Ex-Gaza hostages in Auschwitz for March of the Living

London: The shock of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has echoed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where security forces and agitated Jewish residents have reportedly stepped up attacks on Palestinian communities.

Since the conflict broke out in Gaza on October 7 following a Hamas-led offensive, Israeli settlers have carried out 603 attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, and expelled 1,222 people from 19 pastoral communities, according to UN data. .

Armed settlers have also killed at least nine Palestinians, while Israeli security forces have killed 396 others over the past few months.

Similarly, the Israeli army has intensified the raids. On 4 May, Israeli forces attacked Tulkarem and killed five Palestinians, including four Hamas members. On 20 April, Israeli forces raided the same governorate, where more than 6,400 refugees lived, killing 14 Palestinians.

Abeer, who runs a small business in Jenin, has seen “an increase in settler attacks, proliferation of checkpoints, daily raids on Palestinian homes, destruction of infrastructure, killings of Palestinian youth and Israeli military airstrikes.”

While similar attacks occurred regularly before 7 October, he told Arab News that “they have doubled and become more frightening” since the beginning of the Gaza war.

“Jenin has been a target of the Israeli military for almost two years specifically because it is home to some resistance groups,” he said.

According to a UN Human Rights Office report published in March, a “sharp increase” in long-standing patterns of discrimination, oppression and violence against Palestinians has pushed the West Bank “to the brink of disaster”.

Israel, at “one of the fastest rates on record”, has demolished 917 Palestinian-owned structures in the West Bank since October 7, displacing 1,015 Palestinians. The report said 210 of these structures are in East Jerusalem and 285 are residential buildings.

Yasmin al-Hassan, international advocacy officer for the Federation of Agricultural Working Committees, a non-governmental organization that supports rural Palestinian communities, described the situation in the West Bank as “absolutely appalling.”

“The Israeli expansion of its settler colonial enterprise in the West Bank is taking place in parallel with the genocidal war on Gaza,” he told Arab News.

“The occupation has established many new settler outposts, settler roads within the West Bank,” he said, adding that the Israeli government has “approved thousands of new settler units within the West Bank.”

While casualties from Israeli violence in the West Bank have not reached the scale of casualties in Gaza, he said, “The intensity of Israeli settler colonial violence in every part of historic Palestine has increased, increased, over the past six months. “

The “concessions” granted by Israeli authorities have further encouraged Jewish settlers to move to the West Bank, El-Hassan said.

Settlers attacking Palestinian communities, he said, “are increasingly armed by the Israeli occupation government and there are no consequences for what they are doing.”

Addressing the 55th session of the Human Rights Council in March, Nada al-Nashif, the UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that after 7 October, OHCHR had “restricted, in whole or in part, the wearing of Israeli military uniforms and carrying “Registered the cases of the settlers.” rifles, harassing and attacking Palestinians, including shooting at them at close range.”

He also said that by 31 October, Israeli security forces had reportedly distributed approximately 8,000 weapons to “settlement defense squads” and “regional defense battalions” in the West Bank.

According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, one incident in which Israeli forces allegedly enabled anti-immigrant violence occurred in mid-April, when about 50 settlers “protected by Israeli occupation forces” attacked the village of Aqraba in the northern West Bank. Was attacked.

According to village mayor Salah Bani Jaber, who witnessed the incident, two Palestinians were killed in the attack by settlers. He said Israeli soldiers at the scene “stood silently, watching the settlers.”

“The absence of accountability for violence against residents is a key factor in the current coercive environment,” al-Nashif told the President of the UN Human Rights Council.

He described this lack of accountability as “a manifestation of the dual system of criminal justice that has had a discriminatory impact on Palestinians.”

Yesh Din, an Israeli NGO that documents abuses by Israeli civilians against Palestinians in the occupied territories, concluded in its December data sheet that “the Israeli law enforcement system is failing to fulfill its duty to protect Palestinians from Israeli violence.” “Has failed.”

The report emphasizes that the continuation of “this systemic failure” for at least two decades “demonstrates that the State of Israel normalizes and condones ideologically motivated violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.” supports.”

The data sheet showed that over the past 20 years, 93.7 percent of all police investigations into settler crimes against Palestinians were closed without prosecution, while only 3 percent resulted in a full or partial conviction.

Yesh Din also said that Palestinians distrust Israeli authorities, making victims of settler violence reluctant to report crimes.

Between January and September 2023, more than 57 percent of victims chose not to file a complaint. Of these, 54 percent said they feared reprisals or did not trust Israeli authorities to catch criminals.

Palestinians in rural areas of the West Bank are particularly vulnerable to expulsion from their lands by Jewish settlers.

UAWC’s El-Hassan said: “Israeli settlers, often accompanied or protected by Israeli occupation forces, frequently target Palestinian agricultural lands and critical infrastructure, as well as communities.

“This includes vital resources such as water wells, roads, greenhouses, sanitation facilities, land where crops are grown, herds, herding pens, cars and houses.”

The OHCHR report found that from January 2022 to early September 2023, 1,105 Palestinians from 28 pastoral communities (about 12 percent) were forcibly displaced due to settler violence and prevention of access to grazing lands.

El-Hassan said Palestinian farmers and rural communities in Area C, which covers 61 percent of the West Bank area, have been particularly targeted by Israeli settlers.

“Area C is most of the West Bank, the most resource-rich, and it is also under Israeli military and civilian administration, in accordance with the Oslo Accords,” he said.

The Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn in September 1993, were the first direct peace agreement between Israeli authorities and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He sought to pave the way for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Emphasizing the importance of talking about Area C in the context of Israeli settlement expansion, El-Hassan pointed out that this “very fertile” area is “directly linked to Palestinian livelihoods.”

“This is where most of the settlements are,” he explained, adding that “the Israeli occupation is doing its best to take over this area”.

“Land and livelihoods are directly linked to Palestinian food systems. This targeted disruption and destruction of Palestinian food systems is a strategic tactic of Israeli colonialism attempting to break indigenous relationships with interdependence on the land, no matter the consequences.

“And that includes humanitarian targeting, such as the thousands of killed Palestinians, or environmental, such as the hundreds of thousands of metric tons of planet-warming emissions produced by Israel over the past few months.”

On April 29, Washington said that five Israeli security forces units had committed “gross human rights violations” against Palestinians in the West Bank before October 7, Reuters reported, yet it did not identify any units that had received US military support. Hasn’t stopped me from doing it.

On 3 May, Israel charged two “extremist” groups and four individuals who pleaded guilty to violence in the West Bank, as part of a new package of measures against settlers.

Referring to Jewish residents living in the occupied West Bank, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office says that “the majority of residents of Judea and Samaria are law-abiding citizens… Israelis continue to prosecute law-abiding citizens everywhere.” takes action against those involved and hence there is no room for harsh action on this matter.”

In July last year, at least 3,000 Palestinians fled their homes in the Jenin refugee camp, home to about 18,000 people, when Israeli forces launched what Palestinian officials described as the largest operation in the area in two decades. Told.

Israel said it was targeting a Palestinian terrorist command center.

Saying that “the basis of settler colonialism is land theft,” El-Hassan accused Israel of proving over the past 76 years that it would “do anything to forcibly take that land, and that includes destroying it, “It involves exploitation and commitment.” Massacre.”

“The Palestinian communities are physically rooted in our land,” he told Arab News. “Our relationship with this land is not just symbolic, it is symbiotic. It’s not transactional, it’s reciprocal. And as the indigenous people of this land, we are its stewards.”