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On a quiet winter evening from January 2024, while a Palestinian family was meeting in front of a house in the town of Tamoun in the northern West Bank, calm turned into a tragedy; An Israeli drone launched a missile that killed 3 relatives of the family.
The three victims are cousins, who are: Hamza (8 years), Rida (10 years), and Adam (23 years), in a scene described by eyewitnesses as resembling the scenes of massacres in the Gaza Strip.
Iman Bisharat (the mother of Hamza) rushed out of her house on the impact of the explosion, to find the body of her son torn with shrapnel, and his cousin head is open, with the parts of his brain. As for Adam, he died in her arms.
“Everything was flying … fragments and blood, as if the sky itself exploded,” said Iman with a targeted voice, and she adds, “What I saw was a nightmare from Gaza, but it happened here, in front of my house.”
An unprecedented escalation
A report published by the Financial Times reported that since the attack of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on October 7, 2023, it has intensified its military operations in the West Bank.
Although attention focused on Gaza, the numbers indicate that the West Bank also witnessed a dangerous escalation. The Israeli forces have killed more than 900 Palestinians in the West Bank since that date, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which makes the years 2023 and 2024 the most bloody for Palestinians in the West Bank since the data was recorded in 2005.
The report stated that the Israeli army, which stopped using air strikes in the West Bank 17 years ago, returned to this policy in June 2023, but increased it after the Hamas attack.
These operations extended to the use of helicopters, sometimes warplanes, as happened in Tulkarm camp, in addition to deploying tanks in military operations inside the Jenin, Nour Shams and Tulkarm camps.
Beyond politics
The Israeli government, which is the most right in the country’s history, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, justifies this escalation of the need to confront “escalating threats” in areas where the Palestinian Authority lost its control.
But analysts said to the Finnessal Times that they see that part of the escalation is due to political pressure exerted by Netanyahu’s allies from the far right, such as Battleer Smotrich and Etamar bin Ghafir, who calls for annexation of the West Bank and strengthening the military grip on it.
“Some of this escalation has operational motives, but there are undoubtedly political targets behind it. When Israel uses a F-16 aircraft against a refugee camp that could be targeted with a driver, this is not only for military reasons,” says Ibrahim Dalasha, director of the horizon center for political studies in Ramallah.
Systematic destruction and daily suffering
The report pointed out that the air attacks are not the only one that changes the face of life in the West Bank, as the Israeli military campaign included the destruction of homes and roads, and the displacement of thousands of Palestinians, in addition to imposing more than 800 barriers and a new checkpoint, which made the internal movement a risky adventure.
Meanwhile, Jewish settlers’ violence against the Palestinians increased, as the United Nations recorded more than 2,200 attacks that included attacks on civilians, destroying property, cutting trees, and pushing entire pastoral communities to displacement.
Towards “new Gaza”?
The Financial Times report quoted human rights organizations warning that Israel is applying war tactics to an area subject to the laws of the occupation, and not an open conflict arena.
The report was attributed to Eitan Diamond, an expert in international humanitarian law at the Deconia Center in Jerusalem, as saying that “what is happening in the West Bank is an excessive militarization of civil life, the use of air strikes and the destruction of infrastructure widely that is completely inconsistent with law enforcement laws in the occupied territories.”
Phantom
The report stated that the people of the West Bank no longer have safe places. Iman Bisharat said, “We were afraid to leave the house … Today, we are afraid while we were inside. If they can kill our children for no reason, there is nothing to prevent them from doing anything else.”
He concluded by saying that in light of this escalation, and between the failure of political paths and the increasing violence, the Palestinians in the West Bank live a reality that is slowly similar to that in Gaza, but without the world seeing it with the same clarity.