Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz told a meeting of top Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commanders today that the Defense Ministry is “preparing for a full-scale war situation” in the West Bank, according to Israeli’s N12 channel, speaking of “intensified military activity, large-scale counterterrorism operations in key areas, and stricter enforcement along major routes.”
Israel’s Haaretz daily today warned again in a new lead editorial that what is planned, is to do to the West Bank what has been done to Gaza, and insisted that these plans must be stopped, asking, “Does Anyone in Israel Care about the Blood of Palestinian Children?”
The IDF claimed that it had hit a “terrorist cell” when it killed two Palestinian boys yesterday, ages eight and ten, with a drone. Such acts are not a war against Hamas; they are “a response to calls from the settler right for the Gazafication of the West Bank,” Haaretz charged. Israeli settlers in the West Bank have been using “pogroms and near-lynching” to drive Palestinians from their communities, Haaretz charged. Now they “want to see expulsions and the destruction of civilian infrastructure and entire buildings in the West Bank, too. They look at images of the devastated Gaza Strip and the statistics of tens of thousands of people killed there and are filled with envy. They are jealous of Gaza, where, according to the consensus in Israel, there are no uninvolved noncombatants.
“This week, Likud lawmaker Moshe Saada said that he had no problem with children in Gaza dying. ‘The only way to restore security is to continue the siege on Gaza. Our mistake was that we haven’t done this up to now,’ he said.”
“But what about the blood of Palestinian children?” Haaretz asks, concluding its editorial: “This is no longer of any interest to anyone in Israel. The settler right must not be permitted to drag the country into a war of Gog and Magog, a Jewish Armageddon, in the belief that this war will lead to the final redemption. The settler right’s desire to turn the West Bank into Gaza must be thwarted.”
