On Wednesday, August 28th, the state of Israel carried out major attacks in the West Bank, the worst in 20 years. Israeli military forces launched airstrikes, tore up streets, bulldozed homes, attacked with drones, and sent battalions of soldiers into the Palestinian cities of Jenin and Tulkarem in the northern West Bank. At least ten people were killed in the raids.
Israeli military and government spokesmen claim that the West Bank has become a site of military activity by Hamas, the ruling party of Gaza, with the help of Iran. According to far-right Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, the purpose of the attack was to stop Iran and Hamas from establishing an “Eastern Front” against Israel in the war that began on October 7th.
In fact, attacks on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been escalating for years before the war began. In the Summer of 2021, Palestinians in the West Bank and within the borders of Israel held mass protests and a general strike to protest Israeli attacks on Gaza, ethnic cleansing of Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and far right provocations at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a culturally and religiously significant holy site. They were met with repression and dozens were killed. After Israel’s elections in December of 2022, when the far-right won even more power, killings in the West Bank doubled. In 2022, out of 223 Palestinians killed by Israeli military and settlers in the occupied territories, the majority, 179, were killed in the West Bank. By August of last year, two months before the war began, 243 had been killed, with 192 in the West Bank in attacks that included airstrikes on the city of Nablus, and raids in Jenin and Tulkarem. In other words, Israel’s murder of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank was well underway long before Hamas launched its attack on October 7th, and for the last couple of years the majority of killings occurred in the West Bank.
While the killings there didn’t begin on October 7th, they have increased dramatically, with 650 killed since the war began. This should come as no surprise, because the goal of Israel’s far right government – openly stated by many of its ministers, including Foreign Minister Israel Katz – is to finish the ethnic-cleansing of Palestine and incorporate both Gaza and the West Bank into the territory ruled by the Israeli state. As in Gaza, to accomplish this they are willing to commit genocide, using violence to remove people from their homes and seize their land. When Israeli Ministers like Katz call for a “Gaza-style” operation in the West Bank, this is what he means – to carry the same methods of ethnic cleansing used in Gaza to the West Bank. It doesn’t matter that the West Bank is ruled by the Palestinian Authority and is not aligned with Hamas or Iran. The claim that Israel needs to attack the West Bank to defend itself is an excuse for public consumption, especially in countries like the United States. The real purpose is to prepare an extension of the genocide to the West Bank and eventually to the Palestinians within Israel itself, where 20 percent of the population is Palestinian.
