How growing Israeli violence in the West Bank is fuelling Palestinian resistance

On 5 August, the Israeli military began a large-scale attack on Jenin, namely the Jenin refugee camp, which continued for more than 24 hours.

At least ten Palestinians were killed in the attack, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. In addition to Jenin, another military operation was launched against Tubas, 22 km southeast of the city, in which Israeli military forces killed another four Palestinians, including one minor.

Just three days before, on 3 August, the Israeli military carried out a large-scale attack on Tulkarem refugee camp, 50 km southeast of Jenin, in which at least nine Palestinians were killed. With the attack on Jenin, the number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank in just the first week of August reached 26. 

Amid concerns over a looming regional war, Palestinians are already facing an expansion and intensification of Israel’s military operations in the West Bank. According to UNRWA, the situation in the West Bank is deteriorating daily in what the organisation has dubbed Israel’s “silent war” against Palestinians.

Since October 2023, and in the span of 10 months, the Israeli military has killed more than 634 Palestinians in the West Bank, with at least a fifth being children and minors. This is the highest rate of Palestinians killed as a result of Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank since the UN began documenting fatalities in 2005. 

Israeli military operations and resistance in the West Bank

“When Israel is done with Gaza, they will come to the West Bank to do the same exact thing,” Abu Al-Awda, a defector from the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) security forces and a fighter with the Jenin Brigades told The New Arab back in October 2023, just two weeks into the Israeli military aggression on Gaza.

As Abu Al-Awda predicted, since November of last year, Israeli military operations in the West Bank have been rising at an “alarming” rate according to UN agencies. 

However, this intensification of violence in the West Bank is neither new nor abrupt. For the past three years, Palestinian cities and towns in the West Bank have been facing unprecedented rates of state-backed settler violence, military-led offensives which include extrajudicial assassinations, and an alarming escalation of Israel’s practice of detaining Palestinians without trial or charge, including children and minors.

Across the past three years, the Israeli military continued to break records of killing Palestinians in the West Bank, with close to zero international accountability. Beyond settler attacks, which include lynch mobs and arson attacks burning families inside their own homes, the Israeli military, and police, intensified field executions of civilian Palestinians at point-blank range.

In that context, armed confrontation against the Israeli military continued to grow, specifically in areas north of the West Bank, namely Nablus, Jenin, and later in Tulkarem and Tubas.

Like Gaza, the Israeli military is now escalating the use of drone warfare in the West Bank, including the Hermes 450 drone. While the Israeli military claims to have been targeting Palestinian resistance groups, which the army refers to as “terrorist cells,” the overwhelming majority of those killed are non-combatants, with the destruction inflicted by the military overwhelmingly directed against civilian infrastructure. 

“This is part of the Israeli policy,” Abu Jury, a combatant with the Tulkarem Brigade, told The New Arab just a day after the large-scale assault in which nine were killed with parts of the camp reduced to rubble. “They target civilians as a way to pressure combatants, look at Tulkarem, before the bombs we had nearly two weeks of no water,” he explained.

From Gaza to the West Bank: Different intensity, same strategy

For years, Palestinians in the West Bank have been heading along a gradual trajectory to becoming as deprived as Gaza. 

In addition to the increase in overt violence from Israeli settlers and the military, Israeli policymakers have been facilitating the deprivation of Palestinians from essential life-sustaining resources such as water, specifically, drinkable water, electricity, and freedom of movement.

With war jets hovering above, and the risk of a targeted assassination at any moment, Abu El-Izz, a senior PIJ fighter with the Jenin Brigades, explained to The New Arab why he joined the armed resistance, first in secret and then as part of the brigade. 

“When I was arrested by the Israeli military [in 2002], the interrogator told me ‘you come out of your mother’s womb as a vandal’,” he said. Recalling his imprisonment at just 15 years old, now 37, Abu El-Izz remembered his answer to his interrogator. “I told him, don’t you understand that it is your practices that are warranting confrontation?” he told TNA.

“Look, in the end, we are students of freedom,” Abu El-Izz says. “Whoever stands with us from all over the world, no matter what their background is, we welcome them. Resistance, armed or unarmed, is welcome, as long as the goal is seeking freedom,” he emphasised. 

According to Abu El-Izz, “it is dangerous to reduce what is happening to Palestinians to the timeline of 7 October”. The senior fighter deterred any inquiry on whether there are fears that what is happening in Gaza will come to the West Bank.

“It’s reductionist and naive to suggest that Israel’s war against us began last fall. They have been waging a war against us and every year they escalated their attacks.”

Isolation and embedding fear: Beyond carpet bombing 

Similar to Abu El-Izz, 51-year-old Abu El-Azmi emphasises that Israel’s “silent war” on Palestinians, specifically in the West Bank, has been waged in different ways and forms.

A leftist, Abu El-Azmi considers himself an ally of the Jenin Brigades despite not being a combatant. “It is not just the bombs,” Abu El-Azmi, 51-years-old, told The New Arab. “We are chained by a million chains, and they’re all illusions,” Abu Al-Azmi explained. “We must break these chains.”

The imbalance of power between Israel’s military and Palestinian armed groups is so stark that it is nearly incomprehensible how Palestinians can continue resisting with outdated M16 rifles, Molotov cocktails, rocks, and homemade IEDs against some of the most advanced warfare technology and international military aid available to Israel. 

In Gaza, there is a more structured and organised fashion to armed resistance operations carried out by the military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, and the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Al-Quds Brigades. Unlike Gaza, however, in the West Bank, resistance takes a less structured form mostly arising through individual efforts operating from specific areas like the Jenin refugee camp, Tulkarem refugee camp, Nablus, and Tubas. 

Rather than operating from a specific political affiliation, Palestinian brigades in the West Bank are motivated by individual impetus. “You have to purchase your own gun, learn how to use it, and then engage in resistance,” Abu El-Izz explained.

This difference in structure is largely due to Israeli surveillance and access to Palestinians in the West Bank in a way that is different from Gaza. While Gaza was placed under a military-imposed siege for nearly two decades, in which Palestinians only knew Israel from the sound of drones and bombs falling from the sky, Palestinians in the West Bank face direct contact with the Israeli military due to the presence of illegal settlements. The presence of settlements is also what stymies Israel’s capacity to carpet bomb the West Bank to obliteration. 

With that, heavy surveillance and the mass detainment of Palestinians have become a common Israeli practice in the West Bank. “It is a psychological war against us before the bombs,” Abu El-Azmi outlined. “They first engrain fear amongst the community so we are afraid of each other before we are afraid of the Israeli military,” he said. 

Abu El-Azmi is well-liked by his community and is known in the Jenin Brigades as a man who does not hesitate to give refuge and extend support to fighters who are wanted by Israel, making him a target for assassination. 

“Do you recall about a few weeks ago when the Israeli military tied an injured man to the military jeep as a human shield,” one of the fighters with the brigade says, pointing at Abu Azmi. “The target of that invasion was Abu Azmi.” 

This practice of not just targeting politically active Palestinians and combatants, but anyone who showcases sympathy and relations with them has been a common protocol of “deterrence” by Israel. 

The same strategy is used against regional actors that intervened or showed support for the cause of Palestinian liberation. The Dahiya doctrine used in Lebanon in 2006 – which involved the use of disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure - is emblematic of this.

"When Israel is done with Gaza, they will come to the West Bank to do the same exact thing"

Israel's attempt to re-frame the context

For decades, Palestinians have faced a strict policy of isolation and separation engineered by the Israeli security apparatus. 

While Palestinian armed resistance has been growing in the West Bank for the last three years, “what October 7th did was force everyone to look in this direction”, according to Abu El-Izz.

“Everything that is happening today is just a part of what has been happening in Palestine since 1948, you cannot separate,” he said.

According to the senior fighter, Israel's provocation of a regional war is precisely due to this shift in perception. “It is without a doubt that international efforts, whether at a regional level or otherwise, the demand is to stop the war and re-focus Palestine as a liberation cause,” Abu El-Izz told The New Arab. 

“It is not just local and regional resistance,” he added. “You need to also look at the students worldwide who braved speaking out against Israel while centring the point of liberation.” 

Perhaps this is why Israel’s intentional provocation of regional powers while simultaneously refusing to demonstrate any efforts to address the issue of Palestinian liberation is seen as an effort to stymie the Palestinian pursuit of freedom. “Of course, the Israeli occupation rejects this idea [of liberation] and wants to continue its violations, its occupation, and aggression across all Palestinian lands,” Abu El-Izz said. 

Following the targeted assassination of Hamas’ political representative Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July, which came just hours after the killing of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut on 30 July, most diplomatic talks have shifted to concerns over a regional war.

“Israel’s barbarism is seeking to expand its war regionally in order to facilitate our continued slaughter,” Abu El-Izz explained. “This is why you cannot ignore and not mention Palestinian liberation in assessing all ongoing developments.”

While regional powers are the only actors that provide any semblance of leverage - offering what little hope there is in stopping Israeli practices of ethnic cleansing - divorcing regional confrontation from Palestinian liberation obscures a more fundamental point.

For Palestinians, Israel’s explicit goal of driving them out of their lands either by death or escape will persist, whether there is a regional war or not. 

Mariam Barghouti is a writer and journalist based in the West Bank. She has been covering the region as a reporter and analyst for ten years, served as the senior Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss, and is a member of the Marie Colvin Journalist Network. 

Follow her on X: @MariamBarghouti​