There is another war Israel is waging – one that is not making headlines |
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.
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........