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On December 3, Israeli forces raided a home in the town of Qabatiya, south of Jenin, tearing down a map of Palestine hanging on the wall and confiscating another. The homeowners, a woman and her 11-year-old daughter, were detained for several hours and subjected to on-site field interrogations as Israeli troops vandalised the rest of the house before eventually withdrawing.<\/p>\n
Noura Muhammad, the homeowner, told\u00a0Mondoweiss<\/em>\u00a0that Israeli soldiers broke down the front door when they arrived, immediately asking her whether there was any \u201cgold or money\u201d in the house.<\/p>\n She added that after detaining her and her daughter alongside their neighbors, the soldiers interrogated the child, asking, \u201cWhat do you want to be when you grow up?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey were attempting to get inside my daughter\u2019s head to understand the future,\u201d Noura told\u00a0Mondoweiss<\/em>, explaining that this is a common question that Israeli soldiers ask children to see whether they answer that they want to become resistance fighters. \u201cThey\u2019re asking because they\u2019re afraid of that future,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n In another home, a Palestinian youth with EU citizenship who spoke to\u00a0Mondoweiss<\/em>\u00a0on the condition of anonymity said that Israeli soldiers had detained and interrogated him for hours, while telling him, \u201cWhy are you here? Leave the land of Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n These are not isolated incidents. Over the past several weeks, the Israeli army has launched a renewed military campaign in the northern West Bank,\u00a0first in Tubas<\/a>\u00a0and its neighboring villages and then extending to areas such as Jenin, where Israeli soldiers\u00a0executed two young men<\/a>\u00a0in late November. Since then, Israeli forces have repeatedly conducted raids of cities and towns, imposed curfews, raided homes and converted them into military outposts, forcibly displaced residents, and detained, interrogated, and arrested hundreds of young men.<\/p>\n But what is behind this renewed military campaign, and why is it unfolding only now? While the official Israeli narrative claims that it is \u201ccombating terrorism,\u201d locals in Jenin and other parts of the north say it is really about establishing a new reality on the ground of total Israeli dominance to make way for the resettlement of areas of Jenin that Israel had evacuated in 2005.<\/p>\n Israel is attempting to create a new status quo in the West Bank as part of its objective of altering the north\u2019s geography by repurposing Palestinian land to serve colonization and settler infrastructure. The ongoing military activities in these areas can only be understood with this context in mind, locals say.<\/p>\n The Israeli army, meanwhile, has issued claims that the resistance groups that it has suppressed over the past two years in areas such as\u00a0Tulkarem<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Jenin<\/a>\u00a0have begun to regroup and rearm. According to local journalists who spoke to\u00a0Mondoweiss<\/em>, Israeli claims that armed cells are being \u201creactivated\u201d do not appear to reflect the reality on the ground.<\/p>\n On December 5, the Israeli army released a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0saying that its operations in the north are aimed at \u201cdeterring terrorism.\u201d During a tour of the region, Israeli army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said that \u201cwe will not allow the threat of terrorism to grow, and we will act to thwart it in advance through preemptive offensive activities.\u201d<\/p>\n These statements are not new. Similar rhetoric has increasingly appeared in Israeli news\u00a0outlets<\/a>\u00a0in recent months, laying the groundwork for such sweeping operations under the banner of \u201ccounterterrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n But the military escalation in the northern West Bank isn\u2019t a series of isolated operations, but the opening move in a broader effort to reinstate settlement activity in the Jenin area, says Khaled Bdair, Alghad TV\u2019s northern West Bank correspondent. Bdair argues that the purpose of these operations are to impose total military control over the area in order to \u201calter its geography,\u201d namely by seizing large swathes of land.<\/p>\n On December 10, the Israeli authorities approved the construction of 764 new settlement units in the West Bank, bringing the total number approved by the government to 51,370 units since the end of 2022. Over 700,000 settlers currently reside in the territory, including approximately 250,000 in East Jerusalem, according to Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now.<\/p>\n Following the announcement by the Knesset committee and the northern West Bank\u2019s Settlements Council regarding the geographic boundaries of the areas to which settlers intend to return, Israeli authorities began to actively change realities on the ground by intensifying military operations and confiscating land on a near-daily basis.<\/p>\n Bdair says that in order for settlers to be able to move into this part of the northern West Bank, \u201ca new security reality needs to be created to allow settlers to operate without obstacles.\u201d This explains the intensified raids and continuous military presence in the north, he points out.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Israeli army is no longer acting in response to a specific security incident, but is instead adopting what its military officials refer to as a policy of \u2018mowing the lawn,\u2019\u201d Bdair explained. \u201cThey are carrying out continuous and repeated operations aimed at depleting resistance structures in and around Jenin and maintaining a constant level of deterrence.\u201d<\/p>\n Bdair stresses that Israeli forces are \u201craising the security threshold\u201d to achieve two parallel objectives: first, to effectively meet the \u201csecurity requirements\u201d of the settlement plan, and second, to maintain a state of \u201chigh security alertness.\u201d<\/p>\n This shift in military activities coincides with a qualitative change in the nature of military training, Bdair says, asserting that army exercises are no longer conducted in training bases in the Negev or the Jordan Valley \u2014 which typically use mock Palestinian villages and built structures to simulate operations \u2014 but are now carried out inside the West Bank itself in \u201creal\u201d locations.<\/p>\n This indicates that the army is treating the West Bank as a continuous operational zone, and is seeking to further consolidate its control over the north to lay the groundwork for accelerated colonization.<\/p>\n According to Amir Daoud, Director of Publishing and Documentation at the\u00a0Colonization & Wall Resistance Commission<\/a>, the army carries this out through two primary instruments: military orders related to road construction, which aim to entrench settlement outposts and provide them with permanent infrastructure; and the gradual and systematic return of settlement activity to the northern West Bank through amendments to the Disengagement Law, referring to a an Israeli law from 2005 that led to the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from settlements in Gaza and an additional four settlements in the northern West Bank during that year.<\/p>\n Daoud adds that although these settlements were formally evacuated in 2005, the lands on which they had been built remained off-limits to Palestinians and were effectively treated as closed military zones for approximately 17 years.<\/p>\n In contrast, settlers were allowed to rebuild a settlement outpost in the\u00a0Homesh<\/a>\u00a0area near Jenin in mid-2023 under the guise of a religious school. \u201cThis constituted an early violation of the spirit of the Disengagement Law,\u201d Daoud told\u00a0Mondoweiss<\/em>.<\/p>\n These violations came following the Knesset\u2019s\u00a0amendments to the law<\/a>\u00a0in March 2023 to allow settlers to colonize those areas. A little over a year later in July 2024, then Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant moved to\u00a0revoke the Disengagement Law<\/a>\u00a0entirely.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nMilitary escalation as land confiscation<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Israel moves to reinstate evacuated settlements<\/strong><\/h2>\n