The second Nakba is continuing at an accelerated pace in the West Bank with unprecedented levels of violence being carried out by both IDF and Israeli settlers. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that Israel is imposing a state of “constant terror” in the West Bank due to Israeli state force and settler violence.
UNRWA, a UN agency providing services to Palestinian refugees, declared 2023 to be the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since it began recording casualties in 2005. Nearly 300 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7. It is also the worst year for the killing of children.
Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group, reported an “unmatched surge in settlement activity in the West Bank,” which settlers carry out often with IDF support. A large number of the settler outposts violate private Palestinian land. To date, nine new outposts have been created and 18 illegal roads paved as well as a “new phenomenon of settlers closing Palestinian traffic routes against military orders.”
300 settler attacks since Oct. 7
Over 300 Israeli settler attacks have been recorded since Oct. 7, where they “threaten Palestinians at gunpoint, vandalize their property, hamper [water access], ruin their [olive] trees … steal their belongings” in addition to physically attacking them. Settler violence has driven over 1,200 Palestinians out of their homes.
While Israel did not approve these outposts officially, according to the OHCHR report released last week, settlers are expanding settlements with the political backing of key ministers in Israel’s most right-wing government to date. On Dec. 24, Israel’s cabinet approved NIS 75 million ($20 million in U.S. dollars) to fortify 70 outposts in the West Bank despite being recognized as illegal.
This blatantly violates the 2016 UN Security Council Resolution 2334 that found Israel’s settlements, even back then, to be a “flagrant violation of international law,” and demanded that the expansion be stopped stop per the Geneva Conventions. It is clear that the Israeli government and many of its citizens do not care for or uphold any treaties or agreements as they continue to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land.
Drones target and kill youth
Additionally, the IDF has been carrying out constant incursions, harassment and attacks on various West Bank cities, towns and refugee camps to preemptively target what it calls “terror cells.” During its attack on the Balata refugee camp, the IDF recently fired directly at ambulances to prevent them from reaching injured civilians. In the southern West Bank, the IDF tear-gassed youth resisting illegal raids.
The IDF routinely targets youth, and recently killed 16-year-old Yousef Nader Suleiman Idrees, who happened to be sitting near the area where confrontations were taking place. Israel also carries out drone attacks on innocent Palestinians. On Jan. 7, drone attacks killed seven Palestinians, including four brothers, on their way to work in Jenin.
Israel also assaults Palestinians at checkpoints, where suffocating and discriminatory movement restrictions are imposed. This also applies to the right of worship for West Bank Palestinians who are increasingly denied access to the Al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem, especially for Friday prayers, where 50,000 usually participate. Israeli police recently attacked worshippers there with wastewater.
Child casualties doubled and 880 arrested
While facing humiliating military and operational defeats in Gaza, the IDF carries out operations against the most vulnerable in the West Bank. UNICEF reports a doubling of casualties of children since 2022 with 83 children killed and 576 injured and detained. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk stated that the “violations documented in [the OHCHR report] repeat the pattern and nature of violations reported in the past in the context of long-standing Israeli occupation … the intensity of violence and repression is something that has not been seen in years.”
IDF’s horrific attacks are supplemented by its mass arbitrary arrests of Palestinians with bogus charges. Many are then held under administrative detention without being charged. The IDF preemptively arrests nearly 60 Palestinians daily, with over 5,730 currently detained. Since the beginning of 2024, nearly 230 Palestinians have been arrested in the West Bank.
OHCHR describes the arrests as regularly involving “physical and psychological abuse and humiliation by the [IDF], including sexual and gender-based violence against men and women” — such that the process of arrest itself amounts to torture.
As of Nov. 20, the IDF had also arrested nearly 880 Palestinian children, a brutal practice made possible through Israel’s persistent dehumanization of Palestinians as “animals.” The conditions are so dire that recently-released Luay Al-Taweel of Hebron, described Israel’s Negev prison as an “exact copy of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons, both ‘notorious symbols’ of U.S. human rights violations.”
The people fight back
Despite the constant terror and all-consuming attacks by the IDF and settlers, Palestinians in the West Bank called for a general strike last week to protest Israel’s assassination of Hamas and Al-Qassam Brigades leader, Saleh Al-Arouri. Led by a coalition of Palestinian factions, shops, universities and public and private offices participated in this strike. Ismat Shakhshir, a member of the General Secretariat of the General Union of Palestinian Women, described the assassinations as “desperate measures” due to the “the inability of the occupation to make headway in Gaza.”
Resistance fighters in Nablus, Jenin, Areeha and other areas continue to repel Israeli violence despite being unmatched in military equipment. Hamas senior political officer Husam Badran said that the “resistance in Jenin and throughout the West Bank will break the arrogance of the [Israeli] occupation.”
A US-Israeli aggression
While the evidence of blatant and illegal aggression and the casualties reach unprecedented levels, the U.S. continues to empower the Israeli government to carry out its genocidal agenda while offering half-hearted condemnations as weak lip service to save face. In the UN, the United States blocked calls for a ceasefire even after the rarely-used Article 99 of the UN Charter was invoked to warn of an “impending human catastrophe” in Gaza.
Just last month, the Biden administration introduced a national security bill, which includes an additional $10.1 billion in unconditional military aid to Israel, and has twice bypassed Congress to immediately ship arms and ammunition to Israel.
This is not just an Israeli war, it is a U.S.-Israeli war. Washington is also a perpetrator of genocide and fully responsible for every single injury and death made possible by U.S. weapons and political support.
