This is an excerpt from Palestine Briefing, Al-Monitor's weekly newsletter covering the big stories of the week in Palestine. To get Palestine Briefing in your inbox, sign up here.
While the world’s focus rightly continues to be centered on the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, it’s vital that we not overlook what is happening in the West Bank in terms of Israeli military actions and increased settler violence.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself who is known for his extremist and racist statements, has called for the creation of “sterile buffer zones" around Israeli settlements in the West Bank that Palestinians would not be allowed to enter. These zones would even preclude Palestinians from farming their own privately owned fields if they fall in these areas and from participating in the ongoing olive harvest.
Amid an absence of media attention, Israeli troops have stepped up brutal raids in the Jenin refugee camp and have continued their extrajudicial killings. (Israel says it is targeting Hamas and other militant group members since the Hamas attack.)
The Palestinian WAFA news agency reported on a video showing Israeli forces killing four militants by spraring a car with bullets in the Tukaram refugee camp on Nov. 6, bringing the number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank to 163 in the month since Hamas’ military wing in Gaza carried out its attack on southern Israel. The Israeli army, for its part, said the four men killed in Tulkarem were part of a terrorist cell associated with Hamas and responsible for carrying out “dozens of gun attacks and planning additional attacks."
Since the beginning of 2023, at least 371 Palestinians have lost their lives to Israeli bullets in the West Bank, according to the latest figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry. The New York Times has quoted UN officials as saying that in addition to the deaths, over 2,000 Palestinians have been injured and 1,000 displaced in the West Bank since Oct. 7.
The increase in settler violence against Palestinians has caught the attention of international players. Liz Throssell, UN spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Office, recently said, "Settler violence, which was already at record levels, has also escalated dramatically, averaging seven attacks a day. In more than a third of these attacks, firearms were used." US President Joe Biden has spoken on the issue in recent weeks, saying that settler violence was “pouring gasoline” on an already dangerous situation.
The role of Palestinian leadership
The role and function of the Ramallah-based Palestinian leadership has come into sharper focus as the situation in the West Bank escalates. Two days after the Nov. 4 meeting in Amman between regional foreign ministers and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Jordanian columnist Hamadeh Faraneh told a meeting of senior journalists and editors, including myself, that Arab foreign ministers had insisted to Blinken that there is no option for Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza except for the PLO leadership in Ramallah.
While Washington has reportedly weighed the option of regional figures and the United Nations playing a role in a post-Hamas Gaza, the Arab ministers, according to Faraneh, were adamant about Ramallah remaining the sole representative of the Palestinian people. “Whether we like it or not, there is only one legitimate and agreed leadership of Palestinians, and all the Arabs that Blinken met with informed him of that consensus,” Faraneh noted.
In addition to reiterating that the PLO should be considered the overarching Palestinian representative, Faraneh said the ministers tried to convey that the PA should be given more support to address the uptick of Israeli revenge attacks in the West Bank since the Oct. 7 attack.
One topic of discussion is the need to expand the PLO’s executive committee to include more representation of the powers on the ground in the Palestinian territories, both in Gaza and the West Bank. This expansion should be followed, the argument goes, by the installation of an emergency government after the war is over that would include people representative of the Palestinian population, including those close to the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements.
Israeli minister calls for ‘sterilized’ buffer zones outside West Bank settlements
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08.11.2023
This is an excerpt from Palestine Briefing, Al-Monitor's weekly newsletter covering the big stories of the week in Palestine. To get Palestine Briefing in your inbox, sign up here.
While the world’s focus rightly continues to be centered on the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, it’s vital that we not overlook what is happening in the West Bank in terms of Israeli military actions and increased settler violence.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself who is known for his extremist and racist statements, has called for the creation of “sterile buffer zones" around Israeli settlements in the West Bank that Palestinians would not be allowed to enter. These zones would even preclude Palestinians from farming their own privately owned fields if they fall in these areas and from participating in the ongoing olive harvest.
Amid an absence of media attention, Israeli troops have stepped up brutal raids in the Jenin refugee camp and have continued their extrajudicial killings. (Israel says it is targeting........
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