Israel is still at war
Could the West Bank city of Jenin suffer the same fate as Gaza?
Rajan Menon | 27th January 2025
In Gaza, the guns remain silent. But the Israeli war machine has migrated, not retired. On 21 January, 48 hours after Gaza’s ceasefire, Israel launched “Operation Iron Wall”, which, using ground forces and airpower, seeks to eliminate armed Palestinian groups. The campaign’s focus is mainly on Jenin (home to a large refugee camp) in the northern West Bank but also extends to other areas, such as Tulkarm in the north-west. And the appearance of hundreds of checkpoints across other West Bank towns, as well as mass detentions, could portend a wider offensive across the territory. Gaza has been allowed to exhale, but Israel’s offensive against the Palestinian people continues – and risks provoking an Intifada-style mass revolt in response.
The West Bank has been roiled by occasional violence since 7 October 2023, but this represents a decided and strategic shift from Israel. Operation Iron Wall may be the result of a deal that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the far-right Religious Zionist Party. Netanyahu was desperate to prevent him from resigning in protest at the Gaza deal, following the security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. It’s also possible that President Trump, whose ultimatum apparently led Netanyahu to accept the Gaza ceasefire, gave him carte blanche in the West Bank: on Friday (24 January) the United States dropped its sanctions against West Bank settlers who used violence against Palestinians.
Whatever the catalyst for Iron Wall, Jenin in particular is under massive attack, and not just in the past few days. Since December, it has been raided and blockaded by the security forces of the Palestinian Authority (PA) – the Palestinian political representation now derided by its people as Israel’s gendarme. Their goal was to root out the Jenin Brigades, a coalition that includes Hamas, the Al-Quds Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. But Operation Iron Wall opens a new chapter because the Israel has far more firepower and troops than the PA.
The IDF has laid siege to Jenin’s hospitals, surrounded its sprawling refugee camps, bulldozed homes and stores, destroyed water and sewage mains, displaced as many as 3,000 families, and disrupted electricity and water supplies (including to the Jenin Government Hospital). Israel’s offensive is nowhere in the league of its Gaza War. Still, the West Bank Palestinians worry, based on the remarks of Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and the hardline Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, that some parts of the IDF’s Gaza playbook could be used in Jenin as well as other towns.
Israelis were collectively traumatised by Hamas’s 7 October attacks. But the IDF’s disproportionate response has horrified West Bank Palestinians, drumming up support for armed resistance. In Gaza itself, despite the IDF’s massive attacks, Hamas seems to have replenished its ranks, with thousands of robed fighters appearing on the territory’s streets immediately after the ceasefire. Militant groups in the West Bank have surely swelled their ranks too.
This IDF operation comes following two years of unprecedented attacks on West Bank Palestinians at the hands of armed, militant Jewish settlers. Homes and farms have been targeted, particularly olive groves, with some Palestinians murdered by settlers from afar while tending to their trees. At times, settlers have seemed to maraud with impunity. According a UN report, between Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel and mid-August 2024 alone, they carried out 1,250 attacks, resulting in 120 deaths and injuries, and 1,000 instances of property damage. This settler violence is never labelled “terrorism”, the justification Israel uses for military offensives like Iron Wall. Very few of the perpetrators ever face charges; even fewer are convicted. And they are tried in civilian courts within Israel proper, while Palestinians face Israeli military tribunals with a conviction rates of up to 96 per cent.
The resentment of West Bank Palestinians has also been stoked by land confiscation and settlement construction. Since Israel gained control over the West Bank (along with Gaza and the originally Syrian Golan Heights) after the 1967 Six-Day War, more than 140 Jewish settlements have been built on Palestinian land. This has only been accelerated by politicians like Smotrich. In June, 3,200 acres were appropriated in the Jordan Valley, the largest land seizure in 30 years. Aside from the settlements, as of January 2024 there were at least 236 settler “outposts”, which persist despite being illegal under Israeli law. The settler population also continues to grow, more than doubling during the past two decades. Add to all this the everyday humiliations Palestinians endure – raids, searches, checkpoints, restrictions or bans on their use of roads – and it’s easy to see why the West Bank remains explosive.
The immediate transfer of Israel’s military operations – eased and patronised by the United States – shows how intractable this violence still is, despite the relief now granted to Gaza. All the paths to a settlement between a Palestinian political body and Israel are now closed off. The standard two-state formula is dead – in Israel, the public mood since October 7 favors its sworn opponents. Netanyahu has ruled out a Palestinian state, and last July the Knesset approved a resolution by a 68-9 majority declaring one impermissible “on any piece of land West of the Jordan River”. And after the October 7 attack, few Israelis are receptive to the words “peace process”.
Besides, serial Israeli land expropriations and settlement construction have made the creation of territorially continuous Palestinian state all but impossible. The parts of the West Bank governed by the PA, Areas A and B, which comprise 40 per cent of its total area, are a sprawling archipelago separated by settlements. Trump won’t demand an end to settlement-building, let alone the dismantling of existing settlement; his Gaza peace plan proposes to “just clean out” the entire Strip of Palestinians. And members of his administration echo the most messianic claims of Israel’s politicians: his UN ambassador Elise Stefanik last week said that Israel has “biblical claim” to “all of Judea and Samaria”, which includes the West Bank. Trump’s ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, has previously dismissed the very idea of a Palestinian people, calling it a ruse to deprive Israel of land. Meanwhile, a one-state solution, a single state granting Israeli Jews and Palestinians equal rights, remains a geopolitical chimera.
That is the tragedy of Israel’s war in Gaza. Rather than forcing a post-conflict negotiation or, as some of the country’s hardliners might have hoped, removing the Palestinian problem by removing the Palestinian people, we can now see the October 2023-January 2025 onslaught as a desolate episode within an iterative cycle of violence. Operation Iron Wall will be succeeded by other offensives and periodic bouts of bloodshed, with no political settlement possible or admissible. These dynamics will in turn fortify Israel’s already-powerful far right, corrode the country’s democracy, increase its international isolation, and diminish support for it in the West, particularly among young Americans. The armistice might continue to hold in Gaza. But Israel’s broader war, and the politics it stokes, seems to only be beginning.