Andre Damon@Andre__Damon, WSWS, 24 Oct 2026
The Israeli government sealed off the occupied West Bank on Friday, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was preparing a military operation there of a kind “not carried out since” Israel’s conquest of the territory in 1967.
The Israeli government, in alliance with the Trump administration, is extending the Gaza genocide to the West Bank in step with the preparations for a renewed offensive against Iran. Both are part of one continuous operation to create a “new Middle East,” launched in October 2023 under Democratic President Joe Biden and continued under US President Donald Trump. The total subjugation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a corollary of the war plans of the Trump and Netanyahu governments.
Netanyahu ordered the lockdown four days before Israel’s national election on October 27, 11 days before the US midterm elections on November 3 and four days after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met him in Israel. The New York Times wrote Wednesday that US officials said Hegseth and Netanyahu discussed new strikes on Iran, to be launched after the US elections.
Just as the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas were seized upon by Netanyahu as the pretext to occupy Gaza and displace and exterminate its inhabitants, the Netanyahu government has seized on an attack on Israeli soldiers as its pretext for the offensive to annex the West Bank.
Two soldiers, Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, were killed at a checkpoint outside Hebron, in the southern West Bank, on Friday morning. The Israeli army claimed that two Palestinians from Hebron opened fire on the checkpoint and that troops shot both men dead after a gunfight of about 20 minutes.
Netanyahu pledged to destroy the neighborhood the alleged gunmen came from. “First of all, we will act to destroy this place, to change it completely,” he said at the checkpoint, the Times of Israel reported Friday. The army would “implement the successful and aggressive model we used in the refugee camps” and go “house to house,” Netanyahu said.Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones
The government was “considering a very extensive IDF [Israeli army] operation in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], such as has not been carried out since” the 1967 war, Netanyahu said Friday.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said Friday: “Every clan neighborhood in Hebron from which the terrorists emerged today will be evacuated of its residents.” Katz added: “Just like in Gaza …”
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wrote Friday: “There is no alternative to a comprehensive military campaign in Judea and Samaria to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, collect the weapons, and eliminate the terrorists, exactly as we did in Gaza …” The Palestinian Authority administers the Palestinian towns of the West Bank, and there is no evidence linking it to the gunmen.
By Friday evening the army was demolishing Palestinian buildings near Hebron, the Times of Israel reported that day, after Smotrich said he had ordered the immediate destruction of “a large swath of illegal Arab structures.” The army said that evening that it had “launched offensive counter-terrorism operations in the Hebron area.”
In the first 14 days of October the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs counted “at least 160” attacks by settlers tied to the olive harvest, UN News reported Wednesday. On Monday the agency said Israeli troops and settlers had killed five Palestinians in the West Bank and injured more than 240 in two weeks.
Settlers also staged provocative attacks on foreigners. On October 16 about 80 masked settlers carrying clubs charged a group of Palestinian olive pickers near the village of Abu Falah and beat Heidi Levine, a photojournalist working for the Washington Post, Al Jazeera reported October 20. On October 17 masked settlers attacked French, Belgian and Polish diplomats in the town of Taybeh and threw a French mayor, Bernard Baudoux, 78, to the ground, Al Jazeera reported the next day.
On Friday Netanyahu called West Bank settlers “heroic” and “an example to the people of Israel and to the State of Israel,” NBC News reported that day.
Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, politics, West Bank
Leave a Reply