Key Developments: September 1-4
A Palestinian man was shot in the head and killed during an
Israel army raid on the town of Aqaba, in the Tubas district of the
northern West Bank on Friday, September 1. Abdul Rahim Fayez
Ghannam, 36, a farmer, was shot in the head while he was reportedly on
his way to his fields in the early morning on Friday, and was allegedly
caught in the crossfire, Al Jazeera reported.
Israeli forces had raided the town in search of a wanted Palestinian
man, who Israeli authorities accuse of carrying out a shooting near a
checkpoint in the Jordan valley last month. During the raid, which
sparked confrontations with local residents that lasted several hours in
the early morning hours of Friday, Israeli forces fired tear gas, sound
bombs, and anti-tank grenades towards a residential building,
destroying homes in the building and a nearby wedding venue. Though the
wanted man was not home, Israeli forces reportedly arrested his two
brothers and father, beating at least one of the brothers with their
guns.
Three Palestinians were arrested during an Israeli raid on
the Jenin refugee camp, the first raid since the army’s large-scale
invasion of the camp last July. According to local reports, an
undercover unit of Israeli forces entered the camp on Monday morning to
arrest resistance fighters in the camp affiliated with the military wing
of the Hamas movement. The resistance in Jenin became aware of the
soldiers and began firing towards them, sparking further armed
confrontations. Israeli reinforcements soon arrived, with dozens of army
jeeps, drones, and a helicopter providing cover for the forces.
According to Israeli media, the three Palestinians who were arrested
were identified as Abdullah Sobeh, Ward Sharim, and Mus’ab Ja’ayda, who
the Israeli army is claiming were involved in different shooting
operations, the detonation of IEDs and firing rockets towards
settlements and military posts in recent months. According to the
Palestinian Ministry of Health, four Palestinians were injured with live
ammunition during the raid. According to Israeli media reports, at
least one of the injured was also one of the three men who were
arrested. The raid on Monday marked the first time the army raided the
Jenin camp since July, when Israel carried out a large-scale incursion
on the camp with more than 1,000 troops, killing 14 people and injuring
dozens more.
Israel has broken a 30-year record for administrative
detention of Palestinians, with 1,264 Palestinians currently imprisoned
under the policy, which human rights groups have criticized as
cruel and inhumane. Israeli human rights group Hamoked said that the new
data it obtained from the Israel Prison Service broke the most recent
record of 1,108 administrative detainees, recorded in March 2003, in the
midst of the Second Intifada. Administrative detainees currently make
up one-quarter of the entire Palestinian prisoner population. “This is a
mass, arbitrary detention. Israel is holding over 1,200 Palestinians
without charge or trial, some of them for years, with no effective
judicial review,” Hamoked’s director Jessica Montell said.
Administrative Detention is a widely condemned policy used by Israel
almost exclusively against Palestinians. It allows Israel to imprison
Palestinians indefinitely, for months and years at a time, without
charging them with a crime or putting them on trial. A number of
Palestinian administrative detainees have been on hunger strike in
Israeli prison for weeks in protest of their unlawful detention.
According to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS), Israel has issued
more than 2,200 administrative detention orders against Palestinian
detainees so far this year. In-Depth
We are moving into a new phase of armed resistance in the West Bank.
The broad contours of this phase have only recently begun to reveal
themselves, and they suggest that the West Bank has become a crucial
front for the battle over political legitimacy among Palestinian
factions. It started in early August when the West Bank witnessed a rise
in the number of army raids, lone wolf operations, arrests
of resistance fighters, and protracted street battles in cities and
refugee camps across the northern West Bank. Israeli security analysts noted
the past month’s escalation of Palestinian “terrorism,” pointing out
that it was the product of a lack of a strategic and political vision
for dealing with the West Bank on the part of the current Israeli
government, relegating the army to having to fight “wars of attrition”
against resistance groups through military means alone — as opposed to
using military force in tandem with a more “holistic” strategy that
includes containment through “soft power.”
But the other reason the Israeli intelligence attributes to the
uptick in resistance is the increased “encouragement of terrorism” by
Palestinian political factions. Only last week, Netanyahu threatened
Saleh al-Aruri (Hamas’s deputy leader who operates from Lebanon),
accusing him of being behind the rise in resistance attacks — coming on
the back of an interview Aruri gave to Mayadeen, in which he asserted
that any targeted assassinations would lead to a regional war in which
Israel would lose and that settlers and the settlements would become the
next target of these resistance groups for the foreseeable future.
Despite their reductive qualities, these assessments contain granules of
truth.
It is true that Palestinian resistance factions, whose top leaders
are largely based in Gaza or abroad, are now operating with a greater
degree of confidence with respect to supporting resistance. This can be
gleaned not only in the rise of armed resistance operations but also in
the fact that the resistance factions are openly claiming credit for
them. Throughout the past year and a half, most of the West Bank
resistance was carried by cross-factional formations like the Lions’ Den
or umbrella organizations like the Jenin Brigade. Even when those
groups received arms and funding from the Al-Quds Brigades (the armed
wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad), the most notable feature of
these groups was that they were non-factional and non-sectarian, and the
resistance factions did not lay a heavy claim to these groups even as
they assisted them. One reason for this was that groups like the Lions’
Den are not perceived to be sectarian or serving a specific factional
agenda. Another reason was that many of the members of these resistance
groups were not, in fact, Hamas or PIJ members, but more closely
affiliated with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (the military wing of Fatah)
— especially the Nablus-based groups, like the Lions’ Den, the Balata
Brigade, and the Askar Brigade.
And yet a third reason was that the resistance on the West Bank was
still not a sure thing, and the resistance factions mostly refrained
from explicitly claiming credit for West Bank actions. This caution
wasn’t enough, however, as Israel still launched two wars on Gaza within
the same one-year period — both of them aimed at striking at the
leadership of the PIJ for its early role in fomenting the West Bank
armed resistance groups. It was an attempt to decide the fate of the
West Bank in Gaza.
Things have changed now. The recent rise in armed resistance
operations — whether supposed “lone wolf” attacks, defensive skirmishes
against Israeli forces, or the detonation of IEDs during Israeli
invasions — has been accompanied by a stream of commentary and praise by
the resistance factions, who have also claimed credit for them.
In the past week alone, the Israeli army has conducted a
multi-pronged assault on the northern West Bank, targeting the historic
“triangle of fire” representing Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarem as bulwarks
of resistance. It has launched repeated invasions into Tulkarem to take out the Tulkarem Brigade, which has displayed resilience despite Israeli campaigns to repress them. It has launched invasions into Nablus
to repress an apparently resurgent resistance presence in the city
after an IED was detonated and injured four Israeli soldiers in the
process, claimed by the Nablus branch of the Al-Quds Brigades. And it
launched the first invasion of Jenin refugee camp since the Jenin
Operation, this time in a mission to arrest three resistance fighters
who are alleged Hamas members.
In short, Hamas and the PIJ are now laying claim to the West Bank
resistance more assertively, which is an indication that they are taking
the West Bank with a greater degree of seriousness than they did a year
ago, considering it more viable terrain for building a resistance
infrastructure — which even the Shin Bet recognizes as a “terrorist
system” that exists in the “hearts and minds” of Palestinian youth. The
coming phase of the armed resistance will continue to see the rise in
armed operations, defensive skirmishes, and possibly the detonation of
increasingly better IEDs in different areas — all brought to you by the
resistance factions and the youth of an Intifada that has continued
unannounced, renewing itself quietly and with little fanfare.
Key Figures:
- More than 230 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the year.
- Israel is currently imprisoning 5,100 Palestinian political
prisoners in its jails, according to prisoners rights group Addameer.
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