War on all fronts: Why Israel expanded its atrocities to occupied West Bank

From forcing people to another Nakba to assassinating adversaries beyond its borders, Israel is trying to implement every page from its playbook of 75 years of occupation in Palestine.

The war machine that Israel has unleashed on one of the most densely populated areas in the world since October 7 forced the international community to admit that what is happening in Palestine is a textbook definition of genocide.

Hospitals, schools, mosques and churches have been targeted in Gaza. The enclave itself has been reduced to a pile of rubble. More than 40,000 people – most of them women and children – have been killed. Thousands of bodies are feared to be trapped in the rubble of destroyed buildings.

And journalists who want to broadcast these mass atrocities have been targeted systemically.

However, even the worst atrocities didn’t lead to swift global action to stop what was happening on the ground. Instead, they only prompted a guessing game about which “red line” Israel would cross next time.

All quiet on the northern front?

Amid the increasing attacks against Israel from Lebanon by Hezbollah, the apparent question was whether these would lead to opening another front.

Yet what appears from the speeches of Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, is that the group is not willing to raise tensions and escalate the conflict into a fully-fledged war.

Israel, on the other hand, continues to target members of the Palestinian resistance inside Lebanon. In the earlier stages of the war, it was Salih al-Aruri, one of the leading figures of Hamas, who was assassinated on January 2 in Beirut.

Recently, one specific target raised eyebrows when Israel assassinated a commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Khalil al Maqdah, near the southern Lebanese city of Sidon. Maqdah’s group is the armed wing of the Fatah movement, led by the current President of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas.

The killing was one of the early signs of what was about to come: Israel’s expansion of its invasion and military incursions toward different resistance movements.

It has been known for some that there is a dispute between Fatah and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and by targeting al Maqdah, Israel aimed to further this internal rift.

All roads lead to occupied West Bank

Israeli authorities justified the killing by accusing al Maqdah and his brother of smuggling weapons into the occupied West Bank through Jordan.

For the last couple of years, international media outlets have broadcast and interviewed members of armed mobilisation in the occupied West Bank. Interestingly enough, Israeli TV shows also propagated the theory that there was an increasing presence of Hezbollah inside the West Bank.

The chain of events culminated in the Israeli army on August 28 launching the most extensive military operation in the occupied West Bank since the Second Intifada.

What the Palestinians are witnessing today is a total war waged by Israel on multiple fronts.

Israel’s plans for Gaza became apparent as it forced people to flee to a pocket of land either toward the seashore or the Egyptian border. As the genocide transpired inside Gaza, the situation in the West Bank became even more tense.

The armed group fighting Israeli occupation in Gaza, Hamas’s armed wing al-Qassam Brigades, Islamic Jihad’s battalions, and al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades also asked their members to resist the occupation forces, specifically in Tulkarm and Jenin.

In addition to established and recognised affiliated groups, there are grassroots, independent youth movements like the Lion’s Den and ‘night confusion’ – which have also been resisting Israeli occupation in the occupied West Bank.

While the occupied West Bank has witnessed a systemic and technological occupation by Israel, with checkpoints constraining the daily mobility and practices of Palestinian people, the occupation forces intensified its raids since October 7.

Israel has arrested up to 10,000 Palestinians “suspected” of supporting the resistance movement and criticising Israel’s brutal war in Gaza.

“In the past 11 months,” as Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, said in her latest comments, “Israeli forces have killed 637 Palestinians, including 151 children, amid military assaults, raids, and settler-led pogroms in the West Bank/East Jerusalem.”

Israel’s way of “peace”

The current Palestinian political system can be symbolised in practical terms by the symbolic photo of late PLO leader Yaser Arafat and former Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with former US president Bill Clinton in the middle.

Palestinians have lived in a system designed according to the local, regional, and global dynamics of the 1990s and sold to the world as the Oslo Peace Process.

Whether the “Palestinian street” wanted such a solution is a question that needs to be answered.

The suffering of the Palestinian people, though, has forced the international community to listen to Palestinian demands once more.

Global power politics after October 7 is, however, more complex than it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The United States' unconditional support for Israel led to another veto power in the UN Security Council, China, to act as the new guarantor of a "new world order" for Palestine.

All Palestinian factions, including Fatah, Hamas, PFLP, and Islamic Jihad, among others, agreed during a meeting in China last month to achieve comprehensive national unity under the banner of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Israel chose to retaliate by assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau and spreading violence towards different parts of Palestine.

Haniyeh was the most important figure for the future of Palestine and the ideal candidate to replace Mahmud Abbas.

His assassination can be seen as Israel’s desperate attempt to marginalise the resistance forces and radicalise them and the public to turn against the Palestinian political leadership.