Rights Experts Warn A Besieged West Bank Could Face The Same Fate As Gaza

Israeli forces have mostly focused their attacks on Jenin and Tulkarem, claiming that their raids are intended to prevent Palestinian militants in those areas from attacking Israeli civilians. But there have been no Israeli settlements around Jenin since 2005, and security forces have already cited the threat of settler safety to justify implementing frequent Palestinian checkpoints and building the wall between the West Bank and Israel.

“The only thing that has been proven to provide security is when Palestinians are free. But they don’t want to do that,” Diana Buttu, an attorney in the region and former legal adviser for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, told HuffPost on Thursday. “So instead, Israel lives with this formula that the only way that they can feel secure is if Palestinians feel insecure; that’s their way of operating. And so they’ll keep repeating these same lines over and over again, and nobody really questions them or dissects them.”

Though there is a small but growing Palestinian militant presence in the West Bank, the territory is governed by the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority and not by Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza. Rights experts stress that such a presence is an inevitable response to the long-term occupation of Palestinian land that the International Court of Justice ruled in July is a violation of international law.

The West Bank raids are occurring at the same time as Israel’s nearly yearlong U.S.-funded military offensive in Gaza that officials at the U.N. and other human rights groups in the international community have described as genocidal. Israeli forces have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians there and decimated the territory after Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7 and took hundreds of hostages, about 100 of whom remain in captivity.

Though Palestinian civilians in the West Bank have faced settler and military violence before Oct. 7, the Hamas attack intensified that violence on top of increased Israeli settlement construction. Since the Hamas attack, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 650 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to OCHA. During that same period, Palestinians killed 13 Israeli soldiers and five settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“Israel’s genocidal violence risks leaking out of Gaza and into the occupied Palestinian territory as a whole. The writing is on the wall, and we continue to ignore it,” Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, said in a statement on Monday. “There is mounting evidence that no Palestinian is safe under Israel’s unfettered control.”

The current Israeli government feels more emboldened to conduct daily raids, arrests and demolitions in the West Bank because multiple far-right members of the Knesset ― such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich ― are themselves settlers in the occupied territory, Zaid Amali, a Ramallah-based human rights expert with the nonprofit, nonpartisan MIFTAH, told HuffPost.

“If we were to consider that these are ‘operations’ to eradicate terror, then what is the need to destroy all of the infrastructure that civilians are using?” Amali asked. “What is the need to shoot children, women, uninvolved men, all of these people who are being deliberately targeted? What is the need to obstruct medical workers and ambulances, and sieging hospitals or targeting journalists, which is what has been happening not just during this past week but for decades?”

In the past week, Israel has destroyed infrastructure in the West Bank that is necessary for sustaining Palestinian life ― cutting off water to at least 80% of the population, destroying sewage lines, severing telecommunications for extended periods, ruining more than 70% of Jenin’s roads, including paths to hospitals, and blowing up dozens of Palestinian homes. Attacking such infrastructure is the same tactic Israeli forces have been documented using in Gaza, where Palestinians have been maimed, displaced, starved and deprived of water, infected, detained and tortured.

Buttu and Amali both noted that Palestinians in the West Bank have been anxiously watching the destruction in Gaza unfold for the past 11 months and are now terrified that they may experience the same fate with no international accountability. Families are stocking up on food and water, switching to solar-powered electricity and even planting gardens so they can have direct access to food when the raids worsen.

U.N. agencies are working with humanitarian and local aid partners to help deliver assistance, according to Philippe Lazzarini, chief of the agency responsible for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). Multiple humanitarian organizations mobilized by OCHA were denied access to Jenin on Tuesday by Israeli forces, the agency said.

Despite the concerned statements in the past week by the U.N. and the international community, Palestinian human rights experts have little hope that it will go any further than that.

“What we ask organizations like the U.N. and the member states that form the U.N. is they need to walk the talk. They need to change the rhetoric into real and concrete action. So we need real and concrete steps of international accountability,” such as sanctions or an arms embargo, Amali said. “This is what will stop Israel from committing war crimes. But talk is cheap. We’ve heard a lot of it.”