Over the last month, the West Bank has witnessed the largest military invasion by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in decades, with an increased onslaught of raids, home demolitions, besiegement, forced displacement, and destruction of essential infrastructure.
Around 10:45 p.m. (Palestine) on Oct. 3, the IOF bombed a coffee shop in a four-story building in the Tulkarm refugee camp. The strike killed at least 18 people in what is being called the “biggest massacre” in the West Bank since the Second Intifada. It is also the first time in two decades that Israel has used F-16 warplanes to strike. The IOF claimed that it, along with the Shin Bet, assassinated Zahi Yaser Abd al-Razeq Oufi, head of the Hamas network in Tulkarm. Local sources also confirmed the martyrdom of Quds Brigade Ghaith Radwan during the attack.
This violence is part and parcel of Israel’s settler-colonial practices in place since 1948, but these policies have intensified since Oct. 7, 2023, and particularly since late August of this year. The most recent invasion, dubbed “Operation Summer Camps” by the IOF, mainly targeted the governorates of Tubas, Jenin, and Tulkarm, as well as the invasion of the cities of al-Khalil (Hebron) and Nablus, killing 39 Palestinians and wounding 150 in 10 days. These raids have since continued, with an attack on Qabatiya killing seven people, a further attack on Tubas injuring three, an incursion into Balata refugee camp in Nablus, as well as a raid on the Al Jazeera bureau in Ramallah shutting down their operations for 45 days. This is interlinked with current events in Gaza, and more so to the long historical context of a protracted genocide, despite a focused effort by the Israeli regime to separate the West Bank and Gaza, classifying them as two entities.
Al Jazeera reported that according to official Palestinian sources, attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 723 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 160 children, since Oct. 7.
Violence and Resistance in the West Bank
The incursion into Jenin began on Aug. 28 and lasted 10 days. Hundreds of soldiers descended on the city in bulldozers and armored vehicles. The following week saw the destruction of nearly 70 percent of Jenin’s streets, airstrikes on family homes, the deprivation of 80 percent of the Jenin camp of water access, the blocking of telecommunications and access to hospitals, as well as the forced displacement of families from multiple neighborhoods. Tulkarm was also targeted with airstrikes and forced displacement, with 350 residential and livelihood structures damaged or destroyed, and over 100 people displaced. Movement was severely limited, with medical staff struggling to reach the casualties of the airstrikes, and over 10,000 people in Nur Shams refugee camp experiencing water cutoffs as well as an overflow of sewage. Israeli forces struck al-Far’a Camp in Tubas, restricted medical access to those injured, and damaged an electricity generator and the main road around the camp.
Israeli officials claimed that this onslaught of violence was targeting armed resistance groups based primarily in refugee camps in the Northern West Bank. However, as is the case in Gaza, Israeli forces targeted civilian life beyond resistance infrastructure, both as a means of collective punishment, as well as to destroy the basic necessities of life. Although this may be painted as an escalation in the West Bank, Israel’s settler-colonial project has long destroyed and attacked Palestinian life in the West Bank, both since Oct. 7 and before as part of a protracted genocide. In essence, Israel has been assaulting Palestinians, in Gaza, the West Bank, in camps, and the diaspora since the inception of the Zionist state using the same tactics in fluctuating intensity for all Palestinians while trying to erase their existence.
To highlight this brutish, all-encompassing, and enduring violence, a most prominent parallel that can be drawn is to that of events in 2002 during the Second Intifada; Israeli “Operation Defensive Shield.” This military operation aimed to destroy the “infrastructure of terror” in cities and refugee camps in the West Bank.
During the Battle of Jenin in April 2002, Israeli forces attacked the Jenin refugee camp and besieged it for 10 days. Israeli commando forces and helicopters battled “lightly armed fighters and homemade booby traps” across Jenin, according to Al Jazeera. Throughout the assault, electricity, water, and food were cut off, 52 Palestinians were killed, along with over 25 percent of Jenin refugee camp residents displaced, and 140 residential buildings completely destroyed. The Hawashin district was completely razed down and destroyed, through the use of armored bulldozers. Nablus was similarly attacked and destroyed during the same period; Israeli troops cut off all water, electricity, and telecommunications. Targeted by snipers, bulldozers, and aerial bombing for three days, 75 Palestinians were killed, 47 percent of Nablus’ old city housing blocks were damaged, and 7.5 percent were completely destroyed. To avoid booby traps placed by Palestinian fighters on main roads, Israeli forces moved between civilian homes by exploding walls connecting neighboring houses.
These immoral and illegal tactics, such as land grabs, forced expulsions and demolitions, and the deprivation of basic rights and resources, is an Israeli strategy that no Palestinian, in Palestine or elsewhere, is truly free of. It is important to contextualize recent events. However, in doing so, it is imperative to acknowledge the true scope of this near-perpetual genocide and the use of ‘divide and conquer’ as a long-term strategy.
A Historic and Ongoing Genocide
The foundation of the Zionist state of Israel was built on the suffering of Palestinians. The events preceding and during the Nakba of 1948 are a testament to this. From the late stages of the British Mandate period, Jewish armed militias such as the Irgun and Haganah committed a series of terrorist acts against the Palestinians, and the British as well (see King David Hotel bombing July 1946).
Al Jazeera reported that from December 1947 to May 1948, “Zionist armed groups expelled about 440,000 Palestinians from 220 villages. Before May 15, some of the most infamous massacres had already been committed; the Baldat al-Sheikh massacre on Dec. 31, 1947, killing up to 70 Palestinians; the Sa’sa’ massacre on Feb. 14, 1948, when 16 houses were blown up and 60 people lost their lives; and the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, when about 110 Palestinian men, women and children were slaughtered.”
After this initial displacement, large-scale land grabs and illegal annexations followed in 1967, and after the Oslo Accords, are still ongoing highlighting a chronological continuity.
Palestinians have since been internally displaced, scattered among refugee camps in and outside of Palestine, and continuously both attacked and oppressed by the violent machinery of the Zionist project. Israel has methodically used the same tactics, bombing campaigns, land grabs, expulsion, assassinations, and sexual violence, among countless others, indiscriminately against Palestinians across geography. In tandem, they consciously attempt to separate the narratives of this violence by, for example, disconnecting the raids in the West Bank from the violence in Gaza, though they are part and parcel of the same protracted genocide of the Palestinians.
Simultaneously a concerted attempt to isolate Palestinians from one another continues through separation; a different praxis of apartheid policy.
In his essay “Towards Nakba as a Legal Framework,” published in the Columbia Law Review earlier this year, Rabea Eghbariah explains:
“The compounded structure of legal fragmentation includes at least five legal statuses for Palestinians—citizens of Israel, residents of Jerusalem, residents of the West Bank, residents of Gaza, or refugees—that set their respective sociolegal positionalities in the system. Each of these “fragments” is subject to a distinctive dialectic of violence and relative legal privilege in which power dynamics and control mechanisms operate uniquely and shape the experiences of those within its sphere.”
Current events in both the West Bank and Gaza are connected, as well as populations of Palestinians elsewhere. Further to this, the events remain connected to the historic Zionist violence and must be understood as a continuation of it. Attempting to disconnect the events is indeed another violent strategy.
Certainly, it is impossible to deny the violence inflicted on Gaza and dissociate it from that inflicted on the whole of the land. It is a disservice to the Palestinian people to describe what has transpired over the last year as a war ‘with’ or ‘on’ Gaza as though it exists as a separate entity.
The 76 Year-Long Nakba
Academics, humanitarian agencies, governments, and most importantly Palestinians, have emphasized the notion that the violence in one part of Palestine or against one group of Palestinians is not separate from the overall context. Earlier this year, the Chair of the United Nations Palestinian Rights Committee, Cheikh Niang, said at an event commemorating the Nakba, “The Nakba of 1948 and today’s Nakba in Gaza are not two separate events.” He added that there is a need for a ceasefire in Gaza and pressing for statehood of the Palestinians.
For example, arguments by Eghbariah emphasize that the events of 1948 are protracted. In essence, the systemic violence inflicted by Israel — and before this, Jewish militias such as the Irgun and Haganah — is a conscious effort to completely eradicate the Palestinians through similar flagrantly violent means used today. The Nakba crosses temporal dimensions existing as an entity of its own; a violence that thrives at the intersection of genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, illegal settlements, and Occupation.
Eghbariah writes, “The Nakba has thus undergone a metamorphosis. The mid-twentieth century mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes transformed the Nakba into a tenacious system of Israeli domination; a ‘Nakba regime’ grounded in the destruction of Palestinian society and the continuous denial of its right to self-determination.”
Adding, “The Israeli regime has thus crafted an institutional design that is premised on different and mutating laboratories of oppression, together forming a totality of evolving domination best identified through the concept of Nakba and its structure of fragmentation.”
When Palestinians say the “Nakba is ongoing” it is because it has been a lived reality for multiple generations. Israeli oppression and violence against the Palestinians have been present since the inception of the Zionist state of Israel; with varying ebbs and flows of both intensity and variety. As seen in recent events in Lebanon, this violence is inherently expansionist.