How West Bank aggression could endanger Gaza ceasefire

Israeli attacks on Palestine’s West Bank continue to take on a new intensity. In the wake of the Gaza ceasefire, Israeli occupation forces and settlers have worked in tandem to attack innocent Palestinians, opening fire and injuring scores of individuals. The spike in violence should send a powerful message to all those who believe that the occupation can be trusted on the Gaza ceasefire: it has simply shifted the center of its brutal aggression to the West Bank. “[Her] mother was feeding her [when] she got a bullet from the sniper in her head,” said the grandmother of Laila al-Khatib, the two-year-old Palestinian girl shot and killed by occupation forces over the weekend. This violence cannot be seen in isolation and has the potential to disrupt the Gaza ceasefire.

Take the Israeli forces’ violent raid at Al-Aqsa Mosque in 2023 into account. The deadly event became a catalyst for spillovers elsewhere, promoting escalations and increasing the scope of confrontations manifold. At present, “Israel” is testing the Resistance’s ability to respond to its deadly onslaught in the occupied West Bank and is creating conditions that could prompt more fitting reactions. Realities on the ground speak for themselves: hundreds of Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp were forced to leave their homes and the casualty count in the occupied West Bank has reached double-digits. By pushing to expand “large scale” occupation raids, “Israel” shows few signs of bringing its terror campaign to a halt. Continuation could put the Gaza ceasefire on thin ice, where both sides are expected to operate in good faith. These expanding raids also put a premium on stamping out groups that are committed to protecting Palestine’s freedoms. If violence in the occupied West Bank spirals out of control in the future, an already-fragile Gaza ceasefire may not hold firm.

The value of the ceasefire is impossible to ignore. Legions of Palestinians are finally returning to their homes in northern Gaza, having borne the brunt of a raging genocide that confined their home soil to rubble. The ceasefire also reaffirms the Resistance’s commitment to its people, as well as their freedoms and liberties as it prioritizes their interests in the captive exchange. 

But “Israel” appears hellbent on introducing new risks to that arrangement. It has been using sophisticated weaponry and deadly warfare techniques to attack the Jenin refugee camp and proudly claims that “lessons” from the Gaza genocide are being applied to the occupied West Bank. Why should Resistance groups hold back? It is Palestinian blood that is being targeted from Gaza to the occupied West Bank, and “Israel” feels it can normalize repeated massacres and avoid any consequences. There are also reports that “Israel” is tightening the screws around the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), calling it to “vacate all premises in occupied East Jerusalem and cease its operations in them by 30 January 2025.” 

This move should be seen as part of a broader effort to strangle critical assistance to Palestinians in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank. After all, UNRWA wields a central role in humanitarian assistance across these territories. The timing of a potential UNRWA ban thus coincides with “Israel’s” raging West Bank warfare, suggesting a conscious strategy to further entrench the occupation – while projecting itself as committed to the Gaza truce. All this offers a solid reason for Resistance groups – across the aisle – to be on the alert for “Israel’s” future transgressions and understand the notorious logic behind its criminal campaigning. “As the long-awaited ceasefire in Gaza took place, Israel’s death machinery escalated its firing in the West Bank, killing 10 people in Jenin today”, said UN Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine, Francesca Albanese, in a recent post on X. “If it is not forced to stop, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians will not be confined to Gaza. Mark my words.”

There are clues that “Israel” won’t stop at anything. In the words of war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, occupation massacres in Palestine’s West Bank are tied to a so-called ‘battle’ with Resistance groups across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. This rhetoric is similar to the falsehoods touted by the genocidal regime to justify its mass extermination campaign in Gaza, upending lives, displacing legions of residents, and pushing the aggregate death toll beyond 47,300. However, the genocide didn’t prevent groups allied with the Palestinian cause from responding to occupation terrorism. Little suggests this would change if “Israel” pushed West Bank terrorism to an unprecedented extreme.

And so, backers of the Gaza ceasefire have been warned, once again, that the greatest obstacle to a pause in hostilities is none other than the occupation. A genocidal regime pardoned by many in the West feels empowered to escalate its terror campaign, rather than cease it in the interests of relative calm.

But as Palestinian Resistance groups have shown thus far, brutal injustices will be met with a proportional response.