‘Battlefield will change’: West Coast braces for surge in violence | News about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

When a Gaza ceasefire was announced on January 15, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were overjoyed that Israel’s devastating war against the besieged enclave would finally end.

However, the Israeli state violence quickly escalated across the West Bank in what local observers and analysts describe as an apparent attempt to formally annex more land.

The sudden increase in settler attacks and Israeli military operations has frightened Palestinians in the occupied territory, who believe they may now face the same kind of violence meted out to their countrymen and women in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 46,900 Palestinians in Gaza since the beginning of the war in the enclave in October 2023.

“We watched genocide has been going on in Gaza for 14 months and no one in the world has done anything to stop it and some people here think we will suffer a similar fate,” said Shady Abdullah, a journalist and human rights activist from Tulkarem.

“We all know that we are afraid that the situation could get worse here in the West Bank,” he told Al Jazeera.

Changing the battlefield

Hours after ceasefire in Gaza Starting on January 19, Israel began erecting dozens of new checkpoints in the West Bank to prevent Palestinians from gathering to celebrate the release of political prisoners, who were released in exchange for Israeli prisoners held by Hamas as part of the deal.

Checkpoints also barred farmers from their farms and imprisoned civilians in entire towns, such as Hebron and Bethlehem.

Israeli settlers then began expanding illegal outposts in the West Bank and attacking Palestinian villages. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international lawand many of the haphazardly constructed outposts are even illegal under Israeli lawalthough often little is done to remove them, and many later become formalized.

“The implications of the violence are that it leads to direct or related displacement and this is consistent with Israel’s goal of preventing any Palestinian state on their land,” said Tahani Mustafa, Israel-Palestine expert at the International Crisis Group.

In addition, the Israeli army announced plans to carry out major operations in the West Bank, which began on January 21. a major incursion into the Jenin campallegedly to eradicate armed groups. Israeli attacks on the West Bank preceded the Gaza war, but increased in violence and intensity with the beginning of the war.

“The violence and incursions of settlers that we are seeing… is an indication of where we are going now,” Mustafa told Al Jazeera.

Compromise?

The surge in violence has led some to believe that new United States President Donald Trump has made a compromise with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pause the war in Gaza in exchange for increased aggression in the West Bank.

“The truce in Gaza – which looks more like a humanitarian pause and “trade in hostages and prisoners” – comes at a price. Israel never gives up anything without a price to pay and I think we see that in the West Bank, given the kind of [officials] The Trump administration consists of,” said Mustafa.

Trump has not indicated there is any deal with Netanyahu that would allow him to escalate violence in the West Bank, but he has also refused to commit to a two-state solution and has nominated several opponents of Palestinian statehood to senior positions in his administration.

The prospect of an increased crackdown on Palestinian fighters in the West Bank, as well as the growth of illegal settlements and even potential annexation, appears to have prompted far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to stay in Netanyahu’s fragile coalition rather than withdraw. and topple the government as a way of protesting the Gaza ceasefire.

Under the Watcher, Israel has quietly seized more land on the West Bank over the past year than in the last 20 years combined, according to Peace Now, an Israeli nonprofit that monitors land grabbing.

Both Smotrich and the broader settler movement have long viewed the occupied West Bank as an integral part of “greater Israel,” calling the territory Judea and Samaria.

Smotrich’s rapid annexation of the West Bank went largely unnoticed by the much larger crisis in Gaza, where, in addition to the mass killing of Palestinians, almost the entire pre-war population of 2.3 million people was uprooted and displaced.

Settlers attack

Palestinians across the occupied West Bank now say settlers are stepping up attacks in coordination with the Israeli military to seize and seize more land.

January 20 settlers violently attacked two villages in the northern West Bank, Funduq and Jinasfut, as well as villages further south in Masafer Yatta and around Ramallah.

Settlers burned houses and cars and beat Palestinians under the full protection and watchful eye of the Israeli military, according to local human rights groups.

However, the head of the Israeli army’s Central Command, General Avi Bluth, said in a statement that any “violent unrest harms security and the army will not allow it.”

The attacks took place during Trump’s inauguration as US president – ​​one of his first actions as president he canceled sanctions on groups and individuals which the US previously considered part of the “extremist immigrant movement”.

“The aim of the settlers is known,” said Abbas Milhem, executive director of the Palestinian Farmers Union. “They want to move the Palestinians out of the West Bank and annex the land to Israel and impose Israeli law.”

Ghassan Aleeyan, a Palestinian living in Bethlehem, expressed his frustration to Al Jazeera.

“What these people are doing is illegal, but they don’t care about international law, Palestinian or Israeli law,” he told Al Jazeera. “They don’t even care about God’s law.”

The trip to Jenin

In early December, armed groups in Jenin began a conflict with the Palestinian Authority (PA), the administration created as a result of the 1993 Oslo Accords.

The agreement launched the now-defunct peace process that ostensibly aimed to establish a Palestinian state in the occupied Palestinian territory, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

A key element of the Oslo Accords was the PA’s mandate to eradicate and disarm armed groups as part of its security coordination with Israel.

But as hopes for statehood faded and Israel consolidated its occupation, a number of neighboring armed groups loosely affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and even Fatah—the faction that controls the PA—emerged in Palestinian camps across the West Bank.

Since the PA was unable to crush the armed groups in the Jenin camp, Israel launched a major operation on January 21 that has already killed at least 10 people.

Local observers told Al Jazeera that Israel is justifying its operation under the guise of bolstering Israeli security and ensuring another October 7-style attack does not occur, even though armed groups in the West Bank are far less capable and organized than Hamas in Gaza.

“We believe that Israel’s plan is to attack the northern West Bank in the same way it did during the second intifada when it invaded Palestinian camps,” said Murad Jadallah, a human rights monitor with the Palestinian human rights group al-Haq.

Israel previously occupied the Jenin camp for 10 days in 2002, destroying about 400 houses and displacing about a quarter of the residents during the second Intifada in 2002, according to the UN’s Palestine Refugee Agency (UNRWA).

Mustafa, of the ICG, believes that Israel will conduct more incursions and major military operations across the West Bank in the coming days in an attempt to crush all forms of resistance.

“The battlefield will shift from Gaza to the West Bank,” she said.