Israel has portrayed its strikes on the Jenin refugee camp – the biggest military operation in the occupied West Bank for two decades – as a limited intervention lasting just a few days. This is scant comfort for the thousands fleeing violence, including families making their escape as homes and infrastructure were destroyed. The Palestinian health ministry said on Tuesday that at least 11 people had been killed, and 100 injured.
Whenever the troops leave, the idea of a short-lived offensive is also misleading.The intent is a show of force in retaliation for renewed attacks on settlers, and unexpectedly strong resistance to a previous raid. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, said it was an attack on a “safe haven for terrorists” and “people who would annihilate our country”. But this is only the latest and most intense of multiple raids on Jenin, one of which killed the renowned journalist Shireen Abu Akleh last year. And it will only fuel the surge of violence. On Tuesday a Palestinian resident of the West Bank injured at least nine people in Tel Aviv in a truck and knife attack; he was shot dead.
This is not yet a third intifada – even if the scenes in Jenin are remarkably reminiscent of the second. But the violence is spiralling. Last year was the West Bank’s deadliest since the UN began documenting fatalities in 2005. At least 150 Palestinians – including 33 children – were killed by Israeli forces and at least two by settlers. Ten Israelis, including five settlers, were killed by Palestinians. Yet those figures have been surpassed in the first half of this year.
The residents of Jenin’s refugee camp are the children and grandchildren of those who lost their lands to the new state of Israel in 1948. A peace process appears increasingly distant, never mind the destination of their own state. Obstructed and undercut by Israel, the Palestinian Authority looks corrupt, undemocratic and ineffective to those it nominally represents; many regard it as little more than a security contractor for the Israeli state.
Meanwhile, Israel’s government of extremists is essentially annexing the West Bank by civilianising the occupation, and is expediting approval for thousands of new settlement homes. Mr Netanyahu enabled far-right politicians; now, still facing corruption charges and struggling to push through the undemocratic assault on the judiciary, he seeks to appease extremist coalition mates. When a settler group rampaged through Huwara in revenge for a Palestinian gun attack, torching homes and cars in what an Israeli general called a “pogrom”, Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister who also oversees settler life in the West Bank, said the village should be “wiped out”. Settler violence has increased dramatically.
All this is happening amid international indifference. While the UN humanitarian office expressed concern at the scale of the operation, including airstrikes on an area densely populated with civilians, the US merely said that it supported Israel’s security and right to defend its people. With so little effort to halt the escalation, the forces unleashed under Mr Netanyahu threaten to burn beyond control, with consequences felt for months or years, not days.