In a damning and critical report on the conduct of Israeli occupation forces, The New York Times revealed on Sunday that residents of the occupied West Bank say that Israeli occupation forces are adopting tactics similar to those they used and are using in Gaza, including airstrikes and using Palestinians as human shields.

The newspaper quotes Nasser Damaj, a Palestinian citizen from Jenin, as saying that Israeli soldiers grabbed his arms from each side, led him through the streets to the ruined structure of a mosque, and then to an ancient underground cave, and that when they ordered him to come down, he realized why: he was being used as a human shield.

“They wanted me to explore what was downstairs, to protect them,” Damaj said.

He said he protested, but the three soldiers and their commander, with their assault rifles pointed at him, forced him to investigate what the Israeli occupation forces later called an "underground combat facility."

“Be careful,” Damaj recalls the commander telling him as the soldiers handed him a drone so they could survey the cave. “Don’t break it. It’s expensive.”

“This incident, confirmed by eyewitnesses, did not occur in Gaza, where Israeli forces illegally forced Palestinians to perform dangerous tasks to avoid risking the lives of Israeli soldiers in the war there,” the paper says. “It occurred in the occupied West Bank, where residents say Israeli forces are adopting tactics similar to those deployed in Gaza, including airstrikes and using Palestinians as human shields.”

The 10-day Israeli raid on Damaj's hometown of Jenin was part of a broader military offensive on Palestinian territory that began in late August as part of an intensification of Israeli attacks in the West Bank.

Before October 7, 2023, Israeli airstrikes on the West Bank were relatively rare, experts said, with only a handful of confirmed cases. But during the raids in Jenin and other Palestinian areas that began in August, the Israeli military acknowledged carrying out about 50 airstrikes in the occupied West Bank.

More than 180 people have been killed in airstrikes on the Jenin area in the past year, including dozens of children, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq. The Israeli military has declined to provide a death toll, but has claimed that “98 percent” of those killed in airstrikes were “involved in terrorist activities,” the newspaper reported.

The strikes have caused extensive damage to roads, power grids, water and sewage lines. Local and international aid workers and the United Nations say Israel has obstructed their relief efforts, while videos verified by The New York Times show Israeli bulldozers blocking emergency vehicles. Rather than calling them raids, residents, aid workers and some experts have likened what is happening in the West Bank to war.

The newspaper referred in its report to the continuous sound of Israeli drones conducting surveillance and air strikes.

"It's the Gaza of the northern West Bank," Nadav Weiman, director of Breaking the Silence, a human rights group made up of former Israeli soldiers who say they are collecting testimonies from soldiers who took part in raids in Jenin and Tulkarm, is quoted in the report as saying.

The overall military approach used in the West Bank was known as the “Dahiya Doctrine,” said Fayman, who heads Breaking the Silence, an advocacy group for former Israeli soldiers, referring to Israel’s destruction of the Dahiya, a group of neighborhoods in southern Beirut that were a stronghold of Hezbollah, during its 34-day war in Lebanon in 2006. The tactic creates disproportionate damage to civilian infrastructure and is intended to try to cause so much damage and destruction that civilians will turn against the armed groups in their areas, he said.

Raids on Palestinian areas in the West Bank have become commonplace since the October 7 attacks last year. In addition to armed drones, bulldozers have torn up roads, which the Israeli military says are meant to uncover explosives buried under the pavement.

But the strikes in the past few months have been among the most comprehensive and deadly in the West Bank in two decades.

The Israeli military described the raids as a "counter-terrorism operation" to eliminate Palestinian militant groups and combat increasing attacks against Israelis, including shootings and attempted car bombings. The violence has been accompanied by an increase in attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers who often operate with impunity.

The Israeli military claims that in its operations in the West Bank it has killed or detained dozens of fighters, seized explosives and destroyed command and control centers. It added that it carried out airstrikes "in situations where arrests could not be made due to a real threat to the forces."

The military’s actions in the West Bank have long been shrouded in secrecy, but experts said Israel has largely refrained from airstrikes in the area since the end of the second intifada, nearly 20 years ago. Israel has occasionally used attack helicopters in select operations, but experts said that has happened in only a handful of instances they know of over the two decades.

The newspaper says that the Israeli army’s deployment of armed drones was extremely rare, but it is a phenomenon that began to appear in 2022, but only a few cases were confirmed before October 7, 2023. Salim al-Saadi, a member of the local neighborhood council in Jenin, told the newspaper: “We call Jenin a small Gaza.”

Since then, the Israeli occupation forces have carried out dozens of strikes in the northern areas of the West Bank, largely concentrated in the cities and towns of Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus and Tubas.

On visits to Jenin, Tubas and Tulkarm, The Times came across multiple accounts of Palestinians forced to perform potentially dangerous tasks for Israeli soldiers. The devastation caused by the explosions was widespread, leaving families struggling.

On August 26, Israeli forces carried out an airstrike in the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm on what they described as an “operations room,” killing five people, including 15-year-old Adnan Jaber, whom Israel accused of manufacturing explosives.

"The Israeli news immediately announced that they had killed a terrorist," said Adnan's father, Ayser Jaber. "But he was a little boy, not a terrorist."

Jaber said his son was taking lessons to become a barber: “He had about two weeks left, then he was killed.”

On August 28, an Israeli aircraft bombed what the military described as militants in an alley in the Far’a refugee camp. Residents said a house was also hit, killing two brothers, Mohammed Masoud Mohammed Naja, 17, and Murad Masoud Mohammed Naja, 13, and seriously wounding a third brother and the boys’ father.

In September, the Israeli military said its aircraft had struck "terrorists who threw explosives and fired at security forces" and "eliminated" a person "armed with an explosive device."

Residents said Israeli soldiers shot Majed Fida Abu Zeina, 17, opened fire on ambulances that tried to rescue him, and eventually used a bulldozer to dump his body outside the camp.

"The soldiers do whatever they want," said his mother, Amal Abu Zeina.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, the raids in Jenin and other cities over a 10-day period killed 51 people. Seven children were among the dead, according to the United Nations. On the morning of August 28, as Israeli forces launched their strikes on Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz posted on social media: “We must deal with the threat in the same way we deal with the terror infrastructure in Gaza.” Human rights groups and aid workers warn of what they call dangerous similarities.

“We all feel that the Gaza pattern, the modus operandi, is now being applied to the West Bank, and that is very worrying,” Allegra Pacheco, who leads a consortium of Western-backed aid organizations in the West Bank, was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “The current Israeli government’s goals in the West Bank are to force Palestinians out of targeted areas using the same kind of massive force, weapons and destruction as in Gaza.”

UN officials have warned of “lethal warfare tactics” in the West Bank, and tried to enter Jenin to conduct an assessment, but were denied entry by Israeli authorities, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in September.