When Israel attacks the West Bank, who is it targeting?

Several Palestinian military commanders, including a member of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, two members of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, as well as a mother and her child have been killed by Israeli forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank on Monday, Palestinian and Israeli officials report.

As part of the military assault, a number of army convoys and bulldozers also stormed the Tulkarem refugee camp, where the five were killed, and destroyed buildings, markets and entire neighbourhoods in the area.

There have been persistent Israeli army raids and settler attacks in the Tulkarem area as well as the whole of the West Bank in general, and on an intensified scale since Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected to the prime ministership at the end of 2022, as part of a far-right government. As a result of these raids, the damage caused to southern Israel by the Hamas-led attack on October 7 brought on even more devastation.

There is an Israeli claim that its almost daily raids are necessary so that Hamas cells can be captured and the security of the Israeli state can be maintained. Some critics, however, are of the opinion that these raids are only exacerbating the causes that are fueling armed resistance – in particular, Israel’s decades-long occupation, which the International Court of Justice declared last week to be unlawful.

During the period January through June of this year, Israel has murdered 203 people in the West Bank according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It is estimated that there have been 75 more Israeli soldiers or settlers killed by them in the last year as compared to the same period last year.

There is a growing belief among activists and experts that Israel is claiming to be a victim of terrorism in order to justify its increasing violence, which results in mass displacements and the expansion of illegal settlements.

There are a number of factors underpinning the escalation of violence that has resulted from West Bank operations that need to be taken into account.

Which targets have been raided?

The current Gaza war predates Israel’s daily raids into the occupied West Bank. While the Israeli government claims the raids are aimed at protecting the population, local residents claim that they serve little purpose except to remind them of the reality of living under occupation in the first place.

In recent days, Palestinians have been targeted in towns such as Jenin, Tulkarem, and the Nur Shams refugee camp, and there have been frequent firefights with Palestinian armed men.

The Israeli army is known to fire missiles at the residential areas of camps, bulldoze hospitals and education centres, cut the electricity and kill or injure civilians during almost every raid, according to Shadi Abdullah, a refugee activist from Tulkarem.

This type of tactic has been widely reported throughout the West Bank, and in particular in Jenin, where a large part of the camp has been reduced to rubble as a result of these tactics. One of these raids in May 2022 resulted in Shireen Abu Akleh, a reporter for Al Jazeera, dying in the camp.

During a recent interview with Al Jazeera, Abdullah told the channel that the Israelis do not distinguish between resistance fighters and civilians.

There is also a plan by the Israelis to make the areas uninhabitable, thereby forcing Palestinians to migrate from one Palestinian town to another, which would be considered forced displacement upon them.

West Bank Palestinian armed groups: who are they?

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the West Bank are long-term targets of Israeli military operations, as are new independent armed groups.

In a recent arrest, Shin Bet, Israel’s terror monitoring and foiling agency, said students from Birzeit University were plotting a “significant terror attack” against Israeli forces or settlers.

There was word that the student movements would be taking action in the West Bank, but it doesn’t matter whether it’s popular resistance or armed resistance, the Israelis don’t seem to care either way. In the West Bank city of Nablus, a Palestinian activist named Tasame Ramadan told me, “They are not interested in an escalation of the conflict.”.

There is a desire on the part of Israel for Palestinians to feel that they are controlled and to feel afraid for their lives, she explained.

For the International Crisis Group’s senior Palestine analyst Tahani Mustafa, the reasons for joining armed factions and picking up arms are not uncommon. As the settler violence in Palestine, which has been on the rise without much pushback from the military, and army raids, have increased, many young men pick up guns and join armed groups to defend themselves and their communities.

“There are pockets of resistance in the West Bank, whether it is student movements or armed groups, who are either connected to Hamas or backed by Iran, and Israel plays up the notion that these groups are affiliated with Hamas or are Iranian-backed, because it fits into the notion of what constitutes legitimate violence”, she said.

In my opinion, if it is discovered that the majority of these fighters are just disenfranchised and disillusioned Fatah constituents, that does not make a pretty picture for the Western narrative.

Among the Palestinian factions, Fatah is the largest and most powerful, and it controls the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs the majority of the West Bank, as well as some Gaza Strip areas.

Are there any settlers involved in this process?

It is true, and it happens a lot.

There is a consistent pattern of Jewish settlers attacking entire Palestinian villages throughout the West Bank, as they try to expand the area under their control in the area. As many as hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in illegal settlements in the West Bank, many of these Israelis believe the land is torn asunder by Palestinians and that they are obstacles to the reunification of the region with Israel.

There are many settlers who regularly attack Palestinians that have no prior justification for doing so, but when their own settlements have been attacked, they can be particularly aggressive in their raids on Palestinians.

It was in April of this year that an Israeli teen was found dead in an occupied West Bank settlement, an incident which sparked a wave of vigilante attacks and armed attacks by illegal settlers. Several Palestinians were injured as a result of the violence, which resulted in the death of a 17-year-old Palestinian boy.

There is always an army on hand to protect the settlers,” Abdullah said.

According to him, the security forces and settlers use the concept of ‘terrorism’ as a justification for attacking Palestinians, displacing them from their villages and stealing their property.

What’s wrong with the PA’s protection?

The government is not interested in upturning the 1993 Oslo Accord for the same reason.

This agreement led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was born from the handshake between Yasser Arafat at the time, and Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, on the lawn of the White House in Washington D.C.

In spite of the fact that the accords were supposed to pave the way for a Palestinian state, they have failed to do so, instead relying on the PA and Israel to maintain close security coordination.

The accords were also viewed by Tahani as effectively shackling the PA in its activities. The West Bank Authority has been accused of being incapable of protecting its constituents from Israeli soldiers and combative settlers who violate large swathes of its jurisdiction in large parts of the West Bank as a governing body.

As Tahani told Al Jazeera, “The Palestinian Authority does not even make arrests when it comes to Israeli settlers or soldiers,” he says, not even retaliating against them. Sadly, the Palestinian Authority doesn’t have any jurisdiction over Israelis…so what should [Palestinians] do in this situation? ”.

Timenews1 provided that news.