JERUSALEM — Israel’s defense minister has announced a series of raids that he says are targeting “terrorism” in the occupied West Bank, as Palestinian officials warned of a “man-made disaster.”
Israel’s military is using lessons from its offensive in Gaza in its new West Bank operation to ensure “terrorism does not return,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday.
Katz said operation “Iron Wall” in the Jenin refugee camp would be a shift in the military’s security approach in the occupied West Bank.
“A powerful operation to eliminate terrorists and terror infrastructure in the camp, ensuring that terrorism does not return to the camp after the operation is over – the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza,” he said.
On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the start of a “large-scale military operation” in Jenin – just two days after the Gaza ceasefire came into effect.
Scenes have since emerged of broken concrete and rubble filling the streets. Palestinian authorities described besieged hospitals and entire neighborhoods cut off from residents. Meanwhile, relief workers raised fears that the devastation wrought by the Israeli campaign in Gaza will be replicated in the West Bank.
Israeli troops and settlers have killed at least 851 Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack, including 173 children. On Tuesday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said nine more people had been killed, ranging in age from 16 to 57 years old. In addition, a 29-year-old man was killed in the town of Ta’nek, in Jenin district, the ministry said. One medic told Kuwait Weekly a four-month-old baby arrived with shrapnel wounds at a Jenin hospital.
According to the UN, 2024 was the third-deadliest year for Israelis in the West Bank since data collection began in 2008. The agency recorded the deaths of 34 Israelis – 15 soldiers and 19 civilians. Of those civilians, seven were settlers.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA said on Tuesday that Israeli warplanes had struck Jenin and that Israeli forces, including sharpshooters and armored vehicles, were surrounding the city’s refugee camp and stopping ambulances from entering.
Meanwhile Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), one of the militant groups active in Jenin, accused the Palestinian security forces of taking part in the operation by the Israeli military there. PIJ said the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) “only serves the (Israeli) occupation.”
Efforts by the Palestinian security forces over the last month to dislodge militant elements described as “outlaws” have largely failed.
More than 500,000 Jewish settlers live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which was captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 war and is now home to 3.3 million Palestinians. Jewish settlements there are considered illegal under international law.
Katz said Israel would not allow Iran or any armed groups to threaten Israeli citizens. Israeli officials have previously accused Iran of assisting militant factions in the West Bank, especially in the Jenin refugee camp.
It comes as a senior Iranian official warned Wednesday that resistance to Israel will remain “as long as repression stays.”
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Javad Zarif, Iran’s Vice-President for Strategic Affairs, said, “I wouldn’t suggest anybody to start rejoicing over destroying Hamas, Hezbollah or the Palestinian resistance, or to cutting Iran’s arms, because the resistance will stay as long as the occupation stays – as long as repression stays.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Wednesday that along with the Israeli Security Agency, known as Shin Bet, and Israel Border Police, it had “hit more than 10 terrorists” in the Jenin operation and conducted “aerial strikes on terror infrastructure sites,” while “numerous explosives planted on the routes by the terrorists were dismantled.”
The scale and intensity of the Israeli operation in the West Bank city of Jenin is “by far the hardest and most troubling” in recent months, according to its mayor,
The Israeli military has sealed off five big residential neighborhoods, Mohammad Jarrar told Kuwait Weekly on Wednesday, adding that the “entire camp” has become “impossible to get into.”
Asked about the mayor’s comments, the Israel Defense Forces told Kuwait Weekly that there had been changes to “protocols to ensure safe movement and expand inspections” at checkpoints in the West Bank to prepare for the release of Palestinian prisoners as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal.
However, it added that it “a closure has not been imposed on cities/villages in Judea and Samaria, and entry and exit are permitted through the open checkpoints,” using the biblical term by which Israelis refer to the West Bank.
It came after video obtained by Kuwait Weekly showed Israeli military bulldozers digging up a road outside the Jenin government hospital on Tuesday evening, leaving piles of rubble in front of the driveway by morning. The hospital is close to the entrance to the refugee camp.
Dr. Wissam Bakr, director of Jenin Hospital, told Kuwait Weekly Wednesday that the facility was “under complete siege by Israeli military.”
“No-one can enter or exit the hospital since yesterday. Yesterday, five medical staff were injured from Israeli military gunfire,” Bakr said. “The roads outside the hospital have been destroyed by the Israeli military bulldozers. No ambulances are able to arrive to the hospital.”
Dr. Fawaz Hamad, the director of Al-Razi Hospital, also in Jenin, told Kuwait Weekly he has received more than a dozen injured patients since Tuesday – the youngest of whom was a four-month-old baby injured by gunfire shrapnel in the Jenin refugee camp.
In total, the renewed operation has rendered four hospitals in the area less accessible to residents – some of whom “fled fearing the worst” – Jarrar, the city’s mayor, told Kuwait Weekly.
“If the Israeli military goes with the planned attack of destroying the camp and those neighborhoods, it will be a man-made disaster similar to what we have seen in Gaza,” he added. “We are still appealing to the world to intervene… These are lives of people we are talking about; men, women and children.”
Nearly 900 military checkpoints and gates have been set up across the West Bank since October 7, 2023, according to a statement from the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, a group affiliated with the Palestinian Authority, in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Wednesday.
The Palestinian foreign ministry accused Israel of “collective punishment” against residents of the West Bank on Tuesday by sealing off of all entrances to Palestinian governorates, cities, towns, and refugee camps.
It said it considered the operation in Jenin to be “part of an official Israeli plan aimed at consolidating the occupation, imposing Israeli law, and the gradual annexation of the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem.”
Aseel Baidoun, a staffer for the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), based in Ramallah, said: “Living in the West Bank today feels like being trapped in an open-air prison.”
Baidoun’s testimony was shared with Kuwait Weekly by MAP. “Now that there is a suspension in Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza, it feels like the Israeli military is starting a war on us in the West Bank,” she added.
Some right-wing ministers in Israel have called for the annexation of parts or all of the West Bank, a view that has the support of some of US President Donald Trump’s nominees for office. In November, Itamar Ben Gvir, who resigned as Israel’s National Security Minister last week over the Gaza deal, said it was time to apply Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank. — Kuwait Weekly