Jeremy Scahill
Drop Side News / August 30, 2024 [via email]
Israel is in the midst of its largest scale assault of the occupied West Bank since 2002.
Beginning in the predawn hours on Wednesday, hundreds of Israeli forces in columns of armored vehicles and bulldozers backed by drones and helicopters stormed into refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas. Israel also carried out drone strikes and snipers have reportedly been firing on people inside Jenin. Internet and cell phone service, as well as water and sewage systems, were shut down in parts of the West Bank as Israeli forces conducted house raids. Local residents have reported widespread demolitions of their homes and streets and the blocking of ambulances and medical workers attempting to reach wounded people. Israeli forces surrounded the main hospital in Jenin and have reportedly been searching people entering and exiting the facility.
“This is an incredible scaling up of the violence of the preceding months and in particular weeks,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, “with a full military assault, destroying hospitals, destroying roads, destroying vital infrastructure which had already been severely damaged during the preceding months, and Voila!, telling the Palestinians to go, ordering mass evacuations.”
In an interview with Drop Site News, Albanese said, “I see a serious pattern parallel with what is happening in the Gaza Strip”—“patterns of torture, of destruction, of extrajudicial killings, of uprooting that are very similar to Gaza.”
“It is my responsibility to warn against the risk of the genocide leaking into the West Bank. There is similar rhetoric, similar patterns, and escalating violence, ordering similar things.”
Brandishing Israel’s well-worn propaganda ensign of self-defense, foreign minister Israel Katz has described the operation as “a war in every sense,” declaring that Tel Aviv would approach its invasion of parts of the West Bank “exactly as we deal with terror infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian civilians.”
“We are in the post 9/11 era,” Albanese said. “So resistance movements are naturally considered terrorist first, and then it’s very difficult to dismantle this perception which is so entrenched, so ingrained in ordinary people’s mindset. So if politicians say that—and journalists amplify it—probably this is going to convince people that they are protecting all of us from these masses of savages.”
Kamala Harris pledges unequivocal support for the Israel
Israel’s threat of waging a Gaza-style war against the Palestinians of the West Bank comes as the White House has spent weeks assuring the public that it is working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire deal. The administration’s actions, however, make such claims appear cynical. Since the end of July, there has been a spike in U.S. weapons shipments to Israel and August saw the second largest number of military cargo planes delivering munitions and other equipment at Nevatim Air Base since the launch of the war last October.
In the midst of the attacks on the West Bank, Vice President Kamala Harris did her first sit-down interview with a media outlet since she was anointed Democratic nominee for president. Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris affirmed her ironclad support for Israel, saying she would not withhold weapons shipments. “Let me be very clear. I’m unequivocal and—and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself,” Harris said. “And that’s not gonna change.”
Harris made no reference to the siege of the West Bank. The Biden-Harris administration has said little publicly about the Israeli invasion there, reiterating its line that Israel has a right to defend its “very real security needs, which includes countering terrorist activity in the West Bank.” An administration official claimed in a statement to reporters that the U.S. opposes “mass displacements of Palestinians in the West Bank,” but added, “We recognize that localized evacuation orders may be necessary in certain instances to protect civilian lives during sensitive counter-terrorism operations.”
At the Pentagon Thursday, spokesperson Sabrina Singh spoke as though the U.S. and Israel are not in constant contact with Israel about a war that is being underwritten militarily and politically by the U.S. “We are aware that the IDF is conducting operations in the West Bank, but again we don’t have an understanding of what exactly that is,” Singh said. “We are trying to learn more about their operation.”
In an English-language post on Twitter/X, Katz, the Israeli Foreign Minister, charged that Iran is smuggling weapons into the West Bank through its border with Jordan and accused Tehran of “working to establish an eastern terror front against Israel through special units of the IRGC, involved in smuggling weapons, funding, and directing terror organizations.”
Katz claimed Jordan needed Western support to confront “Iranian subversion,” saying that a “security fence along the Israel-Jordan border must be constructed quickly to prevent an influx of advanced Iranian weapons.”
Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, rejected this justification, saying it defied belief that any significant quantity of Iranian weapons would be coming in through Jordan, a country that participated in defending Israel against an Iranian missile strike in April. “Israel is making up arguments to legitimize and normalize its assault. And the U.S. is providing the most important asset. The United States continues to provide political, even legal justification, economic and military support to Israel while it has already committed genocide and escalates its violence against the Palestinians,” she said. “It’s very clear what the U.S. is doing.”
Israeli media outlets have not focused heavily on the Iran angle, instead citing IDF sources describing the operations in the West Bank as “mowing the lawn”—the phrase used by Israel for conducting periodic intense military attacks against Palestinians to assert its dominance. Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the IDF has defined two main aims for the operation: “destroying Improvised Explosive Devices and infrastructure for making IEDs” and “killing as many terrorists as possible.” Hebrew-language media have also cited an effort to stop weapons smuggling via Jordan but have not particularly emphasized an Iranian connection.
Hamas vows to resume ‘martyrdom operations’ against Israel
Since the invasion began Wednesday morning, armed Palestinian resistance factions, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al Quds force, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades have launched a defensive guerrilla campaign. On Thursday, Abdel Hakim Hanini, a senior Hamas official, suggested that the group was preparing to engage in suicide bombings inside Israel, a tactic that became common during the Second Intifada, which spanned 2000-2005, but had ended almost entirely after 2006 when Hamas and other groups announced an end to the practice.
“The resistance in the West Bank has begun changing its tactics and returning to martyrdom operations to strike at the occupation within the occupied interior,” Hamas said in a statement outlining Hanini’s announcement. “The resistance’s change in tactics is a result of the settlers and the occupation government crossing red lines in their crimes against the Palestinian people.” Hanini also called on the security forces of the Palestinian Authority to participate in a popular uprising against Israeli occupation forces and settlers.
The change in strategy was announced Thursday after the killings of resistance leaders in the West Bank. Most prominent among those killed in the Israeli operations was Mohammed Jaber, a young Islamic Jihad commander known by the nom du guerre Abu Shuja’a, Father of the Brave. A well-known resistance figure whom Israel had previously claimed to have killed in April, Jaber was reportedly killed Thursday alongside four other Palestinian fighters when Israeli forces attacked the Nur Shams camp in Tulkarem. The Israeli military claimed Palestinian resistance forces were storing weapons inside a mosque, but a local official said Jaber was killed in a nearby house and that Israeli forces took his body back to Israel. Islamic Jihad, which is a member of the Tulkarem Brigade that Jaber led, confirmed his death. On Friday, Hamas confirmed that the Jenin commander of Al-Qassam Brigades was also killed by Israeli forces.
While “the right to kill exists in international law,” Albanese stressed, it can only be used “as an extreme measure when the person is posing a danger that cannot be averted. Otherwise, it’s an execution.” She added that “targeted assassinations” of Palestinian resistance figures in occupied territory, including commanders of armed groups, are illegal.
Albanese, citing international law, UN resolutions, and the Geneva protocols, said that Palestinians have a right to take up arms against the invading Israeli forces. “They are in the West Bank and technically they are defending themselves from an unlawful occupier which takes their land.” Israel, she added, has no claim to self-defense when engaged in an unlawful invasion. In July, the International Court of Justice issued a ruling reaffirming that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is illegal.
More than 665 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the West Bank since October 7. Since then, Israeli forces have carried out nearly daily raids in parts of the West Bank. During the past 11 months, some 10,200 Palestinians in the West Bank have been detained or imprisoned by Israel, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society.
Since Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran earlier this month and Yahya Sinwar consolidated his control of both the political and military operations of Hamas, the group has stated that it won’t participate in ceasefire negotiations under the current U.S. and Israeli imposed framework. Hamas has charged that the U.S. is deceiving the public on the negotiations, saying that Washington has backtracked from the proposal Biden first described publicly in May, which Hamas said it accepted in early July. The group says the U.S. is supporting Israel’s demand that it be allowed to continue its war on Gaza after an initial exchange of captives and to continue occupying parts of the Strip.
Israel has named its violent incursion into the West Bank “Operation Summer Camps.” Palestinian resistance groups have dubbed it “The Horrors of the Camps” battle. Combined with the unceasing mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza and the U.S. backing of Israel’s expansion of the war, the attacks on the West Bank could prove the spark that leads to a Third Intifada. History may show it has already begun.
Jeremy Scahill – journalist at Drop Site News, co-founder of The Intercept, author of the books Blackwater and Dirty Wars; Reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, etcetera
