Thea Fathanah Arbar, CNBC Indonesia
Wednesday, 10/25/2023 14:30 WIB
Photo: Palestinians use slingshots to fight Israeli troops on the western edge of the Gaza strip. (AP/Majdi Mohammed)
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – The situation in the West Bank (West Bank) is getting hotter after Israel launched an attack on the area. In recent times, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) blew up the Aqbat Jaber refugee camp on the outskirts of Jericho.
A resident named Mansour (56) said the camp was targeted because his brother Maher Shalon was arrested and suspected of killing an Israeli citizen. In the camp were Maher’s wife and children.
“Israelis have been coming almost every day since October 7,” Mansour was quoted as saying The GuardianWednesday (25/10/2023).
Aqabat Jaber is one of 19 camps still scattered across the West Bank, which were established after the founding of Israel in 1948. These camps were built to accommodate people who fled the Nakba or disaster.
Today, the camps remain a squalid maze of narrow streets with few services, plagued by poverty and crime. All of them are also centers of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Friday’s Aqbat Jaber attack was just one of several major Israeli operations in refugee camps and West Bank towns over the past two weeks.
This is a signal that Israel also considers the West Bank as new territory in the war with Hamas in Gaza. Increased Israeli military activity will likely inflame the already unstable West Bank.
Victims in the West Bank
According to Palestinian data, more than 90 people have been killed, mostly as a result of clashes with the IDF, and 1,200 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the conflict broke out.
Reported Reutersattack drone Israel last night killed three people in the West Bank. The military said armed Palestinians “fired and threw explosive devices” at its troops in the Jenin refugee camp, in the northern West Bank. The military then attacked them with drones, and “the attack was identified.”
At least eight Palestinian communities were also forced to leave their land due to increasing violence from Israeli settlers living in the West Bank.
In Wadi as-Seeq, near Ramallah, soldiers and settlers detained three Palestinians, stripping them down to their underwear before beating them, urinating on them, stubbing out cigarettes on their skin, and sexually assaulting them. The IDF has opened an investigation.
The entire region, which is home to 3 million Palestinians, and around 500,000 Israelis, feels like it is on the verge of exploding.
Before the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict returned to Gaza earlier this month, most people in the region were more worried about the possibility of a return to full-scale fighting in the West Bank.
2022 was the bloodiest year in the occupied territories since the end of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2005, and 2023 has already surpassed the previous year’s grim statistics even before the new war broke out.
But it’s not just the West Bank that is expecting more fighting: Israeli communities in the north of the country, and Lebanese communities near the Blue Line border between the two, are also bracing for more violence.
Watch the video below:
Gaza Logistics Emergency, Israeli Military Threatens Aid Distributors
(luc/luc)
2023-10-25 07:30:00
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