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On December 3, Israeli forces raided a home in the town of Qabatiya, south of Jenin, tearing down a map of Palestine hanging on the wall and confiscating another. The homeowners, a woman and her 11-year-old daughter, were detained for several hours and subjected to on-site field interrogations as Israeli troops vandalised the rest of the house before eventually withdrawing.

Noura Muhammad, the homeowner, told Mondoweiss that Israeli soldiers broke down the front door when they arrived, immediately asking her whether there was any “gold or money” in the house.

She added that after detaining her and her daughter alongside their neighbors, the soldiers interrogated the child, asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“They were attempting to get inside my daughter’s head to understand the future,” Noura told Mondoweiss, explaining that this is a common question that Israeli soldiers ask children to see whether they answer that they want to become resistance fighters. “They’re asking because they’re afraid of that future,” she explains.

In another home, a Palestinian youth with EU citizenship who spoke to Mondoweiss on the condition of anonymity said that Israeli soldiers had detained and interrogated him for hours, while telling him, “Why are you here? Leave the land of Israel.”

These are not isolated incidents. Over the past several weeks, the Israeli army has launched a renewed military campaign in the northern West Bank, first in Tubas and its neighboring villages and then extending to areas such as Jenin, where Israeli soldiers executed two young men in late November. Since then, Israeli forces have repeatedly conducted raids of cities and towns, imposed curfews, raided homes and converted them into military outposts, forcibly displaced residents, and detained, interrogated, and arrested hundreds of young men.

But what is behind this renewed military campaign, and why is it unfolding only now? While the official Israeli narrative claims that it is “combating terrorism,” locals in Jenin and other parts of the north say it is really about establishing a new reality on the ground of total Israeli dominance to make way for the resettlement of areas of Jenin that Israel had evacuated in 2005.

Israel is attempting to create a new status quo in the West Bank as part of its objective of altering the north’s geography by repurposing Palestinian land to serve colonization and settler infrastructure. The ongoing military activities in these areas can only be understood with this context in mind, locals say.

The Israeli army, meanwhile, has issued claims that the resistance groups that it has suppressed over the past two years in areas such as

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