Breathe
By Cristina Gutiérrez
October 7, 2023 marks the beginning of Israel's most recent war in the Palestinian territories. Since then, Gaza has suffered an intense campaign of bombardment and ground attacks that has left more than 47,000 Palestinians dead, devastation of enormous proportions to its infrastructure and healthcare system, and an overwhelming humanitarian crisis affecting the more than two million people residing there. However, little is said about the systematic attacks and abuses suffered by the Palestinian population of the West Bank in these sixteen months.
The West Bank, as well as East Jerusalem, has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, as a result of the Six-Day War. Since then, Israel's control over the lives of the three million Palestinians living there has been intensifying. Thousands of Palestinians have been expelled from their land to build settlements for Israeli civilians, which are considered illegal by the UN and the International Court of Justice. More than 600,000 Israeli settlers live in some 140 settlements since the beginning of the occupation and are considered the main obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state. In addition, Palestinians' freedom of movement is restricted by hundreds of checkpoints throughout the West Bank.
Since the start of the war in October 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have increased the use of extreme violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. According to Doctors Without Borders, at least 870 Palestinians have been killed and more than 7,100 injured in this period. According to a report by this organization, the escalation of violence in the West Bank has severely hampered access to health care and "forms part of a pattern of systematic oppression by Israel that the International Court of Justice has described as racial segregation and apartheid".
On January 21, shortly after the entry into force of the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement, Israel launched a large-scale military operation in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. The Israeli offensive has since spread to other refugee camps, many of them built to accommodate Palestinians displaced after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The latest offensive included shelling and ground attacks, leaving thousands of homes destroyed, mass expulsions, deaths and arrests. The UN estimates that more than 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced as a result of these attacks.
In tandem with Israeli army attacks, settlers have escalated violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Backed by blatant impunity, Israeli settlers carry out deadly physical assaults, property damage and arson against Palestinian homes, fields and vehicles. Many of these assaults occur in front of Israeli soldiers, who,in a blatant act of complicity, simply watch and refrain from intervening to prevent the crimes.
