“Little Gaza” is the nickname locals use for a battle-scarred area here where buildings are destroyed and roads torn up, where families have been driven away, where the alleys throb with loss, grief and fear of snipers. But this isn’t Gaza at all, it’s a refugee camp in Tulkarm in the West Bank.
Without attracting much notice or protest, Israel increasingly is using the tools of war familiar in Gaza — tanks, airstrikes and massive destruction and displacement — here in the West Bank. Human rights groups like B’Tselem call this the “Gazafication” of the West Bank.
A centerpiece of this Gazafication is a wave of Israeli military assaults that started in January in West Bank refugee camps, forcing some 40,000 people from their homes. Historians say that is the highest number of civilians displaced in the territory since Israel seized it in 1967.
In the short run, the Israeli military actions seem to have succeeded in suppressing Palestinian militants in the camps, but at immense cost in lives and suffering. One of those reportedly shot dead by Israeli forces was Sondos Shalabi, a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant with her first child.
In the longer run, the destruction may just sow the seeds of violence. On the edge of a no-go area, where groups of Palestinians looked at their homes but dared not enter for fear of Israeli snipers, I spoke to a 12-year-old boy, Mohammed Abdul Jalil. He said his home had been demolished and his school classes canceled for the last two months because of the military occupation of the camp.
What does Mohammed want to be when he grows up? He spoke up with great bravado: a fighter for Hamas.
“I want to be martyred,” he explained.
So I fear that Israeli forces, in crushing militancy in 2025 but seemingly moving ever further from a two-state solution, are laying the groundwork for violence in 2035.
“Of course more kids want to be martyrs,” said Faisal Salameh, a local official of the Palestinian Authority who warned that Israel is creating ferocious hatreds here. “Why would these children not love life?” he asked. “Because they’ve been thrown out of their homes and schools and lost all normal life.”
“When they demolish your home, are you going to say, ‘Thank you’?” he asked.
Almost as soon as the temporary Gaza cease-fire was reached in January, Israel’s military pivoted to refugee camps near Tulkarm, Jenin and Tubas in the northern West Bank. These camps have indeed been home to militants, some of whom have obtained guns smuggled in from Israel or Jordan, and Israelis have understandable concerns about the risk of terror attacks.
“We are eliminating terrorists,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in February, in justifying the military assaults.
As in Gaza, however, countless innocents are also suffering. I met a middle-aged woman, Suha Mueen, who wept as she recounted how Israeli forces had demolished her home. She then rented another house, but a few days before we spoke, Israeli troops ordered her to vacate that one. Now she and two children are sleeping outside, in the cemetery.
“Where can we go?” she asked. “The mosques are already full.”
She and others may be homeless for a while. Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, has said he told his country’s military to remain in the refugee camps for the year and “not to allow residents to return and the terror to grow.”
Saida Mustafa, 50, is among those who have experienced the Gazafication of the West Bank in multiple ways. An Israeli airstrike killed one son and five other people as they were chatting on the steps of the family home, she said. Soldiers apparently perceived a threat; the family says the group was just eating snacks and talking. Then in February Israeli forces shut off water and put up new checkpoints, she said, leading the family to flee their home and move in with relatives.
“What we need is not boxes of aid but a solution,” Saida told me. But she is not optimistic that one is near.
The Palestinian Authority conducted its own crackdown on militants in the West Bank refugee camps, presumably to make the argument to Israel and America that it can be entrusted with managing Gaza. But among Palestinians themselves, all this seems to have compounded the unpopularity of the Palestinian Authority, already derided as impotent and corrupt.
Polling suggests that Hamas is more popular in the West Bank, where it symbolizes resistance to Israel, than in Gaza, where people actually have to live under it. In short, rather than wiping out Hamas in the West Bank, Israeli raids may be nurturing the despair that feeds it.
A fundamental question this year is whether Israel will annex the West Bank, as some in the far right in Israel are itching to do. The ordinary Palestinians I spoke to were less worried than I expected about annexation. From their point of view, they were already more or less annexed.
It may be that full annexation would cause the most damage to Israel itself. “It would backfire on us, in a painful way,” former Prime Minister Ehud Barak told me, adding that it would effectively kill the traditional Zionist dream of an idealistic and democratic Jewish state. If Palestinian territories were fully annexed and there were no ethnic cleansing by driving out large numbers of people, Palestinians would constitute half the population.
One government minister who is pushing for annexation, Orit Strock, has bluntly said that Palestinians would not be able to vote for the Knesset or have land rights.
“This cannot be called democracy,” Barak noted, adding that an Israel that fully annexed the West Bank would “inevitably become either non-Jewish or nondemocratic.”
Past American presidents have tended to be a mild brake on Netanyahu and the Israeli right, but the Trump administration seems more of an enabler. Trump has already ended some modest sanctions that the Biden administration imposed on extremist settlers.
So while it gets much less attention than Gaza, the repression here in the West Bank seems likely to continue and perhaps worsen. That is terrible for Palestinians, but it may prove even more destructive to the very idea of Israel.
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