The Israeli army has expanded its ongoing military offensive in the northern West Bank from Jenin refugee camp to Nur Shams and al-Far’a refugee camps in Tulkarem and Tubas. The Israeli onslaught has led to the displacement of at least 40,000 Palestinians, according to UNRWA.
Scenes from Gaza are repeating themselves in the refugee camps of the northern West Bank as residents describe being kicked out of their homes by the Israeli army as soldiers go house to house, separating men, women, and children into different groups and marching them out of their neighborhoods at gunpoint. “It was very humiliating and painful,” one resident of Nur Shams refugee camp told Mondoweiss on Tuesday.
The three refugee camps and their surrounding cities have been at the center of a renewed wave of armed Palestinian resistance since 2021, especially in Jenin. In all three areas, Palestinian local resistance groups have been confronting Israeli raids with increasing efficiency and an accumulation of experience, albeit with very little means.
Israel has attempted to break the back of the rising phenomenon in the northern West Bank over the course of the last four years. In early 2022 it stepped up its campaigns of military reprisal with “Operation Break the Wave,” launching increasingly violent and disproportionate raids into Palestinian refugee camps. In July 2022, Israel reintroduced airstrikes in the West Bank to target Palestinian fighters in Jenin, before expanding the use of airstrikes to other parts of the West Bank’s north.
Following October 7, 2023, Israel escalated its raids to another level, taking advantage of the post-October 7 furor to change its military strategy in the West Bank. According to Israeli officials, the current offensive, dubbed “Operation Iron Wall,” aims to “change the security status quo” in the West Bank by definitively crushing the armed resistance, suggesting that its primary goal is security-driven. But the real reason for the wide-ranging escalation in the West Bank surpasses any pretenses of maintaining “security.”
Beyond ‘security’
Skyrocketing Israeli violence after October 7 was often unaccompanied by a security explanation, and much of it was not directed against armed groups. Israel imposed hundreds of additional checkpoints across the West Bank and arrested up to 5,000 Palestinians, including over 3,600 under administrative detention — that is, without charge or trial. It escalated home demolitions in ِArea C (which makes up over 60 percent of the West Bank) and distributed firearms to settlers who forcibly displaced up to 20 Palestinian rural communities in the West Bank. Most of these communities were located in areas that haven’t witnessed any armed Palestinian activity for years, like in the South Hebron Hills and in the eastern slopes of the central Jordan Valley.
Several months after October 7, in May 2024, Israel also reversed the Israeli Disengagement Law of 2005, which had led Israel to withdraw settlers from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank in the wake of the Second Intifada. The revocation of this law allowed Israeli settlers to go back to evacuated settlements in the areas of Jenin and Nablus.
In January, following a Palestinian shooting attack near Qalqilya that killed three Israelis, the head of the Israeli settlements’ regional councils, Yossi Dagan, called on the Israeli army to invade the West Bank’s cities as it did in Gaza. Israeli Finance Minister and hardline Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich called for “making Jenin and Nablus look like Jabalia,” referencing the city and refugee camp in north Gaza that Israel completely destroyed and forcibly depopulated during the last four months of the war before the current ceasefire. According to Smotrich, such actions, coupled with settlement expansion, would make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.
When another representative of the hardline religious right, Itamar Ben-Gvir, resigned from his post as National Security Minister in opposition to the current ceasefire deal, Smotrich did not leave Netanyahu’s cabinet, despite voting against the ceasefire. Analysts have described the “Iron Wall” offensive in the West Bank as Netanyahu’s concession to Smotrich in exchange for refraining from resigning, which would have jeopardized Netanyahu’s cabinet and forced him to call for new elections.
The road to annexation
Smotrich’s main political project has always been the annexation and mass colonization of the West Bank, which has come hand in hand with destroying all possibilities for a Palestinian state. Prior to October 7, Smotrich declared that Palestinians don’t exist and that Palestinian towns in the West Bank, like Huwwara, should be “wiped off the map.” As far back as 2017, he laid out a “Decisive Plan” for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank who would not accept living under “Jewish sovereignty,” giving them the choice between leaving the country or being killed.
The idea that Netanyahu would need to appease him to maintain his government means that the West Bank and Palestinians’ lives in it are the price to be paid for the ceasefire in Gaza — and for Netanyahu’s political survival.
But these ambitions in the West Bank are also shared by Netanyahu himself, and by many members of his cabinet who come from the religious right-wing base and the settler movement in the West Bank. Netanyahu himself had promised in 2020 to annex large parts of the West Bank, especially the Jordan Valley, stating several times that there would never be a Palestinian state on his watch. Netanyahu was also on record, in his early years as a politician in the 1980s, stating that Israel should use any opportunity to displace as many Palestinians as possible, not only from the West Bank but also from within the borders of the Israeli state, and most importantly, from Gaza.
In 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed the Nation-State Law by an overwhelming majority, stipulating that national self-determination between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea belongs only to the Jewish people. During the latest war on Gaza in July 2024, the Israeli Knesset passed a resolution, also with an overwhelming majority, rejecting a Palestinian state anywhere in historic Palestine. Both pieces of legislation echo the Israeli religious right’s calls to completely colonize and annex the West Bank, indicating a strong drive within Israeli politics and society to finally act on this ambition. For Palestinians in the West Bank, this means that they are in the crosshairs, with destruction and forcible expulsion, whether partial or total, on the immediate horizon.
With no end in sight, and with Israeli declarations that it will include all of the West Bank as part of its “Iron Wall” offensive, it becomes clear that the Israeli attack is not a security measure. It is an instrument for carrying out the political aspirations of the Zionist right. The first step has entailed the displacement of 40,000 Palestinians from the northern West Bank’s refugee camps, but it won’t stop there. As the fragile ceasefire in Gaza approaches the end of its first phase, Palestinians brace for what might follow in the West Bank, fearing that what they face will be the beginning of a new chapter in Israel’s war on the Palestinian people.