Israel Launches Major Military Operation in Hebron, West Bank, After Checkpoint Attack

Israel’s military has launched another major operation in the occupied West Bank, which Al Jazeera reports includes plans for mass arrests, home demolitions and forced displacement of residents. The operation follows an attack on Friday at an Israeli military checkpoint near Hebron in which two Israeli soldiers were killed. Al Jazeera reports that the two suspected Palestinian gunmen were shot dead.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a full lockdown of the West Bank and said Israeli forces would go house-to-house in the Hebron neighbourhood where the suspected attackers came from. He said the operation would involve demolitions and forced displacement, and that it would replicate tactics previously used in refugee camps in the northern West Bank.

Israel’s military announced late on Friday that a major “counterterrorism” operation, involving soldiers, police and other security agents, was under way in the Hebron area. It said the “targeted” campaign would last “several days”, in addition to operations in “dozens” of other areas across the West Bank. Israeli rights group B’Tselem warned that the Israeli government’s planned offensive amounts to “collective punishment and acts that could constitute war crimes.”

By Saturday morning, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, Israeli forces had raided hundreds of homes in the Hebron area and turned dozens of houses into military interrogation centres. Al Jazeera’s colleagues on the ground reported that around 300 Palestinian families were being displaced in the city’s al-Jalda neighbourhood. Earlier, Israeli bulldozers wrecked a three-storey building in Hebron while ordering more Palestinian families to leave their homes in the Ein Deir Bahha area and its surroundings.

Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist and political analyst based in Hebron, said nearly 800,000 Palestinians in the Hebron governorate were “under siege, with all entrances and exits closed since (Saturday) morning.” He said many displaced families had left the night before “without carrying enough goods or clothing, or the children’s schoolbags.” Protecting families who are left with little, and the children among them, is the kind of care the Scriptures call believers to show (Proverbs 31:8-9).

Elsewhere, Israeli forces raided at least 15 towns in the northern West Bank, including Nablus, Jenin, Tubas and Qalqilya, Al Jazeera correspondents reported. The Prisoners’ Society said Israeli forces arrested around 70 people between Friday and early Saturday and were interrogating hundreds more. Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah, said there was “a lot of anxiety” across the occupied territory, with people largely avoiding the streets.

Odeh said residents feared that the prime minister’s pledge to apply in Hebron what he called the successful model used in the Tulkarem and Jenin refugee camps could mean “months of being away from their homes and possibly losing them to massive demolitions.”

The operation comes just days before Israel’s election on Tuesday. The Times of Israel reported that Israel had already been planning to lock down the occupied territory before the attack at the Hebron checkpoint.

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