Is Israel escalating attacks on the occupied West Bank?

Illegal Israeli settlers shot dead one Palestinian and wounded three others in the occupied West Bank’s Bethlehem, while five others were killed in an Israeli air strike on the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarem in back-to-back attacks on Monday, the Palestinian health ministry said.

The latest escalation comes on top of global concerns over the rising settler violence against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank territory.

The Israeli military said its aircraft struck an “operations centre” in the Nur Shams camp and that troops were separately blocking routes and conducting searches in the occupied West Bank.

Since October last year, the Israeli settlers have carried out nearly 1,300 attacks against the Palestinians.

Palestinians regularly accuse Israeli security forces of standing by and allowing groups of violent settlers to attack their homes and villages.

The United States and a number of European countries have imposed sanctions on violent settlers and repeatedly called on Israel to do more to curb the attacks. But it has not deterred the illegal settlers from targeting Palestinians.

Thousands of Palestinians have been arrested in military raids since October last year, and at least 637 have been killed, many of them stone-throwing youths or uninvolved civilians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

At least 30 Israelis have also been killed in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the same period, according to Israeli authorities.

In parallel to escalating settler attacks, the Israeli military has ramped up its attacks in the occupied West Bank, with the United Nations last month putting the number of Israeli air strikes at 28 since October 7, 2023.

In its over 10-month war, Israel has sought to escalate the conflict by widening the area of its operations. It recently killed a senior Fatah commander Khalil al Maqdah in an air strike in southern Lebanon’s coastal city of Sidon.

Last month, Israel killed Hamas’s politburo leader and a top negotiator in ceasefire talks Ismail Haniyeh in Iranian capital Tehran. While Israel has declined to comment on Haniyeh’s killing, it informed US officials immediately afterward that it was responsible, the Washington Post reported.