As war rages in Gaza, the West Bank has been transformed

By Gideon Levy and Alex Levac

Over the past six months, the occupied West Bank has undergone a metamorphosis. War broke out in the Gaza Strip, but the “punishment” inflicted on the West Bank for the events of October 7 was not long in coming. You don’t need to have a particularly keen eye to notice the revolution on the ground. It doesn't take much insight to understand that Israel and the settler communities have exploited the dark nightmare of war to alter the situation in the West Bank: to intensify the occupation, to expand the perimeters of settlements, to remove final limits in interactions with the Palestinian population and let them run wild, all far from the eyes of the world.

It is impossible to overestimate the depth and scale of the changes that have taken place in the West Bank in recent months. Most, if not all, of them are probably irreversible. The combination of a war waged against the Palestinians, albeit at a distance from the West Bank, a radical right-wing extremist government in which settlers occupy positions that give them decisive power over the occupation, the rise in power of armed and uniformed settler militias and the general indifference of public opinion has led to a new situation. In these circumstances, the vulnerability of the Palestinians only adds fuel to the fire. This massive fire rages, but everyone's gaze is directed far away, towards the killing fields between Gaza City and Rafah. However, perhaps even more than in Gaza, the repercussions of the revolution taking place in the West Bank will not be limited to this territory. They will infiltrate deeply into every corner of Israel.

Some changes are immediately visible to anyone traveling in the West Bank, others are less so. The West Bank is closed and besieged. Virtually every Palestinian town and village has some or even several access roads that have been closed. Indeed, most of the barred entrance doors, omnipresent in these localities, were locked by the Israeli Defense Forces as of October 8. With such a system of gates and other barriers, a total lockdown of the West Bank can be implemented in a short time. Result? Life has become intolerable for three million people. It's not just the time lost in prolonged travel from one place to another; it is also the fact that we never know if we will arrive at our destination following the painful waits and the indignities suffered at checkpoints.

In addition to the locked gates, there were dozens of ad hoc roadblocks erected by soldiers. They appear and disappear suddenly. When they are in place, traffic becomes a nightmare for any Palestinian who encounters them. The West Bank has gone back almost a quarter of a century, to the time of the second Intifada, but this time without the Intifada.

A friend whose 105-year-old father died this week – and who lives in a village near Tul Karm – has told family and friends not to bother with the custom of paying a visit from condolences, because traffic in and out of this city is from nightmare to impossibility due to the abundance of local checkpoints. Instead, he went to Ramallah for a day to receive visitors.

Some 150,000 Palestinians from the West Bank who were legally allowed to work in Israel have been barred from doing so since October 8. The consequences for the Palestinian (and Israeli) economy are obvious. Likewise, the consequences of the forced inactivity of tens of thousands of people are equally clear and predictable. Another source of income for many Palestinians – the olive harvest – has also been blocked by the war. The olive groves adjacent to the settlements are now completely inaccessible to Palestinians, not even through “coordination” with Israeli authorities, as was possible in previous years. The result: about a third of the crop remained on the trees at a time when most other income disappeared.

What is the direct link between the olive harvest in the West Bank and the war in Gaza? There is none, but the war apparently provided a great opportunity for the settlers and their partners in government. An opportunity that the West Bank settlers were only waiting for to mistreat Palestinians with impunity, make their lives intolerable, dispossess them and humiliate them until they flee or are driven out. Perhaps this is why the settlers seemed particularly joyful this week, on the occasion of the [March 23-24] holiday of Purim?

***

One of the most serious phenomena concerns Israeli authorities who prevent Palestinians from accessing and working on their land, sometimes in anticipation of expulsion. Dror Etkes of the non-governmental organization Kerem Navot, which monitors Israel's land policies in the occupied territories, estimates that Palestinians have been deprived of at least 100,000 dunams (25,000 acres, about 101 km2) of pasture land. and agricultural land since October 7 – and this is a conservative estimate, he adds.

At the same time, a silent transfer of population continues, little by little but systematically, in particular for the weakest inhabitants – those from pastoral communities, mainly – at the two poles of the West Bank: the Jordan Valley in the north and the South Hebron Hills on the other side. Dror Etkes, who has unrivaled knowledge of the settlements, notes that residents of 24 communities have been evicted or forced from their homes and lands due to settler terror since October 7. All residents of 18 of them fled, while in the other six, only a few residents felt forced to leave. A population transfer, albeit clandestine.

Several months ago, an article reported on one of these abandoned enclaves: It was heartbreaking to see the residents packing and loading their meager possessions into a few old pickup trucks, including their livestock, leaving, probably forever, the land on which they and their ancestors were born, heading towards an unknown world.

Another criminal act was revealed when we documented the confiscation of 700 sheep from their owners, carried out by settler-soldiers on the orders of the Jordan Valley Regional Council which technically has no coercive authority over local Palestinian residents . The group of poverty-stricken shepherds were forced to immediately pay 150,000 shekels (about $41,000) to get their flock back – a huge sum that went straight into the settlers' coffers. A few weeks later, Hagar Shezaf in Haaretz reported that the legal adviser to the Civil Administration – the local arm of the Israeli military government – declared the settlers' heinous and despicable action illegal.

The fact that hordes of settlers have donned IDF uniforms appears to have only increased their violence. In recent months, the wartime "emergency security squads" created in virtually every colony and outpost, as well as the mobilization of thousands of reservist settlers following a decree of emergency, apparently gave them the right to intensify their acts of violence against the Palestinians as lords of the land, ostensible representatives of the law and the state. Many Palestinians have described incidents in which settlers launched pogroms, arriving suddenly in uniform in off-road vehicles, sowing violence, making residents feel even more powerless. There is apparently no one to protect the pastoral communities, except for a handful of Israeli volunteers seeking justice.

Dror Etkes mentions at least 11 outposts established without permits in the past six months, including two on land that Palestinian herders fled or were expelled from. This week, he discovered another. The anti-occupation news site Local Call reported that ten days after beginning to build an outpost nearby, settlers frightened residents of one of these communities, who fled en masse.

An outpost like this is sometimes nothing more than a farm – a shack housing a few violent gangsters whose sole purpose is to scare away Palestinians. Recently, their task has been made even easier. An interim report by Dror Etkes, to mark six months of war, notes at least ten roads, a number of large fenced areas of land and even roadblocks, all created by settlers without permission. Additionally, the Israeli government declared 2,640 dunams near the urban settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim, and 8,160 dunams in the town of Aqraba, near Nablus [1].

***

Hundreds of Palestinians, mainly children and adolescents, have been killed, most for no apparent reason. Soldiers deployed to the West Bank appear to be more trigger-happy than before. Perhaps they are envious of their comrades in Gaza, who are apparently allowed to kill people indiscriminately? Do the inhabitants of the West Bank want to behave like them, to take revenge on the Palestinians as such, because of the horrors of October 7? Are the IDF and border police turning a blind eye to the violent events taking place in the West Bank more than before?

The data we present below speaks for itself. The hand on the trigger is light and IDF commanders and the Israeli public are apathetic. But anyone who thinks that this seemingly sanctioned mass violence and the deaths will remain within the borders of the West Bank may be mistaken.

When it comes to assassination cases, many appear unprovoked and criminal. Already on October 8, soldiers killed Yasser Kasba, 18, who the army said had thrown a Molotov cocktail – no one was injured and he did not endanger anyone – at the Qalandiyah checkpoint , near Jerusalem. The shooting was broadcast live by the US Arabic-language satellite television channel Alhurra. Kasba was shot in the back as he fled.

This incident opened the floodgates. Over the next two months, 31 people were killed in the Ramallah area, including a mother of seven, in front of her husband and children; 42 people were killed in the Tulkarem region in the first six weeks, including a 63-year-old mentally disabled man and a 15-year-old who was shot twice in the head. Through the end of February, a total of 396 people were killed in the West Bank, including 100 children and teenagers – the vast majority by soldiers – according to carefully verified data collected by the Israeli rights organization. 'B'Tselem man. More than half of the minors, B’Tselem notes, were killed in circumstances that did not justify the use of lethal weapons.

Young West Bank residents begin writing documents that resemble their final wishes. We reported on one last month – that of Abdel Rahman Hamad, almost 18, whose dream was to study medicine (Haaretz, February 17, 2024). He left detailed instructions on what to do if he was killed: “Don’t put me in the refrigerator in the morgue,” he wrote. “Bury me immediately. Lay me on my bed, cover me with blankets and carry me to burial. When you take me down to the grave, stay by my side. But don't be sad. Remember only the beautiful moments you have of me and do not lament over my fate.

There were other incidents as well. Two young people of American nationality were killed in the space of a few weeks. The young man who was knocked off his bike by a military jeep and shot at point blank range. The soldiers and settlers who, probably together, fired around ten bullets at a vehicle carrying two young people on an excursion, killing one of them. The 32 bullets that struck a car carrying a family – during security forces' pursuit of a vehicle that had passed through a checkpoint without stopping – killing a 5-year-old girl, whose body was not was returned to the family only 10 days later.

A missile killed seven young men, including four brothers, outside Jenin. Another missile, fired at the center of the Nur Shams refugee camp [Tulkarem governorate], killed six people and injured seven, who were denied medical treatment for more than an hour. Two young people with special needs were also affected, one fatally. Three brothers returning home from picking akoub, edible thistle-like plants, on the Israeli side of the separation barrier were victims of a manhunt during which soldiers killed two of the brothers , injured the third, then arrested a fourth who arrived on the scene later. Equally shocking is the incident of the 10-year-old boy who was shot in his father's pickup truck and fell into the arms of his dead 7-year-old brother.

And a word about the mass arrests, the exact scale of which we don’t even know. In the first two months of the war, 4,785 people were arrested in the West Bank, according to the United Nations. One of them, Munther Amira, was an administrative detainee (incarcerated without trial), whose story, marked by torture, beatings and humiliation at Ofer prison, the Israeli “Guantanamo”, was was told here last week [see the March 23 translation of this article on this site]. Even this cruel prison looked very different before the war broke out in Gaza. (Article published by Haaretz on March 30, 2024; editorial translation A l’Encontre)

______

[1] On March 22, during the visit of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced this major land seizure – the largest since the so-called Oslo peace of 1993 – and described it as “a 'a spectacular and important new measure for Jewish colonization' in the West Bank. (Ed.)