HOW ISRAEL HAS TIGHTENED ITS GRIP ON THE WEST BANK / THE FINANCIAL TIMES BIG READ

How Israel has tightened its grip on the West Bank

The spiralling confrontations in the territory come as the hardline coalition government has moved to expand settlements

James Shotter in Jenin 

People stand amid the rubble outside a mosque in Jenin on Wednesday © AFP via Getty Images

It was in the early hours of Monday, as a stream of soldiers entered his house via a hole they had just smashed in his daughters’ bedroom wall, that Ali Saadi realised that the latest Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp was different from the many others he had witnessed in recent years.

Having handcuffed Saadi and his male relatives, and locked the family in a downstairs room, the soldiers knocked further holes in his bedroom wall so they could use it as a snipers’ nest during a two-day operation that became the biggest Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank in two decades.

“It was so violent,” says Saadi, an official in the Palestinian security agency, gesturing outside where Israeli military bulldozers had ripped up streets and crumpled cars, and air strikes had blown out windows and left gaping holes in families’ living rooms. 

“It took them just two days to do all this.”

Israeli officials said this week’s operation — which killed 12 Palestinians, injured 140 and forced thousands to flee — was needed to combat militants who had turned the densely populated camp into a stronghold from which to launch attacks on Israelis. 

“[Terrorists] shall have no safe haven,” said Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Palestinians see the raid as part of a broader series of steps taken by Israel’s hardline new government aimed at tightening its grip on the West Bank, the landlocked territory which Palestinians want to form the heart of a future state, but which Israel has occupied since 1967.

Clashes with the Israeli army in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin this week. The violence over the past year has largely centred on Jenin and Nablus © Ronaldo Schmedit/AFP/Getty Images

Together, they say, Israel’s moves are undermining the Palestinian Authority which oversees parts of the West Bank, fuelling instability, and extinguishing any lingering hopes for a Palestinian state.

“[They] want to physically remove the tracks of the two state solution, including the PA,” says one Palestinian official, while also lamenting inaction from the US or Arab states. 

“I think this is the most dangerous period in our recent history . . . The nuts and bolts are coming loose.”

Under pressure

The deterioration of the security situation in the West Bank began before Netanyahu’s coalition with ultra religious and ultra nationalist parties, widely seen as the most rightwing in Israeli history, took office in December.

Israeli security forces have been carrying out almost daily raids in the territory since a series of attacks by Palestinians on Israelis last spring. But the bloodshed has intensified in recent months.

According to UN data, which does not include the most recent violence, Israeli forces have killed 114 Palestinians in the territory this year and Palestinians have killed 16 Israelis, putting 2023 on course to be the deadliest year in the West Bank since 2005.

The capabilities of militants in the West Bank are also growing, according to Israeli officials. 

During a raid on Jenin in June, an Israeli convoy was hit by an improvised explosive device which left soldiers stranded under fire for hours. 

The massive operation to rescue them saw Israel use helicopter gunships over the West Bank for the first time since 2005.

Military officials said that this, along with an attempt by militants in Jenin last month to fire a rudimentary rocket at Israel for the first time, had been a key factor in the decision to launch this week’s raid. 

Palestinian militant groups have typically launched rockets at Israel from the coastal enclave of the Gaza Strip.

“[The IEDs] are much more sophisticated than in the past. 

I’m quite sure that a lot of technological knowhow was delivered from Gaza to Jenin and even maybe from Lebanon,” says Michael Milstein, a former adviser to the Israeli agency that oversees Palestinian affairs in the West Bank. 

“The rockets are [still basic]. But it was the same case in Gaza 20 years ago . . . and they improved very, very quickly.”

An Israeli convoy was hit by an improvised explosive device which left soldiers stranded under fire for hours, during a raid on Jenin last month © Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images

But there has also been pressure from extremist settlers in government, such as finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, for a far more aggressive approach to Palestinian militants.

After Palestinian gunmen killed four Israelis near the West Bank’s Eli settlement last month, Ben-Gvir — an ultra nationalist previously convicted of incitement to racism — demanded “a military operation to demolish buildings, eliminate terrorists, not one or two, but tens and hundreds, and if necessary even thousands”.

Ben-Gvir accompanied his demand for a military campaign with a call for settlers to seize more land in the West Bank, drawing a contradiction from Netanyahu, who said the government would oppose such actions.

But for the most part, Netanyahu has allowed his allies to press on with a raft of policies expanding settlements, which are considered illegal under international law, yet in the West Bank have swelled to accommodate 500,000 people.

During its six months in office, the government has advanced plans for the construction of 13,000 housing units in settlements, almost triple the amount advanced in the whole of last year.

It has also approved the legalisation of nine settlement outposts that even Israel previously regarded as illegal, and passed legislation paving the way for settlers to return to four settlements in the northern West Bank that were dismantled in 2005.

On top of this, they have also transferred extensive powers over civilian life in the West Bank from the military to a specially created ministerial role held by Smotrich in the defence ministry.

Settler leaders want the government to go even further, and formally annex the West Bank. 

“If Israel loses to the Arabs, we won’t exist. 

That’s why we need to win, and this means that Judea and Samaria must be part of the state of Israel,” says Shlomo Ne’eman, head of the Yesha Council, an umbrella body for settlers, using the biblical name for the West Bank. 

“And the two state solution is taken totally off the table.”

Jenin residents run away from tear gas in a confrontation with PA security forces following the funeral of Palestinians killed in the city © Raneen Sawafta/Reuters

But other observers argue that the transfer of powers from the military to Smotrich already amounts to a recognition that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is not temporary, but permanent.

“This is the ripping off of the veil . . . 

And this isn’t just transferring powers from the military to civilian politicians. 

It’s transferring them to the most nationalistic, extremist, messianic, violent forces in the country,” says Dahlia Scheindlin, a pollster and political analyst.

“I think the idea of separation into two sovereign, independent states with a hard international border between them has been dead for a decade. 

And right now it’s being buried, or cremated, or whatever happens after death.”

This blitz of pro-settler activity in government has been accompanied by a surge in violence by settlers themselves against Palestinians and their property. 

According to the UN, there were 441 attacks by settlers in the first five and a half months of the year.

In one attack in February, after a Palestinian killed two settlers earlier in the day, hundreds of settlers rampaged through Huwara, a Palestinian town south of Nablus, torching buildings and cars in an attack that even the Israeli military commander for the West Bank called a “pogrom”.

After last month’s shooting in Eli, there was another burst of vigilante attacks. 

In Turmus Ayya, a town of some 4,000 people just north of Ramallah that was among those attacked, the mayor Lafi Adeeb Shalabi says that 30 houses, 50 cars and many dunams of land and crops had been torched, and that one man had been killed during the rampage, which he estimated had cost around $10mn of damage.

When PA officials tried to attend a funeral this week for some of the Palestinians killed during the latest raid in Jenin, they were met with heckling from angry crowds © Majid Mohammed/AP

Residents are still reeling. Mahmoud Hajaz, a 73-year-old retiree, says that his wife and grandson had been trapped in his house for 30 to 40 minutes after settlers set it on fire, before being rescued. 

His son, who had been in the town centre shopping, returned to see the house in flames and briefly thought that his mother had been burnt alive.

“He started screaming, ‘Where’s my mum? Mum, mum, where are you?’” 

Hajaz recalls, standing beside the partially gutted building, as workmen tried to clean the scorched interior.

In the aftermath of that attack, Israeli security officials took the unusual step of issuing a statement branding the wave of settler attacks “nationalist terrorism”. 

But the reaction from within government has been mixed, with one minister lambasting the officials for their statement.

An altercation between an Israeli policeman and a Palestinian during a protest against the Israeli military operation in Jenin © Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty Images

The PA’s impotence in the face of such settler violence, as well of its broader inability to protect its people from Israeli assaults, infuriates Palestinians. 

When PA officials tried to attend a funeral this week for some of the Palestinians killed during the latest raid in Jenin, they were met with shouts of, “Out!” and heckling from angry crowds. 

Hajaz is similarly dismissive. 

“When [Palestinian prime minister] Mohammad Shtayyeh came here I told him, ‘Either protect us, or give us a way to protect ourselves’,” he says.

The PA has been hobbled by its inability to provide public services and President Mahmoud Abbas’s refusal to hold elections. 

But observers say that the root cause of its slow-motion collapse is the failure of the peace process, which has robbed the organisation — once seen as a stepping stone to a Palestinian state — of its raison d’être and left Palestinians bereft of hope for the future. 

“The worst enemy of stability and security is hopelessness,” said the Palestinian official. 

“That’s why people are emigrating en masse from all political parties.”

Tinderbox territory

As violence has flared over the past year, established militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad have gained traction in the West Bank, and newer ones, such as the Lions’ Den in Nablus, have grown in prominence. 

Some observers have begun to wonder whether a third intifada, after the Palestinian uprisings of the 1980s and early 2000s, could be brewing.

Others are more sceptical, pointing out that the violence over the past year has largely centred on Jenin and Nablus, and not spread throughout the West Bank. 

Unlike in the second intifada, the Palestinian leadership has so far shown no inclination to support a broader uprising.

But given how volatile the West Bank has become, diplomats worry that a small spark could yet ignite a broader conflagration, not least because, unlike during previous periods of Israeli-Palestinians tensions, there is little appetite among key international players, such as the US and big Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, for a concerted push for a political solution.

Mourners gather during the funeral of Eli Mizrahi and his wife, Natalie, who were killed in a shooting attack in East Jerusalem in January © Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images

“The US doesn’t have a peace plan up its sleeve. 

They think in terms of trying to manage the conflict, and not let it get out of hand,” says one western diplomat. 

“But there is a very explosive cocktail of scattered centres of conflict. 

They are not necessarily co-ordinated — but one event can ignite things.”

In his apartment in the Jenin refugee camp, debris from the raid still strewn across the floor, Saadi is also pessimistic about support from Palestinian allies. 

“If you brought an end to the occupation, you would bring an end to all the problems here,” he says. 

“[But] I feel towards the Arabs as I feel towards the international community and the western countries: they are only looking at us. They’re not doing anything.”

Additional reporting from Andrew England

Cartography by Liz Faunce