Human rights experts warn that Israeli forces are increasingly using their war-like tactics from the ongoing offensive in Gaza to kill, injure and displace Palestinians in the West Bank a military campaign that has quickly become the deadliest operation in the settler-occupied territory in more than two decades.
Last week, Israel launched the largest raids in the occupied West Bank since the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, of the early 2000s, targeting Palestinian cities including Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Tubas. From Aug. 27 to Sept. 2, hundreds of soldiers in the territory killed more than 30 Palestinians, including at least seven children, the highest number of Palestinians killed in a single week in the West Bank since November, according to the United Nations humanitarian affairs agency (OCHA).
We remain very alarmed by the human toll of intensified Israeli military operations in the West Bank. Its now been a week, and that operation is still ongoing, OCHA operations director Edem Wosornu told the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday. Respect for international humanitarian law and international human rights law is not optional.
Israeli forces have mostly focused their attacks on Jenin and Tulkarem, claiming that their raids are intended to prevent Palestinian militants in those areas from attacking Israeli civilians. But there have been no Israeli settlements around Jenin since 2005, and security forces have already cited the threat of settler safety to justify implementing frequent Palestinian checkpoints and building the wall between the West Bank and Israel.
The only thing that has been proven to provide security is when Palestinians are free. But they dont want to do that, Diana Buttu, an attorney in the region and former legal adviser for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, told HuffPost on Thursday. So instead, Israel lives with this formula that the only way that they can feel secure is if Palestinians feel insecure; thats their way of operating. And so theyll keep repeating these same lines over and over again, and nobody really questions them or dissects them.
Though there is a small but growing Palestinian militant presence in the West Bank, the territory is governed by the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority and not by Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza. Rights experts stress that such a presence is an inevitable response to the long-term occupation of Palestinian land that the International Court of Justice ruled in July is a violation of international law.
The West Bank raids are occurring at the same time as Israels nearly yearlong U.S.-funded military offensive in Gaza that officials at the U.N. and other human rights groups in the international community have described as genocidal. Israeli forces have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians there and decimated the territory after Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7 and took hundreds of hostages, about 100 of whom remain in captivity.
Though Palestinian civilians in the West Bank have faced settler and military violence before Oct. 7, the Hamas attack intensified that violence on top of increased Israeli settlement construction. Since the Hamas attack, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 650 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to OCHA. During that same period, Palestinians killed 13 Israeli soldiers and five settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
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