Israel said its forces killed five Palestinian "terrorists" in the West Bank this morning, following the deaths of 10 Palestinians yesterday as the Israeli military launched raids across the occupied territory.
The violence has refocused attention on the area as fears grow that Israeli settlers are using the Gaza war as an opportunity to seize more land in the West Bank.
The UN reported on 20 August that "on average, at least one Palestinian has been killed every day" so far this month by Israeli airstrikes on the West Bank. And since the 7 October attacks by Hamas, "20 Israeli outposts have sprung up and 18 Palestinian communities have been forced out of ancestral villages", said Christina Lamb in The Sunday Times.
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By "changing facts on the ground", as they describe it, settlers "hope to move enough Israelis on to the land" and "build enough on it" to "make their presence irreversible", said Yolande Knell and Toby Luckhurst on the BBC. Their "long-term hope is that Israel formally annexes the land".
Since the start of the war in Gaza, there has been an "acceleration" in settlement growth in the West Bank and extremists in Israel's government "boast" that these changes will prevent an independent Palestinian state. It is feared that the settlers and their supporters in government want to "prolong the war in Gaza to suit their goals".
More than 700,000 Israelis live in about 130 settlements among 2.7 million Palestinians, but the "land grab has never been so open", said Lamb.
Many in the region believe that Israel has "opened a second front" in the West Bank, a territory that is a "dystopian world of razor-wire fences, signs warning Do Not Enter, armed lookouts and checkpoints, sometimes blaring music into neighbourhoods".
The settlers' mission is "becoming increasingly violent", said The Economist, and settler violence in the West Bank has "increased sharply" since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October. Despite Palestinians being forced to flee a number of small villages in remote parts of the West Bank, there have only been "a handful" of arrests.
The war in Gaza has "emboldened" settlers because the fighting has "accelerated the creeping influence" of settlers over the army, and "provided a smokescreen" for "further land-grabs" in the West Bank.
Several government ministers are "hell-bent on using relentless – and often violent settler expansion to create a 'greater Israel' all the way to the Jordan river", said Donald Macintyre on the i news site.
What next?
The United States has announced new sanctions on settlers in the West Bank and urged its ally Israel to bring greater accountability. "Extremist settler violence" in the West Bank "causes intense human suffering, harms Israel's security and undermines the prospect for peace and stability in the region", said a US State Department spokesman.
So far, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has "ruled out restoring Jewish settlements in Gaza", but he "remains beholden" to far-right parties who are "working to make settlements in the West Bank irreversible", said the BBC.
