‘War on all Palestinians’: Israel steps up atrocities in occupied West Bank

Entering occupied East Jerusalem following Hamas' attack on Israel, my colleagues and I drove past armed Israeli soldiers grouped by the dozens on our way to the Palestinian neighbourhood of at-Tur on the Mount of Olives.

"Tell everyone we're the good guys!" an Israeli soldier yells at us after stopping our vehicle to check our press credentials.

The irony is not lost on anyone.

About 80 km to the west, Israeli warplanes are dropping bombs on helpless Palestinian civilians in Gaza, killing tens of thousands of people, most of them children and women.

Here, in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Israeli troops and settlers have increased their violent atrocities on Palestinians following the October 7 Hamas attack.

Israeli military raids and settler attacks have increased since October 7, as Tel Aviv extends its military control of the entire Palestinian population, creating a palpable atmosphere of fear throughout the occupied territories.

The numbers are staggering and tell the story by themselves.

Over 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank since October 7. This is more than the number of Palestinian killed in all of 2022, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

The ministry states that the death toll in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of the year has risen to over 460.

More than 50 of those killed since October 7 are children, raising the number of minors killed since the beginning of the year to over 90, according to the independent organisation Defense for Children-Palestine.

Palestinians are often killed during Israeli military raids into neighbourhoods around the occupied territories. Some are even shot by Israeli snipers.

On November 2, a thirteen-year-old Palestinian boy was shot in the back and killed by an undercover Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank’s Al Bireh city.

Ayham al Shafeh was killed while he was on his way to have breakfast with his friends.

Palestinian neighbours point out that no clashes had taken place on that day. There were no demonstrations. And resistance movements are not active in the area. There was no reason for the Israeli soldier to target the Palestinian teenager.

The pained screams of Ayham's mother, Najeeya al Shafeh, could be heard from outside her home as friends and family tried to comfort her.

"My soul is attached to him…," she tells TRT World. "I love him. I love him a lot."

Record detention and torture

Israel has also ramped up arbitrary detentions since the Hamas attack, nearly doubling the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

Over 3,290 Palestinians have been detained in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank since October 7, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society. The list includes 125 women and 145 children.

Rights groups like Amnesty International have documented widespread torture by Israeli forces in places of detention.

At the beginning of November, disturbing video footage began surfacing on social media, uploaded by Israeli soldiers themselves, of Palestinian men from the occupied West Bank being tortured by soldiers.

One of the men detained in the occupied West Bank was Issa Amro, the co-founder of the grassroots group Youth Against Settlements and a well-known activist.

In 2010, Amro won the United Nations OHCHR' Human Rights Defender of the Year in Palestine' award.

He is based in H2 Hebron, the Israeli-controlled section of the ancient city.

H2 Hebron is the only area in the occupied West Bank in which Israeli settlers live among Palestinian residents and not in separate communities. For that reason, Palestinians often suffer the harshest conditions imposed by the Israeli military in the entire occupied territory.

Palestinians living in H2 Hebron must contend with 22 Israeli military checkpoints and more than 100 movement barriers daily.

Since October 7, an estimated 34,000 Palestinians, who live among 700 Israeli settlers, have been barred from stepping outside their homes except for one hour in the morning and one in the evening on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, according to residents and Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem.

Dror Sadot, a spokeswoman for B'Tselem, says the lockdown in H2 Hebron is a "blatant example of how Israel is implementing collective punishment in the West Bank".

Palestinians across the occupied territories have had to face Israeli soldiers and settlers enraged by the news of Hamas' attack out of Gaza into southern Israel.

Amro was detained at an Israeli military base on October 7 after news of the Hamas attack broke out. He was walking home when he was attacked by around 15 Israeli soldiers and 10 settlers, some of whom were his neighbours.

He was handcuffed, blindfolded and gagged before being taken away.

TRT was unable to reach Amro in person due to Israel's lockdown of the city, but he spoke over the phone to share details of his detention.

"I was dehumanised in a very bad way. I was beaten before. I was attacked before. I'm one of the most frequently arrested Palestinians in the West Bank.

But it was the first time in my life to be treated this way," he tells TRT World.

"I'm a human rights defender with international recognition, and I'm known to Israeli forces for my non-violent politics… And despite being a public figure, I was almost killed."

Amro was held for 10 hours in a cold room where he says Israeli soldiers and settlers beat him, spat on him and sexually harassed him. He says they also took photos and videos of him during the torture.

The torture was so brutal that Amro passed out twice during the detainment. But he was refused medical attention.

Amro says his wrists were bound so tight with plastic handcuffs that he has lost some feeling in his hands and has to consider a surgical operation to repair nerve damage. He says he knows some men who were detained and treated worse than he was.

"It was too much for the families of these men to see this happen. There is more fear now. Palestinians don't get close to soldiers. They don't challenge soldiers," Amro says.

Rights groups say Israel is making a mockery of the Fourth Geneva Convention under which Palestinian people of the occupied West Bank and Gaza are "Protected Persons".

Under international law, torture and other ill-treatment committed against protected persons in an occupied territory is a war crime.

Displacement and forcible transfer

According to Amro and residents of H2 Hebron, almost every Palestinian home was raided by Israeli forces on October 7, and Palestinians are facing increasing stone-pelting and physical attacks by Israeli settlers.

"Within the first few hours after Hamas' attack, H2 Hebron was closed completely. Soldiers everywhere, settlers everywhere. The number of soldiers increased by maybe five times. They closed the roads to the houses. They closed all the checkpoints," Amro says.

Israeli settlers, under the protection of the Israeli military, went around to the homes of Palestinian families on the evening of October 7, warning them to leave within 24 hours or risk getting killed.

"In H2 Hebron, I can say that about 40 percent of Palestinian families left their homes," Amro adds.

"When Palestinians don't feel safe, and they don't have enough access to food, and they don't have any government services, they leave. This is what's happening."

According to B'Tselem, since October 7, five communities in South Hebron Hills have left their homes. These communities include Khirbet a-Radhem, Khirbet Zanutah, Enizan, Atiriyah and Maktal Msalam.

The Israeli human rights organisation also reports that approximately 963 Palestinians have been displaced from 16 communities throughout areas of the occupied West Bank as a result of Israeli military and settler attacks and land access restrictions.

The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission reported that Israeli settlers carried out 220 attacks against Palestinians and their property in the occupied West Bank in October alone.

Amro says that with the majority of media attention on Gaza, where over 15,800 Palestinians have been killed, Israel has been able to accelerate dispossession and displacement across the West Bank.

"Usually, in these areas, we depend on media attention. What makes the Israeli army prevent Israeli settlers from attacking Palestinians is the media. This is our only form of protection. And we do not have this now."

According to international law, forcible transfer of an occupied population is a crime against humanity punishable by the International Criminal Court.

Violence predates October 7

The occupied West Bank was already boiling before October 7 under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government, Amro says.

Before the Hamas assault, 2023 was already the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank in over two decades, with 250 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire, mostly during military raids.

The current situation represents a continuation of Israel's erasure of Palestinians and its longstanding policy of forcible transfer throughout the entirety of the occupied territory to gain control.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), state-sanctioned settler-driven displacement in the occupied West Bank has been on the rise throughout 2023.

In September, OCHA revealed that 1,105 Palestinians from 28 communities – about 12 percent of their total population – had been displaced since 2022, citing settler violence and the prevention of access to grazing grounds as the primary reason.

As part of a coalition deal with its ultra-national allies, Netanyahu's far-right government put West Bank settlement expansion at the top of its list of priorities a day before being sworn into power in December 2022, vowing to legalise dozens of illegally built outposts and to annex the occupied territory.

According to data from the Israeli rights group Peace Now, there are currently around 694,000 settlers, 145 settlements and 140 random settlement outposts across the occupied West Bank - all illegal under international law.

"This really shows that the war is not on Hamas. The war is on all Palestinians. And any Palestinian who raises his voice or talks about occupation will be a target," Amro says.

"Israel is not protecting itself. Israel is protecting its occupation, its apartheid and its settlements. They want to keep their supremacy above Palestinians."

It is glaringly obvious in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank that every Palestinian is treated with suspicion. Every Palestinian stands as a "security threat" against Israel's 75-year-long campaign to establish a Jewish-only state.

This is clear in the landscape where Israel has installed the West Bank barrier, its military checkpoints, watchtowers, surveillance cameras and fences lined with barbed wire around schools, hospitals, shops, homes and roads.

Even though Israel has no legal basis for using force against an occupied population and even though the 16-year-long siege on Gaza has been called "a form of genocide" by the International Criminal Court's former Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the circumstances of the Palestinians worsen every year, backed by Israel's powerful allies.

"This means Palestinians are left alone, and Israel is not the only occupier," Amro says.

"We are all living in a violent circle."