As the world watches the horror unfold in Gaza, there’s another Israeli conflict happening that’s being visually ignored.
4 min read
Palestinians say Israel is using the war on Gaza as a distraction to escalate arrests and destruction in the occupied West Bank.
As Israel unleashes hundreds of raids against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, its ultra-nationist settlers appear to be taking advantage of the chaos to attack Palestinians in the West Bank.
Buried among reports this week of hundreds of air strikes against tunnels, missile sites, and Hamas outposts in Gaza was one somewhat out of place. It was a mosque in the middle of the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
People check the damage inside a building in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, following an Israeli air strike on October 22, 2023. Picture: AFP
Israel’s military says it was an attack against a Hamas command centre.
But the strike has drawn attention to the ‘shadow war’ between Israeli settlers and Arab residents in the villages and fields of this second UN-mandated Palestinian homeland.
Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem is calling out the violence, saying it has “received reports of settlers entering Palestinian communities, sometimes armed and often escorted by soldiers, and attacking residents, in some cases threatening them at gunpoint or firing at them.”
And Israel’s Netanyahu government – widely criticised for being caught off guard because of its moves to support illegal settlers – is adding further fuel to the fire.
Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has announced he will distribute 10,000 assault rifles to Israeli civilians in strife-torn areas – including the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Meanwhile, occupational Israeli troops have imposed checkpoints and roadblocks to curtail Palestinian movement there. At the same time, little appears to have been done to stop a surge in settler attacks around Ramallah, in the Jordan Valley and in the Hebron Hills.
Authorities say well over 90 Palestinians have been killed and 1300 detained since October 7.
“Many killings were random shootings of Palestinian drivers by Israeli soldiers or settlers going into towns and gunning down the first Palestinian they saw,” the International Crisis Group reports.
“Events on the ground indicate that under cover of war, settlers are carrying out such assaults virtually unchecked, with no one trying to stop them before, during, or after the fact,” B’Tselem adds.
Israel’s land grab?
Last week, six masked Israeli settlers armed with military M-16 assault rifles reportedly infiltrated the Palestinian village of Qusra near Nablus. They opened fire, killing three and critically injuring a six-year-old girl. A 13-year-old Palestinian was shot dead when Israeli soldiers later moved in to secure the scene.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres this week stated: “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum”.
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” he told a UN Security Council Meeting.
Israel has reacted in anger and demanded his resignation.
But the steady growth of illegal settlements now has 500,000 Israelis living among 3 million West Bank Palestinians.
These are considered illegal by both the International Court of Justice and the United Nations. The West Bank and Gaza Strip were partitioned as Arab homelands under the same 1949 UN General Assembly that created the state of Israel.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently stated Australia recognises these “are illegal under international law and a significant obstacle to peace”.
But since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured power through a far-right coalition in 2022, he’s been accused of redirecting troops from the Gaza border to support West Bank settlers and suppress Palestinian activities. Such policies have been equated to “apartheid” by his critics. And his ministers have done little to support his denials.
“My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs,” Security Minister Ben-Gvir proclaimed in August.
The 47-year-old Jewish Power party leader – who has several convictions for racist and ‘terror’ related offences – controls Israel’s West Bank Border Police. He lives in the illegal Kiryat Arba settlement. And he’s one of several far-right government members behind a crackdown on dissent among Palestinians and Israelis alike.
Home invasion
Where Hamas rules Palestine Gaza, the Palestinian Authority is supposed to govern the West Bank while Under Israeli occupation. But its President, Mahmoud Abbas, is unpopular, and his regime is widely considered a corrupt puppet of Israel’s security forces.
Now Israel, faced with a ground invasion of Gaza while deterring Hezbollah Jihadists in Lebanon, cannot afford another Palestinian uprising in the West Bank. And Netanyahu is well aware of the international sensitivity to the actions of Jewish extremists there.
“Israeli forces have targeted local journalists, fearing that their coverage of the spate of violence could trigger further public anger,” states the ICG. “Israel also imposed a total closure – meaning that it allows nothing in or out, while also blocking traffic headed from town to town – in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and shut the Allenby Bridge, the main route to Jordan.”
Mourners carry the bodies two Palestinian men, 29-year-old Jihad Saleh, and 17-year-old Mohammed Abu Zer, killed during an Israeli raid on the village of Zawata, west of the city of Nablus, in the Israeli occupied West Bank on October 23, 2023. Picture: Zain JAAFAR / AFP
Allegations include reports of Israeli soldiers confiscating mobile phones and digital cameras to prevent evidence of settler violence from leaking out.
Among the recent incidents, Israeli news service Haaretz reports three Palestinians from the West Bank village of Wadi As-Seeq were detained by Israeli troops and settlers, handcuffed, stripped, beaten, urinated on and had lit cigarettes pushed into their skin.
“Meanwhile, settler networks on social media are awash with incitement and vitriol against Palestinians, including explicit threats to inflict lethal harm on their persons and property,” reports B’Tselem. “The targeted communities are aware of this rhetoric and know, from experience, that the danger is not merely theoretical but real.”