It’s not just in Gaza that Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing and war crimes against the Palestinians. A surge in attacks in the occupied West Bank has left at least 870 Palestinians dead there since October 2023.
Children are dying in appalling numbers, with more than 200 dead, almost half of the total number of children killed in the West Bank over the past 20 years.
Just days after the Gaza ceasefire began, Israel launched a series of major military raids on Jenin, followed by attacks in Tulkarem, Tamoun and Tubas, all in the northern West Bank.
More than 40,000 people have been displaced, mainly from the refugee camps set up after the 1948 Nakba when Israel expelled 700,000 Palestinians. According to the UNRWA, “Repeated and destructive operations have rendered the northern refugee camps uninhabitable, trapping residents in cyclical displacement.”
At least 50 people are dead so far.
In the Nour Shams refugee camp near Tulkarm in early February, Israeli troops shot dead two women including one who was eight months pregnant.
Scores of new checkpoints have also been set up across the West Bank, with travel between cities for Palestinians all but impossible. Israel has also carried out mass arrests, with more than 14,300 Palestinians arrested in the West Bank since 7 October 2023.
According to Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Israel’s raids have become far more aggressive, as “military operations target and destroy critical utilities, including water systems and electrical networks—thus creating long-lasting medical and humanitarian impacts on Palestinian communities”.
Jenin
Hundreds of Israeli troops, backed by drones, helicopter gunships and armoured cars, have descended on the Jenin refugee camp.
Residents have been ordered to leave their homes via loudspeaker as drones circled overhead, with dozens arrested and interrogated.
About 90 per cent of the camp’s population has fled.
Large areas of the camp have been reduced to rubble. Israel demolished nearly 20 apartment buildings at once after rigging them with explosives, in scenes widely shared on social media, while bulldozers flattened another 100 homes.
This is part of an offensive against the Jenin Brigade, an umbrella group for Palestinian resistance factions there, in particular Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. Jenin has been a bastion of Palestinian resistance within the West Bank for decades.
It follows a six-week siege of the camp by Palestinian Authority (PA) Security Forces beginning in December that left 14 Palestinians dead, including three children, a journalist and three other civilians.
The PA was set up following the Oslo Accords in 1990s, the failed “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians, and given limited control in some areas with the promise of a future Palestinian state.
Almost three decades on, it’s clear Israel has no intention of allowing a Palestinian state. But the PA continues to collaborate with Israel to clamp down on resistance to the occupation.
It is increasingly despised among Palestinians. A poll in June 2024 found more than 60 per cent supported the PA’s dissolution, with 89 per cent wanting its leader Mahmoud Abbas to resign.
Palestinian resistance is a response to the daily humiliation of occupation and their ongoing dispossession by Israeli settlers.
The number of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is now at least 730,000, with official control of half the land in the West Bank.
Settlers are constantly establishing new outposts to control more land, organising violent attacks on Palestinians to try to push them out. There are now more than 200 of these outposts, according to Israeli NGO Peace Now, with 60 more set up in 2024 alone.
Israel’s military raids have been followed by an increase in settler attacks on Palestinians, with cars and properties set on fire at Qalqilya and at Turmus Aya near Ramallah.
In 2024 there were 1400 separate incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank including physical assaults, arson, and destruction of fruit trees, as documented by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
This is the highest level ever recorded, leading to the displacement of 4700 Palestinians.
A landmark International Court of Justice ruling last July reaffirmed that Israel’s occupation in the West Bank was illegal under international law and should end “as rapidly as possible”, finding that it was carrying out racial discrimination and apartheid through its “near-complete separation” of Palestinians from Israeli settlers.
As a member of the court, the Australian government is obligated to impose sanctions on any export of weapons or other goods that support the occupation. We need to keep demanding the Albanese government starts to act.
By James Supple
