Qassam Muaddi
Mondoweiss / October 7, 2024
While Israel has been carrying out a genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, its military and settlers have been waging another campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, moving ever closer towards Israel’s goals of annexation.
For a year now in the West Bank, Israel has launched a war against Palestinians. While the genocidal assault on Gaza has claimed the lives of tens of thousands, and according to some estimates, hundreds of thousands, the onslaught in the West Bank has ramped up in the form of displacement, the unprecedented expansion of settlements, rampant settler violence and pogroms, economic warfare, mass incarceration, and the launching of a military offensive on centers of resistance across the West Bank. As of this writing, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 743 Palestinians, wounded 5,250, and displaced 5,947. But underlying these numbers is a far deeper reality of Israeli settler encroachment and creeping annexation in the West Bank.
The Israeli offensive in the West Bank is nothing but random, nor is it detached from Israel’s policies in Gaza. It follows a strategy in line with Israel’s stated plans to annex the West Bank and undermine any possibilities for a future Palestinian state.
Although these Israeli policies have been employed by Israel for decades of occupation in the West Bank, observers argue that Israel’s strategy in the West Bank after October 7 has aimed to create a new political reality, heading towards achieving definitive Israeli control over the West Bank.
A plan ‘decades in the making’
The main feature of Israeli violence after October 7 has been characterized by Israeli settler pogroms against Palestinian villages and rural communities. Following the October 7 attacks on Israel, Israeli settler mobs attacked Palestinian communities in the West Bank’s Area C, which makes up over 60 percent of the West Bank’s area and falls under full Israeli military control. Palestinians living in Area C have struggled to survive Israel’s building restrictions, constant land grabs, and home demolitions.
By December, settlers had already depopulated 20 Palestinian Bedouin rural communities, forcibly displacing hundreds of inhabitants. These attacks concentrated in the southern Hebron hills, where 250 Palestinian residents of the village of Zanouta were expelled in a single day, and in the eastern slopes of the central West Bank overlooking the Jordan Valley, where almost all Bedouin families were forced to leave to the outskirts of Ramallah’s eastern villages.
According to Khalil Tafakji, a Palestinian expert on Israeli settlements who directed Jerusalem’s Orient House maps unit for many years, “settlers launched these attacks to take advantage of the media and political atmosphere that followed October 7, but they follow a strategic logic that has been decades in the making.”
“We can see this clearly by understanding where the attacks have concentrated,” Tafakji points out. “The eastern slopes have been cleared of any Palestinian presence, effectively separating the heart of the West Bank from the Jordan Valley, which Israel has been wanting to annex for years.”
However, settler attacks also targeted Palestinian towns in the central and northern West Bank, transforming the lives of Palestinians in Area B — which falls under the joint control of the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli army — into an endless cycle of fear, severely affecting their livelihood.
One of the hardest-hit towns, Al-Mughayyir, is almost halfway between Ramallah and Nablus. The town is a mid-sized Palestinian community of some 4,500 inhabitants, with paved streets and sidewalks, new multi-floor buildings alongside old peasant houses, supermarkets, and two schools. Al-Mughayyir is surrounded by olive groves on lands privately owned by the town’s families.
In April, Al-Mughayyir suffered one of the most violent settler attacks in the West Bank in the past year. After a settler boy was found dead at the bottom of a valley between Al-Mughayyir and the neighbouring town of Duma, Israeli settlers gathered outside of the town seeking revenge.
“It was a Friday, and we were in the middle of prayer when news spread that settlers were gathering in buses along the Israeli road outside the town,” Fayez Abu Alia, a farmer and resident of Mughayyir, told Mondoweiss. “So we cut the prayer short and rushed to the scene.”
“The settlers began to advance between the olive groves towards the town, some of them carrying firearms, and began to throw Molotov cocktails and rocks on houses,” Abu Alia described. “Some settlers had long knives, and they began to stab the goats and sheep in the stables on their way to the town.”
The attack lasted for hours, during which time a group of young men was trapped on a rooftop. One of them, Jihad Abu Alia, was killed by a settler’s bullet. Several houses were set on fire by settlers, and according to residents, the Israeli army stopped firefighter trucks from reaching Mughayyir throughout the attack.
“Since the attack, accessing the olive groves in the plain next to the Israeli road has become impossible,” says Fayez Abu Alia. “Settlers from the nearby settlement of Shilo and the three outposts around Al-Mughayyir watch us, and if they see anyone going near the plain, they call the army, which arrives and forces us to leave. We can’t stay in our land for more than 90 minutes,” he explains.
The plain in question is the town’s most important farming land, where a large part of the families’ olive groves lie, serving as Al-Mughayyir’s eastern extension; without access to it, the mobility of the town’s people is now limited to the urban part of the town and a few gardens around it. According to Fayez Abu Alia, his olive oil production dropped from a yearly average of 80 16-liter tanks of oil to only five last year, as settler attacks had begun since October when the harvest season was at its height. He fears that during the current season this year, he won’t be able to do any better.
Khalil Tafakji believes that the constant settler harassment of the eastern line of villages and towns like Al-Mughayyir “is the continuation of the same logic” of separating the West Bank from the Jordan Valley.
“And then there are the south Hebron hills, which have been seen by Israel as a buffer zone at the southern tip of the West Bank,” Tafakji adds. “And there is also the south and west of Nablus.”
“The region of western Nablus is very close to Israel proper, and it’s where the Ariel settlement bloc is built,” Tafakji explains. “The logic here is to cut the West Bank’s continuity into a northern and a southern half through southern Nablus, and this is why settlers have ramped up their establishment of outposts alongside violent attacks in the same area after October 7.”
The areas south and west of Nablus also saw a marked increase in settler attacks, especially in the towns of Huwwara, Libban, Qusra, and Burqa, where Israeli settlers have multiplied outposts on Palestinian land. The Israeli army has been conducting infrastructure works around Nablus that will offer settlers new roads and bus stations.
A settler government
Settler attacks over the past year have also been coupled with government action to empower the settler movement in the West Bank. In October and November, Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, posted videos of himself on X distributing firearms to Israelis, reportedly including West Bank settlers. A report by the Knesset’s Security Committee stated that Israeli settlers in the West Bank possessed 160,000 firearms and that the number was going to increase to 165,000 by the end of 2023.
In June, Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who holds administrative powers over the West Bank, said in a meeting with settlers that he had been working on a plan to transfer administrative powers in the West Bank from the occupation army to a special division he created in the Finance Ministry run by civilian government employees.
“This division is completely run by settlers, and it has been given wide powers, special police force, surveillance drones, and a special budget,” Jamal Jumaa, coordinator of the grassroots Stop The Wall campaign, told Mondoweiss.
“This is a new phase of the Israeli colonial project in the West Bank, which aims at consolidating Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and pushing Palestinians into isolated, overcrowded urban spaces in areas A and B,” Jumaa explains. “In these areas, overpopulation and deteriorating life conditions would push Palestinians to leave the country on their own.”
“This strategy has been clear for over two decades, but it was unfolding slowly,” Jumaa points out. “But it seems that after October 7, Israel has taken its offensive in the West Bank to a new level. It now wants to definitively control and annex it.”
Israel’s military campaign in service of settlement expansion
Simultaneously, Israel ramped up its military offensive on the West Bank’s cities and refugee camps, especially in the northern cities of Jenin, Tulkarem, Tubas, and Nablus, where local resistance groups have been developing since late 2021.
Last week, on October 3, Israel dropped a heavy missile from a fighter jet on the Tulkarem refugee camp. The strike killed 20 Palestinians, including an entire family of six, including two children aged 5 and 7. The Israeli army said the strike had targeted an alleged “local Hamas commander,” Zahi Oufi. It was the first time in over 20 years that the Israeli army launched such a deadly airstrike in the West Bank. It was the latest in a series of destructive military raids that saw the wholesale bulldozing of roads and civilian infrastructure in refugee camps in the norther West Bank.
In Tulkarem refugee camp, all the streets are destroyed and sewage pipes are torn out from the earth. Houses on the sides of the narrow alleys are mostly damaged, riddled with bullet holes or missing doors, and sometimes, entire walls.
“Since October 7, we have had no sense of calm, let alone security,” Nehaya al-Jundi, the Director of a local association for the rehabilitation of handicapped children in Tulkarem’s Nur Shams refugee camp, told Mondoweiss in September.
“Our center in Nur Shams was raided by the occupation soldiers six times, each time destroying content,” said al-Jundi. “At each raid, people are arrested from their homes and interrogated in the field.”
“Homes are broken into, families terrorized,” she added. “This has become our daily reality.”
Tulkarem and Jenin have been critical havens for the rise of local armed Palestinian resistance groups, mostly comprised of young men in their twenties who challenge the Israeli army when it enters their neighborhoods. Israel launched at least two large campaigns against these cities before October 7.
Ever since October 7, however, Israeli raids have become more frequent, lasted longer (for days at a time), and wrought more destruction and devastation. Most of all, the raids have become far more deadly than in previous years.
Residents say that Israel seeks to reduce the population of the camps in order to dry out social support for the resistance groups.
“Since August, Israeli forces have arrested hundreds of people and conducted field interrogations with them,” Muhammad Abu Eid, a resident of Tulkarem city, told Mondoweiss. “Those who were released were told to leave the camp until the end of the raid.”
“Upon returning to the camps, many of these people discovered that their homes were damaged,” he said. “And they had to rent apartments in the city with the help of UNRWA, the Palestinian Authority, and other NGOs.”
Abu Eid is a member of the Jadayel Association, a local organization that distributes humanitarian aid to the camp’s residents. “It seems that the occupation is trying to empty the camps, but most people chose to stay and repair their homes,” he explained. “We and other associations try to help them with food parcels and blankets, but it’s not enough.”
But the military escalation in the northern West Bank is connected to the settlement project, says Jamal Jumaa.
“It is part of Israel’s ‘decisive’ plan for the West Bank after October 7,” he explains.
Jumaa believes that for Israel’s vision of complete annexation to be realized, “it needs to break the spirit of resistance and crush its physical formations.”
“This is what happened 20 years ago during the Second Intifada,” he clarifies. “In 2002, Ariel Sharon launched a large operation against West Bank cities that crushed Palestinian armed formations and caused large damage to Palestinian infrastructure.”
That same year, Israel began to build the annexation wall, ostensibly for “security” and to combat Palestinian resistance, but which in actuality surrounded areas B and C, disconnecting Palestinian urban areas from one another. “All of this drew the outline for a settlement expansion project that has been unfolding before the eyes of the entire world for the past two decades,” Jumaa says.
Jumaa believes that the current military campaign in the West Bank is doing the same work that the annexation wall was intended to do 20 years ago. “The military campaign is advancing the new phase of Israel’s colonial settlement project,” he says.
As Israel is embroiled in an endless war on several fronts, looking for a lost victory in the rubble of Gaza and the hills of southern Lebanon as it pushes toward all-out war with Iran, it continues its offensive on three million Palestinians in the West Bank. Meanwhile, Palestinians in the West Bank continue to struggle to survive Israel’s assault, living in complete uncertainty regarding what the future may hold for them.
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss
