“Shield of Jerusalem”… The Decisive Battle in the Heart of Jerusalem

With the war of extermination in Gaza moving into a new phase, less intense in bombing and more focused on siege, delegitimizing the resistance, and pushing Palestinian society towards internal conflict, the Israeli occupation has returned to dedicate itself more broadly to the open decisive front in Jerusalem, and alongside it, the annexation and displacement front in the West Bank. These two fronts will lead the occupation's strategy in the coming period, even if interrupted by a temporary escalation on the Lebanese, Syrian, or even Iranian fronts.

One of the most prominent goals of this path is to reach “final borders” for Jerusalem, by annexing the largest possible number of settlements and settlers, and swallowing the widest possible geographical area, in exchange for excluding the largest number of Jerusalemites from the city's demographic and political equation.

Within this context, the occupation launched a series of operations it called “Shield of Jerusalem.” Its first episodes began on December 23, 2025, targeting Kafr Aqab and Qalandia refugee camp, which were separated from Jerusalem by the wall. This was followed by a second episode on January 12, 2026, against Shuafat refugee camp, which lasted several days, and came as a prelude to the demolition of the UNRWA headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood on January 20 of the same year.

On January 26, 2026, the occupation launched the third episode of these campaigns, directing its operations to the Qalandia Airport neighborhood inside the wall, and to the towns of Kafr Aqab and Hizma outside it. In just two days, more than forty properties were demolished in the vicinity of Qalandia Airport, and more than seventy properties in the three areas combined, according to the Jerusalem Governorate. This number is equivalent to approximately 28% of the total demolition operations witnessed in Jerusalem throughout 2025, which was already the most destructive year since the occupation of the city in 1967.

In short, we are facing a return of the center of the decisive battle to Jerusalem, at an unprecedented pace, which necessitates restoring the will to defend it in all possible forms, foremost among them restoring popular action in the post-extermination phase. Otherwise, the result will be more Zionist encroachment heading towards final liquidation.

As for the ongoing aggression in northern Jerusalem, it can be read as follows:

First, it constitutes a prelude to building a large settlement on the ruins of the Jerusalem International Airport in Qalandia, which was opened during the Jordanian era, and its lands, amounting to about 1200 dunams, are still registered in the name of the Jordanian State Treasury. Despite the Wadi Araba agreement, the occupation treats this land as its heir and plans to establish about 9400 settlement units, integrated with the “Atarot” industrial zone to the south, and with the Qalandia checkpoint to the north, thereby consecrating the separation of Kafr Aqab and Qalandia camp from Jerusalem not only by the wall, but by overlapping residential, industrial, and security layers.

Second, for years, the occupation deliberately left Kafr Aqab as the sole outlet for Jerusalemite construction, overlooking urban chaos, with the aim of turning it into a population magnet before its final separation from Jerusalem, thereby excluding the largest possible number of Jerusalemites. Thus, the town became a severely overcrowded area, with weak infrastructure, immersed in daily friction, to the extent that the people of Jerusalem began to call it sarcastic names like “Kafr Ajab” (Wonder Village) and “Kafr Ghadab” (Anger Village). Today, the occupation completes this path with security campaigns and selective demolitions that “re-engineer” the place according to its needs.

Third, the occupation is moving towards consecrating the final separation of Hizma from Jerusalem, and pushing it to become an isolated rural area without a civilian center. If this policy is placed alongside what is happening in Khan al-Ahmar and the Jerusalem wilderness, and in Mikhmas and the surrounding Bedouin communities, and along the eastern extension of Ramallah, the picture suggests not only geographical isolation, but a broader exclusionary vision aimed at emptying the eastern extension of Jerusalem and Ramallah, and linking it to the project of Judaizing the Jordan Valley and the areas leading to it, and pushing Palestinians towards urban centers that can in turn be eliminated later.

In conclusion, Jerusalem has always been the mirror of the conflict with the Zionist project, and from it, intifadas and revolutions began. What its realities today tell us is that what comes after the war of extermination is not a calming, but a transition of the war from one form to another, and from one front to another. The war of liquidation is no longer content with slow progress, and it will not stop except with one of two ends: either it is met with an equivalent force that defeats the occupation's bet on its continuation, or it is left to reach its catastrophic goal, God forbid.

Under the weight of extermination, part of the Arab and Palestinian consciousness returned to raising the question of “Al-Aqsa Flood” and its utility, and even blaming the resistance for the crime. However, the real question, before and after the flood, is the same: How do we prevent liquidation? And how do we thwart the ongoing project of elimination with American partnership and official Arab and Islamic complicity? The flood, like the stations that preceded it, was not a cause for liquidation, but an attempt to disrupt it, and it succeeded temporarily. The challenge today is how to continue the struggle until despair is instilled in the consciousness of the Zionist project and its supporters of the possibility of achieving this decisive outcome, because overcoming this threshold alone is sufficient to move the conflict to an unprecedented stage, a stage in which the occupation loses its belief in the possibility of achieving its ideological ceilings.