Since the ceasefire in January 2025, which led to a temporary pause in Israel’s relentless 15-month long genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, there has been an intensification of military attacks in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The Israeli military has launched several new raids across the West Bank, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands. An estimated 40,000 people have been expelled from their homes over the past month alone. Bulldozers have been used to destroy critical infrastructure. The Israeli army has used tanks to attack the Palestinian people taking shelter in refugee camps. This is reported to be the first use of Israeli tanks in the West Bank, since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005, i.e., the uprising of the Palestinian people against the forcible occupation of their land by Israel and their brutal eviction.
The alleged aim of Israel’s present offensive in the West Bank, code-named ‘Operation Iron Wall’, is to root out “terrorists” in the three largest refugee camps – Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams. In reality, it is to terrorise the Palestinian people and drive them out from their land.
Expansion of Israeli settlements and settler violence escalation
Even during Israel’s 15 month long genocidal war on the Palestinian people in Gaza, attacks on the Palestinian people in the West Bank and brutal Israeli settler violence against them were almost daily occurrence. Side by side with the Israeli military attacks, Israeli settlers under the protection of Israeli soldiers, have gone on the rampage time and again, setting fire to Palestinian vehicles and properties, killing and injuring hundreds of Palestinians.
The Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been ceaselessly expanding the illegal construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In 2023, Netanyahu’s government approved the construction of tens of thousands of new housing units in the occupied West Bank region. It also amended a law to allow settlers to return to four settlements that they had previously occupied, but had later been forced to evacuate, because they were illegal.
Illegal by international law
Israel refuses to give up the Palestinian territories it occupied in the 1967 war — East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip — despite repeated UN resolutions asking it to do so.
Setting up and expanding settler colonies of Israeli Jews in the Occupied Territories of Palestine is one of the gravest provocations of the Israeli state against the Palestinian people. This is in direct contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population to territories of other countries and peoples it has forcibly occupied.
Currently, there are about 250 such illegal settler colonies with more than 7.5 lakh settlers (about 10 percent of Israel’s Jewish population) in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are given armed protection by the Israeli state. The Israeli military oversees the building and expansion of the Israeli settlements in these Occupied Territories.
Palestinians who live within these Occupied Territories are surrounded by Israeli settlements. They have to daily suffer the brutal, humiliating methods of frisking at the hundreds of checkpoints set up by the Israeli forces in the Occupied Territories. They live in constant terror of settler attacks and the threat of eviction.
From 7 October, 2023 to 31 December, 2024, at least 1,860 incidents of settler violence in the occupied West Bank were recorded – an average of four a day according to data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Palestinians in Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron are among the worst victims of settler attacks. At least 870 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 177 children, have been killed and more than 6,700 wounded in this period. More than 2,100 homes and buildings have been demolished, leaving more than 6,700 people displaced.
Nightly Israeli army raids have become a regular occurrence in towns and villages in the West Bank, with Israeli soldiers and settlers killing, beating up and terrorising men, women and children.
According to reports, in this period, at least 13,500 Palestinians including children have been arrested by the Israeli soldiers, and at least 3,432 Palestinians are being held in Israeli military prisons without charge.
Full backing of US imperialism
The Israeli state brazenly continues its occupation of Palestinian territory and its attacks on the Palestinian people, without regard for world opinion. This is because it is backed to the hilt by US imperialism. US imperialism continues to assist Israel to arm itself to the teeth. It uses its veto power to defend Israel’s actions in the United Nations, as it has continued to do throughout Israel’s 15-month long genocidal war in Gaza.
The US has built up Israel and continues to strengthen it, as a weapon targeting the Palestinian and other Arab peoples, with the aim of establishing its control and domination over the oil-rich West Asian region.
US president Donald Trump has lifted the sanctions against settler organisations and individuals carrying out violent attacks against Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank. The previous Biden government had been forced to impose these sanctions in February 2024, in the face of world wide condemnation of US support for the settlements Israel was establishing in the occupied territories of West Bank and East Jerusalem in brazen violation of international law. US President Trump’s recent calls for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by the forcible expulsion of more than 2 million Palestinians and for the US take-over of the region, has raised fears of a similar fate, among the Palestinian population in the West Bank and other Occupied Territories.
The crimes by Israel, backed by US imperialism, against the Palestinian people, can never be forgotten or forgiven. The struggle of the Palestinian people against Israeli aggression, in defence of their right to their homeland, is entirely just. It enjoys the widest support of all the freedom-loving peoples of the world.