Rights and Accountability 12 February 2025
Israeli occupation soldiers are deployed in the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley, south of Tubas, in the occupied West Bank on 10 February.
APA imagesIsrael’s ongoing deadly assault in the occupied West Bank has nearly emptied several refugee camps.
Some 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced since Israel’s military operation dubbed “Iron Wall” launched in the northern Jenin refugee camp on 21 January. Since then, Israel expanded its assault to Tulkarm refugee camp and Nur Shams refugee camp near Tulkarm, also in the north. Al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley, south of Tubas, was also targeted.
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, said the deadly and destructive assault “is now the single longest in the West Bank since the second intifada.”
Israel’s operation follows a series of assaults on refugee camps in the occupied West Bank which have left them “uninhabitable,” according to UNRWA, forcing their residents into a state of “cyclical displacement.”
This was “a spillover of the war in Gaza,” the agency said.
Indeed, Israel’s ceasefire agreement with Hamas in Gaza was met with strong opposition from the right-wing camp in the coalition. This compelled the Israeli government to frame the large-scale operation in the occupied West Bank as an extension of the war in Gaza.
It was “designed to give the far-right parties cover for remaining in the governing coalition,” writes Amos Harel, an analyst for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.
“They can argue that the war on terror is continuing unabated, particularly in areas that greatly concern their voters.”
The genocidal approach of the Israeli army in Gaza doesn’t appear to have gone away with the start of the ceasefire.
The “everything is dangerous so everything is allowed” approach, as Harel puts it, “has spilled over into the West Bank.”
This is so much the case that “some commanders are trying to calm the atmosphere as conscripts redeploy from Gaza to the West Bank.”
There remains an appetite for revenge among Israeli soldiers.
“Conversations between reserve officers and the young generation reveal a wild atmosphere, extremism that deems harming Palestinians as settling scores for the massacre,” Harel continues.
This includes overlapping tactics, such as besieging hospitals, destroying surrounding roads, wanton killing of Palestinians – including children – explosions and aerial bombardments, much of which has “become commonplace,” according to UNRWA.
This appetite may be further fueled by Israeli military orders to expand their open-fire policy. Commanders and soldiers told Haaretz that two commanders issued directives permitting military forces to shoot and kill anyone “messing with the ground,” according to Avi Bluth, commander of the army’s central command.
Israeli army sources also revealed to the newspaper that another commander instructed forces to use live ammunition against any vehicle approaching a checkpoint from so-called combat zones.
The Israeli army said there was “no change” to open-fire orders and that it was the initiative of senior officers in the army’s central command. Either way, Israeli occupation forces have always pursued a trigger-happy policy with utter disregard for Palestinian lives, encouraged by the impunity soldiers enjoy.
Killed pregnant woman
Since 21 January, the army has invaded several areas and refugee camps, carried out airstrikes, destroyed critical infrastructure such as electricity, sewage and water lines, raided homes, arrested youth and deployed snipers in residential areas.
Nearly 50 Palestinians have been killed in those areas and over 100 have been injured.
Israel is doing this under the guise of crushing armed resistance that emerged in those areas to confront Israel’s colonization and theft of Palestinian land.
Schools for Palestinian children in Tulkarm, its refugee camp, and the Jenin area were forced to close as a result of the ongoing Israeli assault.
Israeli forces imposed a siege on two hospitals in Tulkarm, disrupting medical care, particularly for kidney dialysis patients.
On 9 February, Israeli forces opened fire on a young couple in a car as they were leaving their home in the Nur Shams refugee camp.
The attack killed 23-year-old Sundus Jamal Shalabi, who was pregnant in her final trimester, and left her husband critically injured, according to a field investigation by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
Israeli forces then obstructed the movement of medics and ambulances for approximately one hour, delaying medical assistance. Doctors were unable to save Sundus’s unborn child.
“Jenin camp stands empty today, evoking memories of the second intifada,” UNRWA said.
“This scene stands to be repeated in other camps.”
The Palestinian Authority’s deadly raid, which lasted over a month between December and January, further “exacerbated” the forcible displacement of Palestinians, UNRWA said.
Israel carried out nearly 40 airstrikes in the West Bank this year alone.
Eyes on the West Bank
Throughout Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, settlers and some Israeli ministers have publicly spoken of resettling the Gaza Strip. US President Donald Trump may have reignited that ambition with his declaration that Gaza should be emptied of its residents and developed into a luxury real estate project.
But to much more muted responses from the mainstream media and politicians, including heads of the Arab states, Israel has been steadily accelerating its colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank for decades.
Israel’s primary focus has always been on the larger and more strategically significant territory constituting one-fifth of historic Palestine: the occupied West Bank.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres echoed this sentiment at the World Economic Forum last month.
“It is clear for me that Israel is not fundamentally interested in Gaza, it is fundamentally interested in the West Bank,” he said.
The reality on the ground is undeniable.
Throughout 2024, Israel took significant steps to expand its presence in the West Bank, severely restricted Palestinian movement and allocated tens of millions of dollars to settlement-related projects.
This was “the year in which the government’s annexation plan began to be implemented in practice,” Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now said.
The group is citing a 2022 agreement between the ruling party Likud with the extreme-right wing Religious Zionism that hinges forming a coalition on a plan that includes the annexation of the occupied West Bank and the legalization of settlements.
Creating facts on the ground
At least 59 Israeli “outposts” were established in the West Bank last year.
That’s an unprecedented number.
To compare, less than seven outposts were established in the West Bank on average each year since 1996.
While all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law and building them is a war crime, what Israel refers to as “outposts” are often built without even Israel’s permission and are considered illegal under Israeli law.
In their early stages, they often comprise a small number of the more extreme settlers gathering in a certain area with a few caravans or structures, often unconnected to water and electricity.
Bezalel Smotrich, the ultra-far-right Israeli finance minister, has been attempting to streamline the process of legalizing and recognizing outposts under Israeli law by providing them with basic services and creating facts on the ground.
For the first time since the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel signed the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, some of those outposts were established in Area B.
Israel also built hundreds of illegal roads across the occupied West Bank throughout the year, easing Israeli access to settlements while obstructing Palestinian movement.
Nearly 6,000 acres of Palestinian land was declared by Israel as “state land.” That constitutes half of all declared state land since the Oslo accords were signed.
Declaring Palestinian land as “state land” is a legal maneuver aimed at confiscating land belonging to Palestinians by interpreting an Ottoman law that was utilized in a completely different context nearly two centuries ago.
“As part of the annexation of the West Bank, Israel is investing billions of shekels in strengthening settlements, changing the legal system and weakening the Civil Administration,” Peace Now said.
“More importantly, it is entirely altering the physical landscape.”
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