Israeli forces arrested at least 1,000 Palestinians in a single day on Thursday during a wide-ranging raid on Tulkarem in the northern West Bank, Abdullah Kamil, the governor of the Tulkarem area, told local media. The raid came following a roadside bomb attack on an armored Israeli military vehicle earlier in the day, taking place near a checkpoint outside the city. The attack wounded two Israeli soldiers, according to the Israeli army radio.
Kamil added that Israeli forces imposed a total closure on Tulkarem and conducted a campaign of home searches across the city, describing it as a “systematic policy.”
The explosion that targeted the armored vehicle as it exited Checkpoint 104, west of Tulkarem, was the first armed Palestinian action in the northern West Bank since the Israeli army forcibly expelled the residents of the refugee camps of Tulkarem and Jenin from their homes earlier this year. The camps were emptied of their inhabitants throughout January and February during an all-out Israeli military assault across the northern West Bank, dubbed “Operation Iron Wall.”
The Israeli army vowed that it would remain in the camps for at least a year, allegedly to end the phenomenon of armed resistance groups in the camps, which have been challenging Israeli raids into Palestinian towns and refugee camps since 2022.
Responsibility for Thursday’s attack was claimed by the Tulkarem Brigade, one of the armed groups that had operated out of Tulkarem refugee camp before Operation Iron Wall first commenced. The Brigade’s Thursday operation makes it the first military action carried out by the group in 8 months.
‘Collective vengeance’
The Israeli army’s response was one of “collective vengeance,” said Hussein Sheikh Ali, a Tulkarem resident and local social activist.
“The occupation’s soldiers began to go from house to house, searching and damaging people’s belongings. As we speak, they still are stationed all over the city,” Ali told Mondoweiss on Friday afternoon.
The Israeli army arrested hundreds of Palestinian men and youth in the streets, Ali said, picking them up at random based on who happened to be present at work or in the streets.
“They arrested most of them without even checking their IDs,” Ali said. “They made them walk in a line down the street as Israeli forces directed them where to go. It was a show of force.”
Described as a public display of “humiliation,” images of the hundreds of Palestinian men being marched through the streets while detained spread across social media on Thursday and Friday.
Ali told Mondoweiss that Israeli soldiers conducted field interrogations with many of the men they rounded up, before taking their pictures and eventually letting them go after hours of being detained in an open space. “The raid has paralyzed life in Tulkarem,” he explained. “The army is banning vehicles from driving in the city. It has stopped all forms of commercial life, with schools and businesses closed and under curfew order. The curfew was only just lifted late Friday morning.”
The mass arrests had continued into the night, as life across the city of Tulkarem was brought to a standstill.
Ali added that, as of Friday evening, “people are staying indoors, and whoever needs to get anything from outside needs to go out on foot.”
Meanwhile, Israeli forces have demolished several greenhouses at the outskirts of the city, Ali said.
The city of Tulkarem has barely recovered from the Israeli army’s offensive last January, during which Israeli troops had been stationed in the city center for weeks and demolished parts of several landmark buildings in the area, including the facade of the Tulkarem courthouse in the center of town. Israeli bulldozers had also razed several hundred homes in the Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps to the ground.
“There are still 30,000 displaced people from the camps [living] in the city,” Ali tells Mondoweiss. “Their lives have been turned upside down.”
“Many of them lost their source of income, such as owners of small businesses in the camps,” Ali explained. “And those who still have jobs now have to pay rent or replace belongings they were forced to leave behind when the army forced them to evacuate.”
Ali clarifies that, in Tulkarem, it is the local community and civil society that have taken responsibility for housing and tending to the needs of the twice-displaced population of refugees. “We’ve gotten very little help from the Palestinian government or international organizations,” Ali maintained. “Social associations, cultural clubs, and local charities have been doing all they can to provide for those families who lost everything. We’re trying to get life in the city back on track.”
Ali said that one of the food kitchens he is part of distributes up to 1,000 meals a day to the displaced. It runs entirely on local donations.
Israel’s crackdown across the West Bank has escalated in recent months as Israeli leaders openly discuss their intention to officially annex large swathes of the occupied West Bank. Since October 2023, the Israeli army and settlers have killed 1,020 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, while 7,000 Palestinians have been wounded, and around 19,000 have been arrested.
If you give Foreign Affairs your email and agree to sell them your firstborn child you may get access to this article by Robert Pape, a political scientist at U of Chicago. I believe his article is relevant to this story:
The Unparalleled Devastation of Gaza…Why Punishing Civilians Has Not Yielded Strategic Success…Amid heavy bombardment that has turned the territory into a wasteland of rubble and stringent blockades that have led to mass hunger and even starvation, over 61,000 Palestinians have died and over 145,000 have been seriously wounded…But the true number of the war’s casualties may far outstrip those figures, which do not include the thousands of bodies that remain under the rubble, the large number of dead that could not arrive at morgues, and the excess deaths from the destruction of infrastructure and the ensuing disease, famine, and lack of medical care…. Israel’s campaign in Gaza is the most lethal case of a Western democracy using the punishment of civilians as a tactic of war….Israel’s defenders may insist that civilian deaths are inevitable in a conflict against a burrowed-in terrorist enemy. But it has been clear from Israeli actions—including the targeting of children by snipers, the relentless bombing of civilian infrastructure and residences, and the blockade and starvation of the civilian population—as well as the rhetoric of numerous Israeli officials that Israel’s war is not simply against Hamas but aimed at all the residents of Gaza…. the notion that Hamas can be eradicated via military means is a “fantasy,” as the former Shin Bet director Yoram Cohen said this week….Whether it is called a “genocide” or not, no sensible observer could look at Israel’s war in Gaza and miss the stunning levels of devastation that Palestinians have endured. Beyond the mass death and suffering, the level of physical devastation is remarkable...And yet despite this mammoth destructive enterprise, Israel has not come close to fulfilling its stated aim of eliminating Hamas…. Israel must reverse course and pursue alternatives to its campaign of mass death in Gaza….In June 2024, I argued in Foreign Affairs that at least in one way, Hamas was stronger then than it was before October 7, 2023....Israeli leaders must decide whether their ongoing immoral actions in Gaza are really worth the costs to their country’s future
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/gaza-unparalleled-devastation-robert-pape
Palestinians don’t have to do anything, or even say anything, against Israel for Israel to treat them as existential threats. They are existential threats by being Palestinian — by being the indigenous inhabitants of the land. They give the lie to Israeli Jews’ claims that the land belongs to them.