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The occupied West Bank has been gripped by a surge in violence over the past year as Israeli forces have launched repeated raids targeting Palestinian militants. But even by those bloody standards, the past two weeks have marked a dramatic escalation.
Last month, Israeli forces deployed helicopter gunships over the territory for the first time in two decades after a raid in Jenin left soldiers stranded and under fire. On Monday, they sent hundreds of troops backed by armed drones back to the city, the biggest incursion in the West Bank since a Palestinian uprising known as the second intifada ended in 2005.
“This is different,” said Ayman Yousef, professor of political science at the Arab-American University in Jenin. “This is a full-scale operation.”
Israeli officials said the raid was part of an effort to root out militants from the Jenin refugee camp. But a spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas branded the assault on the densely populated camp, which killed 12 Palestinians, injured more than 140 and forced around 500 families to flee, “a new war crime against our defenceless people”.
With the peace process dead, Israeli settlements relentlessly expanding, settler violence against Palestinians mounting and the Palestinian Authority — once the embodiment of hopes for an independent state — crumbling under its own failings and the pressures of Israel’s long occupation, the stability of the West Bank has been deteriorating for years.
But analysts said the sharp escalation in Israel’s use of force in its latest raid in Jenin had been driven by shorter-term factors. One was the evolution of the capabilities of the militant factions in the camp. In addition to improving the quality of their improvised explosive devices, those factions last week for the first time also fired a rudimentary rocket at Israel, albeit without causing casualties.
The second was mounting pressure from far-right settlers, such as finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, on prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take more aggressive action in the West Bank.
After Palestinian gunmen killed four Israelis in the wake of the first Jenin raid two weeks ago, Ben-Gvir — an ultranationalist previously convicted of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist group — demanded “a military operation to demolish buildings, eliminate terrorists, not one or two, but tens and hundreds, and if necessary even thousands”. Smotrich had called for Israel to “replace tweezer activity with a broad operation”.
“Of course there are political considerations. But I think the main problem is that the basic threat in Jenin is such that you cannot handle it the same way as a year or two ago,” said Michael Milstein, a former adviser to the Israeli agency that oversees Palestinian affairs in the West Bank.
Even before the latest bloodshed, this year was already on course to be the deadliest year since 2005 in the West Bank — which Palestinians see as the heart of a future state but which Israel has occupied since 1967. Israeli forces had killed 114 Palestinians in the territory and Palestinians 16 Israelis, according to the most recent UN data.
During that time, the Jenin camp, long a militant stronghold, has been the scene of repeated fighting, with Israeli forces raiding it on multiple occasions as part of a series of incursions in the West Bank in response to a number of attacks on Israelis by Palestinians that began last spring.
The level of force used by Israel this week — involving air power and large numbers of troops — is a step up, prompting some observers to draw parallels with the second intifada, a period of intense violence in the early 2000s which left 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis dead.
However, the fighting this year has been more localised, with the focus in Jenin and Nablus, another city in the north of the West Bank, and the Israeli military insisting it did not intend to carry out a broader offensive. “[The current operation] is focused on the camp,” Daniel Hagari, the military’s chief spokesman, said on Monday. “It’s not in all the West Bank. We don’t need to have an invasion.”
Yousef, from the Arab-American University, said another broad-based conflict was not in the interests of the Israeli or Palestinian leaderships, and that West Bank militant groups also lacked the capacity to wage one. But he said continued Israeli raids in other restive cities in the West Bank such as Nablus and Tulkarem were likely.
“They don’t want the Jenin camp to be a role model for other towns in the West Bank,” he said. “When they withdraw from Jenin, I think they’ll assess whether they can use this sort of operation in other places.”
Milstein warned, however, that without addressing more fundamental problems, such as the disintegration of the PA, the power vacuum it had left in the north of the West Bank, and Palestinians’ everyday struggles, Israel would find itself fighting the same battles again and again.
“The basic problems in the West Bank are much deeper than terror or military or security problems. You also need to take care of political and social and economic problems,” he said.
“After a few weeks, the infrastructure of Hamas and Islamic Jihad will recover, and they will think of ways to take revenge,” he said, referring to the two main Palestinian militant groups. “So without co-ordination with the PA we will find ourselves again in the same story — and very soon.”