Israel applies many tactics used in his war against Gaza to grasp and control the territory through the occupied West Bank during his Operation Iron Wall campaign, said a new report.
Israel launched the operation in January. Defend what the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) called “by far the longest and most destructive operation of the West Bank occupied since the second intifada in the 2000s”, the Israeli army said that its intention was to preserve its “freedoms of action” within the Palestinian territory while it continued to tear them off and destroy Buildings, infrastructure and Palesnian tracks and water.
The report of the British Research Group Forensic Architecture suggested that Israel has imposed what researchers call a system of “spatial control”, essentially a series of mechanisms which allow it to deploy military units through Palestinian territory.
The report focused on the Israeli action in the refugee camps of Jenin and Far’a in the north of the West Bank and Nur Shams and Tulkarem in the northwest of the West Bank. The researchers interviewed and analyzed the declarations of witnesses, satellite imaging and hundreds of videos to demonstrate a systematic Israeli action plan coordinated intended to impose a military control network in refugee camps through the West Bank similar to that imposed in Gaza.
In the process, the existing roads have been widened while houses, private gardens and adjacent properties have been demolished to allow rapid deployment of Israeli military vehicles.
“This network of military roads is clearly visible in Jenin’s refugee camp and evidence indicates that the same tactic is, at the time of publication, to be repeated in the NUR Shams and Tulkarm refugee camps,” noted the authors of the report.
Israeli ministers previously declared that they planned to use the same methods in the West Bank which destroyed the Gaza Strip, leading to more than 54,000 Palestinians killed and by the majority of damaged or destroyed buildings.
In January, the Minister of Defense Israel Katz said that Israel would apply the “lesson” of the “repeated raids in Gaza” at the Jenin refugee camp. The following month, the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, who controls a large part of the administration of the West Bank, boasted that “Tulkarem and Jenin will look like Jabalia and Shujayea. Naplus and Ramallah will look like Rafah and Khan Younis ”, comparing the regeneration camps in the west bank to Gaza areas that have been devastated by Israelili.
“They will also be transformed into uninhabitable ruins, and their residents will be forced to migrate and are looking for a new life in other countries,” said Smotrich.
Hamze Attar, a defense analyst based in Luxembourg, told Tel Aviv Tribune that these tactics are not new in Palestinian territory, having been deployed by the British for the first time on their mandate against historic Palestine, which preceded the Israeli Foundation in 1948.
“This is part of the” counterinsurgency “strategy,” he said. “Larger roads (means) easy to strength – larger roads, less congestioned battle management; Larger roads, less capacity for combatants to escape from a house in a house. ”
Moving the move
About 75,000 Palestinians live in Jenin, Nur Shams, Far’a and Tulkarem refugee camps. They were moved themselves or came down from those moved during the Nakba (which means “disaster”) when about 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes by the Zionist forces from 1947 to 1949 as part of the creation of Israel.
Now, at least 40,000 people living in the Cisjordan refugee camps have been moved following Operation Iron Wall, according to the United Nations.
As in Gaza, many of these people were forced from their home on the orders of the Israeli army, which, according to researchers, was “armed” against the local population.
Once an area has been released from its buildings and roads, it becomes a killing area and the Israeli army is free to reshape and build what it likes without interference from residents, according to the report.
“Such a mass movement of engineering has enabled Israeli soldiers to reshape these built environments without obstruction,” noted the report, adding that when Palestinian residents tried to return home after an Israeli military action, they were often obstructed by the continuous presence of troops.
Destroy infrastructure
Researchers in medico-legal architecture have said that Israeli attacks on medical facilities in Gaza have also spread to the West Bank.
“Israeli attacks on medical infrastructure in the West Bank have included the placement of hospitals in siege, obstructing access to ambulances in areas with injured civilians, targeting medical staff and using at least one medical establishment as a center for detention and interrogation,” said the report.
During the first attacks of Israel against the Jenin refugee camp on January 21, several hospitals were surrounded by the Israeli army, including the government hospital in Jenin, the Al-Amal Hospital and the Al-Razi Hospital, noted researchers.
The next day, civilians and hospital staff indicated that the main road leading to the Jenin government hospital had been destroyed by Israeli military bulldozers and that access to the hospital was blocked by newly built bermes or dark barriers,
On February 4, Jenin reports said the Israeli army hindered ambulances taking away people injured to reach the hospital.
A postponement of Gaza also led a report from UNRWA in early February, saying that the Israeli army had forcibly co -opted one of the UNRWA Arroub health centers near Jerusalem as an interrogation and detention site.
Attacks on health establishments were part of a wider campaign to harm civil infrastructure in the West Bank, according to the medical-legal architecture report, using armored bulldozers, controlled demolitions and air attacks.
The researchers said they had verified more than 200 examples of Israeli soldiers deliberately destroying buildings and street networks in the four refugee camps with armored bulldozers reducing civil roads to barely passable heaps of land and exposed rubble.
The civil properties, including parked vehicles, food trolleys and agricultural buildings, such as greenhouses, were also destroyed during Israeli military operations, they said.
