The increasing violence in the occupied West Bank points to a loss of control
The northern West Bank was once seen by Israeli, Palestinian and international authorities as a sort of pilot program for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory, and by some even as a potential prototype for a future Palestinian state.
But a sharp escalation of violence in the region in recent days involving Palestinian militants, Israeli security forces and extremist Jewish settlers underscores the failure of that vision.
The northern West Bank is witnessing an explosive mix of the rise of local armed Palestinian militias carrying out shooting attacks on Israelis; almost daily raids by the Israeli army to arrest militants, often fatal; and reprisals by extremist Jewish settlers, who have swept through Palestinian villages and set fire to property.
The coalition government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — which includes far-right, ultra-nationalist parties that reject all talks with Palestinian leaders — has escalated tensions and pushed for a more aggressive military response to attacks. The government is also pushing for the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which is seen by most countries as an obstacle to resolving the conflict and as a violation of international law.
The volatile mix has resulted in one of the deadliest years for Palestinians in the West Bank in more than a decade. Of the 140 Palestinian deaths in the area so far this year, about 86 have occurred in the northern West Bank, mostly in the Jenin and Nablus areas. Most were killed in armed clashes during military raids, although some were innocent bystanders.
“In recent months, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on a new guise,” Yohanan Tzofeff, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, wrote Thursday. “The attacks in the West Bank and attempts to escalate the situation have increased.”
This week’s violence began with a deadly Israeli raid on Monday in the northern West Bank town of Jenin. It led to an hours-long firefight that killed seven Palestinians, including a 15-year-old girl, according to Palestinian health officials. For the first time since the early 2000s, Israeli helicopter gunships were sent into the area to secure troops attempting to free wounded soldiers and armored vehicles disabled by a powerful roadside bomb.
A day later, Palestinian gunmen killed four Israeli civilians, including a 17-year-old boy, near the Jewish settlement of Eli. The Palestinian gunmen were members of the armed wing of Hamas, the militant Islamist group that took control of the coastal area of Gaza in 2007 after winning elections the year before.
And then, late on Wednesday, an Israeli airstrike by an unmanned drone killed three Palestinian militants in a car that the military said had just fired on an Israeli position in the northern West Bank and carried out attacks on Jewish settlements in the area.
The killing of the four Israelis near Eli sparked a wave of retaliation Tuesday and Wednesday by Israeli extremists who swept through Palestinian towns and villages, including Turmus Aya, north of Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, which covers most Palestinian towns and villages. controls. in the West Bank. Turmus Aya is a relatively affluent community and many of the residents are also US citizens.
The Israeli arsonists set fire to 15 houses and 60 vehicles and crops, Lafi Deeb, the head of the Turmus Aya council, told Palestinian radio on Thursday. A Palestinian man from the town was fatally shot by an Israeli officer during the fight, according to officials.
Mr Deeb said his town, which did not have its own fire trucks, had to wait for one to arrive from Bir Zeit, about half an hour away.
When Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh later visited the city, he was confronted by a resident who yelled at him and demanded that the authority “do more to protect its people,” The Associated Press reported.
Mr Netanyahu called the settler attacks unacceptable and said: “The State of Israel is a state of law. The citizens of Israel are all obliged to respect the law.”
The Israeli army condemned the settlers’ violence, saying security forces entered the city to put out the fires, prevent clashes and collect evidence, and that Israeli police were investigating the event.
But Israeli forces, despite their overall control of the area and a spate of similarly destructive reprisals against settlers in February, seem powerless to prevent it.
While violence in the northern West Bank has escalated in recent months, the situation has been deteriorating for years, with waves of violence rising and ebbing since the collapse of peace talks nearly a decade ago.
Hoping to reduce friction in the area and signal progress toward a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel dismantled four Jewish settlements around Jenin in 2005 and also withdrew from the Palestinian coastal enclave of the Gaza Strip.
Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War and has said its future will be decided in negotiations, but the last formal round of US-brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace talks ended in 2014.
The Palestinian Authority, the interim body established in the mid-1990s as part of the Oslo peace process, would exercise limited self-government in parts of the occupied West Bank, with security forces numbering about 60,000. But it is absent from the hotbeds of Palestinian militants in the northern part of the area, such as Jenin and Nablus, and it seems, experts say, responsibility has almost been abdicated.
“It’s a turnaround and a collapse,” said Zakaria al-Qaq, a Palestinian national security expert. Instead of less involvement, he said, “there is total involvement between Israel and the small Palestinian factions, and the Palestinian Authority is out of the game, in the margins, or not there at all.”
“We’re back to square one,” he added. “There is no Oslo. There is nothing.”
Israeli hardliners, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, have called for a wide-ranging Israeli military operation in the West Bank modeled on Israel’s 2002 invasion of Palestinian cities. the height of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, when suicide bombers attacked Israeli cities.
But many Israeli security experts say the circumstances don’t warrant a major operation.
“In 2002, we had 130 deaths a month,” Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Mr. Netanyahu and now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a conservative-minded research group, said of the Israeli victims of the intifada. So far this year, 29 Israelis have been killed by Arab attackers.
“There are many weapons in the area, the Palestinian Authority is not functioning and we have to solve it alone,” said Mr. Amidror. “But it’s not the same situation,” he added, pointing out that the current armed Palestinian militias in the West Bank were mostly local gangs operating without organizational infrastructure.
Instead, the Israeli government is not only turning more aggressively against the militias, but is also focusing on the expansion of the settlements.
Immediately after the attack in Eli, Mr. Netanyahu announced plans to build 1,000 settler homes there. In addition, Israeli authorities are expected to put forward plans for an additional 4,000 homes in the settlements at a planning meeting next week.
On Sunday, the government eased the process for approving new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and handed oversight from Defense Minister, currently Yoav Gallant, to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right former settlement activist who favors Israeli annexation. of the West Bank.
And in March, Israel’s parliament repealed legislation that excluded settlers from the four Jewish communities in the occupied West Bank evacuated in 2005, allowing visits there, though the government would still have to approve any reconstruction in the areas.
Myra Noveck And Hiba Yazbek reporting contributed.