Israeli soldiers arrest two Palestinian men during a raid in the Nur Shams camp near the city of Tulkarm in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on 28 August 2024 (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP)
The Israeli military’s assault against four refugee camps and almost every town in the north of the occupied West Bank, using battlefield weapons, commando-style helicopter landings, drones and bulldozers, cannot be classed as a response to the war on Gaza.
This is far bigger than a “counter-terrorism” operation claimed by Israel.
War in the West Bank was planned before Hamas’s attack on 7 October last year, a senior Fatah member with close links to security circles told me.
It was postponed by the Gaza war, but also refined and honed by it.
When Israel saw just how much Palestinian blood the US and Europe were prepared to tolerate in Gaza – how much destruction, how many millions would be continually displaced, and for how long – Israel felt emboldened to visit the same hell on its real target: the occupied West Bank.
Crush the West Bank, and the Palestinian people can say goodbye to their state forever.
This is the message that Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right minister and settler who has been working to transfer the governance of the occupied West Bank from military to civilian control, has consistently and publicly broadcast.
Like the war in Gaza, “Operation Summer Camps” is not aimed primarily at local resistance groups or their leaders, although several have already been targeted and killed.
The attacks from land and air on Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas, along with the laying of siege and the sealing off of hospitals and detention of medics, are all directed against the population, just as they were in Gaza.
The bulldozers go in, not to clear a path for the tanks, but to dig up the water pipes and drains vital for life, in the full knowledge that in six months, the occupied West Bank will have outbreaks of major diseases and epidemics, just as Gaza has now.
And let’s dispense with the notion that this is just Smotrich’s plan to annex most of the West Bank by stealth, and force large population transfers to Area A – the area still nominally under Palestinian Authority (PA) control – or better still, from Israel’s point of view, to Jordan.
It is a government plan. Shortly after the army offensive began, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, called for population transfers – under the fig leaf of “temporary evacuation.”
“This is a war for everything and we must win it,” Katz said.
Clinical purpose
Smotrich himself revealed in a speech to settlers taped by a Peace Now activist that his plan has the prime minister’s full backing. Benjamin Netanyahu was “with us full on”, Smotrich said.
He described his plan to irreversibly alter the way the occupied West Bank is governed as “mega-dramatic”, adding that “such changes change a system’s DNA”.
For the average Jewish Israeli citizen, the West Bank operation is meat and drink.
If the international community gave us cover to transfer more than two million Palestinians in Gaza, they tell themselves and each other, we can do the same in the West Bank, free of Israel’s legal obligations as an occupying power; free of any boundaries or red lines.
And the worst part about it is, they are right to draw this conclusion.
Gaza has put the Smotrich plan to annex the occupied West Bank into hyperdrive.
Since 7 October, the boundary between the settlements and the army, which was blurred before the war, has been erased completely, as Haaretz commented in an editorial.
Settlers who before 7 October were burning down the houses and crops of Palestinians, have reappeared in uniform with the weapons and authority of the Israeli army.
In just 10 days after the Hamas attack, 62 Palestinians were killed and dozens injured in settler attacks, while roadblocks went up – and all for a very specific aim: to drive Palestinians out of their homes and farms.
The inhumanity of these times scares me, as a journalist and as a person. Every Palestinian knows that Israel has total impunity, total freedom to do what it wants with us
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights monitor, documented eight entire communities, home to 87 families numbering 472 people, including 136 minors, being driven from their homes in one week.
Don’t be fooled by the rare and increasingly lone voices of reason coming from Israel’s security elite. Shin Bet Chief Ronen Bar warned that increasingly overt settler violence was wreaking “indescribable damage” on Israel and changing it beyond recognition.
The attack on the refugee camps of Balata, Nur Shams, Jenin and Far’a have a clinical purpose.
The camps represent the density of the Palestinian population from all walks of life. Israel’s aim is to ethnically cleanse the camps to erase the last remnants of the Palestinian people’s basic claim of a right to return.
The PA is paralysed. It does not have a response to this wholesale assault on its homeland.
“There is no serious plan, because the most important aspect of resisting the Israeli action is having one Palestinian leadership and one Palestinian vision, which would mean ending the division between Fatah and Hamas. And yet the PA is not serious about it,” one informed Fatah insider told me.
No red lines
Deprived of leaders, the Palestinian reaction is unknown. But remember one thing: none of the major events that changed the course of this conflict were predicted.
No-one predicted the First Intifada. No one predicted Operation al-Aqsa Flood.
“The reactions of the Palestinian people are always creative and distinct, and one that does not surrender,” the Fatah insider said.
But one thing is for sure: genocide, something the world vowed would never happen again after the Holocaust, is being normalised. And this will affect not just our future as Palestinians, but the future of the entire world.
Every day, for the last 11 months, I have been receiving pictures of dead bodies, smashed heads, and parts of bodies being collected in body bags.
As the region’s bureau chief for Middle East Eye, it is my job to sift through and examine these images. None of the pictures of barbarity appear in the Israeli media or the western world – but an Arab and Muslim audience gets them every day.
What Israeli soldiers are doing can be done in other countries as well. We seem to be sleepwalking into a new era of barbarity.
And while this daily slaughter is taking place, a new Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, was crowned, while organisers of the party’s convention did everything they could to exclude a Palestinian speaker on their main platform.
They told the Washington Post they did this in the name of keeping the conference “unified”.
The inhumanity of these times scares me, as a journalist and as a person.
Every Palestinian knows that Israel has total impunity, total freedom to do what it wants with us.
Maybe in the long run, the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court will prevail over attempts by the US and others to muzzle them. But none of this affords any protection to Jenin, Tukarm or Tubas now. None of this stops Israel from dropping 1,000-pound bombs on tents.
As a Palestinian, wherever you live – in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, as a resident of Jerusalem or as a citizen of Israel – the Israeli state can do anything it likes to you. You, your home and your family can disappear from one day to the next, no questions asked.
Gaza and now the occupied West Bank have shown us all that there are no red lines. How many children should be killed before the world calls a halt to this slaughter?
The answer is there is no limit.
