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As the United States focuses efforts on protracting Israel’s aggression on Gaza through the theatrics of a ceasefire, another war is also taking place in the West Bank.
In the last two years, Israel has upped its “counterinsurgency operations” in the West Bank to “thwart Palestinian terrorism”. Using terms like “counterinsurgency operations” is not coincidental. Israel instrumentalises military terms to conceal intention and fabricate reality. From Operation Iron Wall, to Operation Summer Camps and Operation Five Stones, to, most recently, the “counterterrorism” operation in al-Khalil (Hebron), these are presented and reported as temporary, targeted, and reactive.
But they are not. The intensified military aggression – along with settler militia violence, infrastructure destruction, home demolitions and ever multiplying roadblocks and checkpoints – are meant to create facts on the ground that make life for Palestinians impossible – similar to Gaza.
The West Bank’s war zones
In 2025, Israel’s military onslaught in the West Bank resulted in the largest mass displacement campaign Palestinians have faced since 1967, with nearly 50,000 Palestinians violently kicked out of their homes.
The Israeli army destroyed the refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarem and denied their residents the right to return. It has now effectively transformed the two camps into its military headquarters in the north.
Israeli troops also undertook the near-total destruction of infrastructure, including roads, sanitation systems and the electric grid. At least 70 percent of Jenin city’s roads were bulldozed, and the majority of water pipelines and sewage networks were destroyed in Jenin and Tulkarem within weeks, incurring millions of dollars in economic loss.
Thousands of households were disconnected from both water and electricity across the district. And still today, displaced families live in hard-to-access areas with hardly any civilian infrastructure.
In parallel, the Israeli army expanded the geography of its violence. Israeli troops now carry out regular raids in cities in the centre of the West Bank, including Ramallah and Ariha (Jericho), and in the south like al-Khalil (Hebron) and Bethlehem. In these attacks, Palestinians are besieged, terrorised and at times executed by Israeli soldiers who are operating with impunity.
This week, the Israeli army launched a large-scale operation in al-Khalil (Hebron) under the guise of bringing law and order. The whole city has been placed under lockdown with Israeli tanks patrolling the streets, while men and boys are being detained, subject to field interrogation and held under brutal conditions.
But Israeli violence is not limited to army raids and operations only. Where the army goes, settlers follow. In true settler-colonial spirit, the army acts as the trailblazer to usher attacks by Israeli settler militias on Palestinian people and property and shepherd land annexation. In the last two years, Israelis living illegally in the West Bank have been armed with military-grade weapons ranging from US-made M16s to pistols and drones, and they are using them at will.
It is by now clear that Israel’s “counterinsurgency” operations are not about achieving victory “on the battlefield”. They are a coordinated effort with settlers to re-engineer the spatial and social environment in the West Bank so there can be no dissent or resistance.
When a counterinsurgency logic is applied to an occupied civilian population, it transforms homes, streets, and daily routines into instruments of control.
The infrastructure of fear
Last January, Israeli settlers put up billboards on main roads in the West Bank. In big bold letters, they wrote: “there is no future in Palestine”. Palestinians understood this for what it was: a declaration of war. We are now in the middle of it.
Every week, there is an average of nine Palestinians killed, 88 more injured, 180 arrested, a dozen more tortured in field interrogations, coupled with an average of 100 Israeli settler attacks, 300 military raids and assaults and 10 demolitions of Palestinian homes and property. This is all just a week’s work.
These figures do not just reflect the heightened level of violence, but also its frequency. The aim of this intensification is to erode any sense of normalcy for Palestinians.
Thousands of raids over the course of a year, coupled with settlement expansion, new bypass roads, hundreds of new military checkpoints, and systemic surveillance, are not episodic; they have transformed violence from exception to routine, normalising disruption as a condition of governance.
Settler-colonial violence dictates Palestinian lives; it shapes when people sleep, where children play, when they can go to school, whether businesses open, and how futures are imagined. It imposes the need for constant recalibration. It drains and exhausts.
Across the West Bank, Palestinian daily life is structured around violent interruptions. Israel is not only redrawing the map through de facto annexation, but it is using fear as infrastructure to redraw the boundaries of where it is safe for Palestinians to exist.
This affects every aspect of life. As a Palestinian journalist, every time I hit the road, I am met with a familiar, crippling anxiety about what could happen. I rarely take the same route twice. One day, it’s a village closed off; the next, an entire city. An hour-long drive turns into a three-hour, sometimes four-hour one. I reroute through the mountains, again and again, as Israeli gates and checkpoints appear at every entry and exit of every Palestinian village and town.
Our life in the West Bank is measured in detours. They don’t just highlight Israel’s systemic and expedited theft of territory and life-sustaining resources, but they serve to rob time and deplete socioeconomic capacity. Israel has not only ruptured territorial continuity in the West Bank, but destroyed social life, psychological grounding, and political possibilities.
And so while some Palestinians are pushed out at gunpoint, the rest are being pushed out through the infrastructure of fear.
Israel has successfully created a hostile environment where even homes can become battlefields in a matter of minutes. At the same time, violence from armed Israeli militias and the proliferation of outposts suffocate urban areas like Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem and al-Khalil (Hebron).
The Israeli army has even taken to carrying out systemic lootings of currency exchange shops and stealing valuables, like gold and silver, from households. This is as important as the daily terror because Israel is not only destroying physical infrastructure, but simultaneously making recovery and rebuilding impossible.
Fragmenting a people
A disconnected land is a disconnected people. Palestinian cities in the West Bank are shrinking and are being swallowed into an ever-expanding Israeli colonial state.
Last year, Israel formalised plans to develop the illegal E1 settlement project, and this year, it is expected to push forward the plan to expand settlements near Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and across Ramallah. These developments would effectively cut off occupied East Jerusalem from the West Bank and the north from the south. Israeli settlers are now erecting Israeli flags on Palestinian roads and homes as a symbol of conquest.
The West Bank is pivotal for understanding that war does not only arrive with bombs; sometimes it comes with checkpoints, permits, zoning restrictions, state-sponsored violence, and the rerouting of life-sustaining resources away from the Palestinians and towards settlements. It is not merely the fragmentation of land in preparation for colonisation, but the slow degradation of the native population’s capacity to exist collectively.
The West Bank is where war takes hold beneath the threshold of headlines, without any front lines.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
