When the ceasefire in Gaza was announced on January 15, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were elated that Israel’s devastating war against the besieged enclave was finally coming to an end.
However, Israeli state violence has rapidly escalated in 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 territories, who believe they could now face the same type of violence inflicted on their compatriots in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 46,900 Palestinians in Gaza since its war in the enclave began in October 2023.
“We saw a genocide in Gaza for 14 months and no one in the world did anything to stop it and some people here think we will suffer the same fate,” said Shady Abdullah, a journalist and human rights activist from Tulkarem.
“We all know that we fear that the situation will get even worse here in the West Bank,” he told Tel Aviv Tribune.
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 released in an exchange for Israeli captives held by Hamas as part of the deal.
The checkpoints also barred farmers from their farmland and locked down civilians in entire towns, such as Hebron and Bethlehem.
Israeli settlers then began expanding their illegal outposts in the West Bank and attacking Palestinian villages. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, and many haphazardly constructed outposts are even illegal under Israeli law, although often little is done to remove them, and many are later made official.
“The implications of the violence are that it leads to direct or associated displacement and this is consistent with Israel’s goal of preventing any Palestinian state on its territory,” said Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Israel-Palestine at the International Crisis Group.
In addition, the Israeli army announced its intention to carry out major operations in the West Bank, which began on January 21 with a major incursion into the Jenin camp, apparently to eradicate armed groups. Israeli raids in the West Bank preceded the war on Gaza, but intensified in violence and intensity with the start of the war.
“The violence and settler incursions we are seeing… are an indicator of the direction we are heading now,” Mustafa told Tel Aviv Tribune.
A compromise?
The surge in violence has led some to believe that new US President Donald Trump had compromised with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to suspend the war on Gaza in exchange for increased aggression in the West Bank.
“The ceasefire in Gaza – which looks more like a humanitarian pause and a “hostage and prisoner trade” – comes at a price. Israel never gives up anything without a price to pay and I think we see 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 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 named several figures opposed to it. the creation of a Palestinian state to sit there. important positions in his administration.
The potential for increased repression against Palestinian fighters in the West Bank, as well as the growth of illegal settlements and even potential annexation, appears to have prompted far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to remain in the fragile coalition. Netanyahu, rather than withdrawing from it. and bring down the government in protest against the ceasefire in Gaza.
Under Smotrich, Israel has quietly confiscated more land in the West Bank in the last year than in the past 20 years combined, according to Peace Now, an Israeli nonprofit that monitors land grabs.
Smotrich and the broader settler movement have long viewed 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 massacres of Palestinians, almost the entire pre-war population of 2.3 millions of people, were uprooted and displaced.
Settler attacks
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank now say settlers are intensifying their attacks in coordination with the Israeli military to confiscate and seize more land.
On January 20, settlers violently attacked two northern West Bank villages, 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 riot undermines security and the army will not allow it.”
The attacks took place during Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States – in one of his first actions as president, he rolled back sanctions against groups and individuals that the United States previously considered part of the “extremist settler movement.”
“The settlers’ goal is known,” said Abbas Milhem, executive director of the Palestinian Farmers Union. “They want to transfer 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 Tel Aviv Tribune.
“What these people are doing is illegal, but they don’t care about international law, nor Palestinian law, nor Israeli law,” he told Tel Aviv Tribune. “They don’t even care about God’s law. »
Raid on Jenin
In early December, armed groups in Jenin began clashing with the Palestinian Authority (PA), an administration created following the 1993 Oslo Accords.
The agreements revived a now-defunct peace process, which ostensibly aimed to establish a Palestinian state across the entire occupied Palestinian territory, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
A key part of the Oslo Accords was tasking the Palestinian Authority with rooting out and disarming armed groups as part of its security coordination with Israel.
But as hopes for statehood faded and Israel strengthened its occupation, a number of grassroots armed groups, loosely linked to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and even Fatah – the faction that controls the Authority Palestinian – have emerged in Palestinian camps in the West Bank.
With the Palestinian Authority unable to crush the armed groups in the Jenin camp, Israel launched a major operation on January 21 which has already left at least 10 dead.
Local observers told Tel Aviv Tribune that Israel justifies its operation under the pretext of strengthening Israel’s security and ensuring that another October 7-type attack does not occur, even if armed groups in the West Bank are well less capable and organized than Hamas in Gaza. .
“We believe that 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 monitor for al-Haq, a Palestinian rights group.
Israel occupied the Jenin camp for 10 days in 2002, destroying about 400 homes and displacing about a quarter of the residents during the second Intifada in 2002, according to the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA).
ICG’s Mustafa believes Israel will carry out more incursions and major military operations across the West Bank in the coming days in an attempt to crush all forms of resistance.
“The battlefield is about to shift from Gaza to the West Bank,” she said.