Today in the West Bank, five Israeli soldiers were reportedly shot by two Palestinians. Two of the soldiers died and both of the Palestinian gunmen were killed. An average day in the West Bank witnesses four attacks by Israeli settlers and over ten injured Palestinians, of which two are children. One Palestinian is killed per day and, every fifth day on average, the Palestinian killed is a child.
Four days before the polls open for national elections, with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu slightly behind in the latest poll, Netanyahu used the latest incident to call an emergency meeting of his Security Cabinet, joined by officials from military and security agencies. Without offering any evidence to the public, he declared that Hamas was “planning a major attack aimed at murdering innocent civilians.” While Netanyahu still could trigger a full-scale war with Iran prior to the voting, he may well calculate that his filling the next 96 hours with a militarized drama against Palestinian “terrorists” may work just as well to save him from being deposed and subject to prison.
Netanyahu announced, as reported by the Times of Israel (TOI): “First of all, we will act to destroy this place [Hebron], to change it completely... But we are going to do something that has not been done until now: We will implement the successful and aggressive model we used in the refugee camps, which are essentially terrorist strongholds... That is exactly what we will do here, in the neighborhood in Hebron from which the terrorists emerged. We will evacuate the residents, we will go house to house, we will remove the weapons there as well, and all the terrorist infrastructure will be dealt with and destroyed.”
Netanyahu added that the IDF has drawn up plans for “a very broad IDF operation in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], the likes of which have not been done since the Six-Day War. The IDF is ready to carry it out and we will determine the timing, but it is on its way.”
Today, Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank, was completely enclosed by the IDF, turning a region of almost a million Palestinians into a giant prison, where individuals are allowed exit only if they pass examination (questioning and security checks), one by one. The IDF said that “anyone who raises suspicion during the checks will be taken for questioning by security forces.” Further, the army has begun demolishing “illegal structures that could pose a security risk.” One need only look at the vast leveling and destruction in Gaza to appreciate Netanyahu’s plan for Hebron.
National Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir added: “We have to act before it’s too late. The Palestinian Authority must be dismantled and demilitarized, and its terror infrastructure wiped out completely… The lives of the residents of Judea and Samaria, of the settlers, the lives of the soldiers, the lives of the police officers, the lives of our fighters are a million times more important than freedom of movement.”
Hebron has been a launching pad for violent settler extremists in the past. Its more than 200,000 Palestinian residents have been targeted for harassment by a community of radical settlers living under protection of the Israeli government. Under the influence of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the Gush Emunim settler movement grew in Hebron. While subsequently disbanded, Gush Emunim combined with the racist, supremacist Kach movement of Meir Kahane, to recruit extremists to the cause of Greater Israel. Hebron was the scene of a mass murder on February 25, 1994 by Israeli doctor Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarch Mosque. Goldstein, like the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, had been influenced by Kahane, who was banned from running for re-election to the Knesset in 1988 due to his extremism.
Netanyahu’s targeting of the Palestinians in Hebron will likely provoke a response from Hamas, triggering more violence in the days before the election.
