human rights activist from Tulkarem.
“We all know that we fear that the situation could get much worse here in the West Bank,” he told Al Jazeera.
Changing Battlefield
Hours after the Gaza ceasefire began on January 19, Israel began erecting dozens of new checkpoints in the West Bank to prevent Palestinians from gathering and celebrating the release of political prisoners, who were freed in an exchange by Israeli captives held by Hamas as part of the deal.
The checkpoints also banned farmers from reaching their farmlands and locked up civilians in entire cities, such as Hebron and Bethlehem.
Israeli settlers then began expanding illegal outposts in the West Bank and attacking Palestinian villages. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, and many of the haphazardly built outposts are even illegal under Israeli law, although little is often done to remove them and many of them are later formalized.
“The implications of violence are that it leads to direct or associated displacement and that is in line with Israel’s goal of preventing any Palestinian state on its land,” said Tahani Mustafa, an Israel-Palestine expert at the International Crisis Group.
Additionally, the Israeli military announced plans to carry out major operations in the West Bank, beginning on January 21 with a major raid on the Jenin camp, ostensibly to root out armed groups. Israeli incursions into the West Bank predated the war in Gaza, but increased in violence and intensity with the start of the war.
“The settler violence and the incursions that we are seeing… are an indicator of where we are heading now,” Mustafa told Al Jazeera.
Compensation?
The rise in violence has led some to believe that new US President Donald Trump made a commitment to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the war in Gaza in exchange for escalating aggression in the West Bank.
“The ceasefire in Gaza – which looks more like a humanitarian pause and a “trade in hostages and prisoners” – has a price. “Israel never gives up anything without paying a price and I think we are seeing that in the West Bank, given the type of (officials) that make up the Trump administration,” Mustafa said.
Trump has not indicated that there is any kind of agreement with Netanyahu that would allow him to increase violence in the West Bank, but he has also refused to commit to a two-state solution and has nominated several figures who oppose the creation of a Palestinian state. for prominent positions in his administration.
The prospect of further repression against Palestinian fighters in the West Bank, as well as the growth of illegal settlements and even possible annexation, appears to have incentivized Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to remain in Netanyahu’s fragile coalition. , instead of retreating. and collapsing the government as a way to protest the ceasefire in Gaza.
Under Smotrich’s government, Israel has quietly confiscated more land in the West Bank over the past year than in the past 20 years combined, according to Peace Now, an Israeli nonprofit that monitors land grabs.
Both Smotrich and the broader settler movement have long considered the occupied West Bank as an integral part of “greater Israel” and refer to the territory as Judea and Samaria.
Smotrich’s rapid annexation of the West Bank went largely unnoticed due to the much larger crisis in Gaza, where, in addition to the mass killing of Palestinians, almost the entire pre-war population of 2.3 million people was uprooted and displaced.
Settler attacks
Palestinians across the occupied West Bank now say settlers are stepping up attacks in coordination with the Israeli military to confiscate and seize more land.
On January 20, settlers violently attacked two villages in the northern West Bank, Funduq and Jinasfut, as well as villages further south in Masafer Yatta and around Ramallah.
Settlers burned homes and cars and beat Palestinians under the full protection and watchful eye of the Israeli military, according to local rights groups.
However, the head of the Israeli army’s Central Command, General Avi Bluth, said in a statement that any “violent disturbances harm security and the army will not allow it.”
The attacks occurred during Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States: in one of his first actions as president he revoked sanctions on groups and individuals that the United States had previously considered part of the “extremist settler movement.”
“The objective of the settlers is known,” said Abbas Milhem, executive director of the Palestinian Farmers Union. “They want to move Palestinians out of the West Bank, annex the land to Israel and impose Israeli law.”
Ghassan Aleeyan, a Palestinian living in Bethlehem, expressed his frustration to Al Jazeera.
“What these people are doing is illegal, but they don’t care about international law, Palestinian law or Israeli law,” he told Al Jazeera. “They don’t even care about God’s law.”
The raid is Jen’s.
In early December, armed groups in Jenin began clashing with the Palestinian Authority (PA), an administration created as a result of the 1993 Oslo Accords.
The agreements boosted a now-defunct peace process that apparently aimed to establish a Palestinian state across the occupied Palestinian territory, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
A key element of the Oslo Accords was tasking the Palestinian Authority with the task of rooting out and disarming armed groups as part of its security coordination with Israel.
But as hopes for a state faded and Israel entrenched its occupation, various neighborhood armed groups loosely connected to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and even Fatah – the faction that controls the Palestinian Authority – emerged in Palestinian camps across the West Bank.
As the Palestinian Authority was unable to crush armed groups in the Jenin countryside, Israel launched a major operation on January 21, which has already killed at least 10 people.
Local observers told Al Jazeera that Israel is justifying its operation under the pretext of bolstering Israel’s security and ensuring that another October 7-style attack does not occur, even though armed groups in the West Bank are much less capable. and organized than Hamas in Gaza. .
“We believe Israel’s plan is to attack the northern West Bank in the same way it did during the second Intifada when it invaded Palestinian camps,” said Murad Jadallah, a human rights observer for al-Haq, a Palestinian rights group. .
Israel previously occupied the Jenin camp for 10 days in 2002, destroying some 400 homes and displacing about a quarter of the residents during the second Intifada in 2002, according to the UN Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA).
The ICG’s Mustafa believes that Israel will carry out more incursions and major military operations in the West Bank in the coming days in an attempt to crush all forms of resistance.
“The battlefield is about to move from Gaza to the West Bank,” he said.
