By Dr Brian Brivati, Executive Director of BPP
15 August 2025
The day after Trump’s inauguration, the IDF launched a new military operation in the West Bank. The main target of Operation Iron Wall (an unambiguous reference to the policy of extending the borders of the Jewish state by military force – see p.32) was the refugee camps in the West Bank cities, particularly in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarem. The Israeli government declared it was part of a counter-terrorism operation and that it killed 15 Palestinian fighters within the first week. However, the scale and destructiveness suggested that the broader aim was to drive out as many Palestinians as possible out of the camps. The renewed Israeli offensive in the West Bank was also a way of appeasing hardline, right-wing members of the government who had voted against the Gaza ceasefire a few days earlier and had threatened to resign and collapse the coalition government.
In Jenin, Israeli forces destroyed homes, tore up roads, cut water pipes and issued evacuation orders (just as in Gaza) to leave the camp and eventually 40,000 were forcibly displaced from the refugee camps. The Defence Minister, Israel Katz, declared the camps were “now empty of residents”, a clear an example of ethnic cleansing. The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, referred to the “Gazafication” of the West Bank.
Meanwhile, in the villages of the West Bank, settler violence surged, seemingly approved by Trump, who lifted the sanctions which had been imposed on violent setters by the Biden administration. The pattern of settler attack and forcible displacement is illustrated by what happened in the isolated village of Mu’arrajat in early July.
In the previous two years, Jewish settlers had set fire to the village mosque, attacked its school and stolen livestock from its villagers. Then, as the Financial Times reported (on 6 July), “the final straw came on Thursday night, when dozens of settlers entered the remote Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank, after days of harassment during which they ransacked a property, set up an outpost next to the village, and told locals they had to leave. By Friday afternoon, most of Mu’arrajat’s 200 remaining inhabitants had done just that.”
Three months earlier, during an attack on the village of Susya, Israeli soldiers seized three Palestinians and detained them. Unlike most attacks, this did not go unnoticed by the rest of the world as one of the Palestinian victims was the film director Hamdan Ballal, whose film, ‘No Other Land’, which portrays the destruction of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, had won an Academy Award in Hollywood. The Israeli military labelled him a terrorist. And, on 30 July, it was reported that a Palestinian journalist who had helped make the film had been killed by settlers.
By the end of July 2025, according to the UN’s humanitarian arm, OCHA, settlers had carried out more than 2,500 attacks in the West Bank/territory, beating up villagers, vandalising property and destroying their crops. In late July, the British Foreign Secretary spoke of “settler terrorism”.
The seizure of land was speeded up/intensified as the Israeli government further tightened its grip on the Palestinian territory. In May, it approved the building of 22 new settlements – illegal under international law – the biggest expansion since the 1990s, which would further carve up the already fragmented Palestinian territory. Several members of the government called for the annexation of the entire West Bank. The demolition of homes and forcible transfer of population, which settlement building commonly entailed, is deemed a war crime by the UN.
The UN reported that, by late June, 943 Palestinians had been killed by settlers or the IDF and that the prison population had doubled. Many were children, one of them a 13-year-old boy shot dead while playing with his friend in an olive grove. The IDF said the boys had been throwing stones in the direction of a patrol and referred to them as “terrorists”, thus trying to justify the killing.
Forcible transfer is a war crime. Also a crime against humanity if part of widespread or systematic attack on the civilian population, said the UN Human Rights office.
The Israeli human rights group, B’tselem, reported on the continuing Israeli campaign to take over as much land as possible. What has changed, said their spokesman, is the ”total impunity for soldiers and settlers. The settlers used to hide their faces, now they’re more brutal and violent and it’s happening in broad daylight.” Guard 23 May
For resident Mheihat, the village of Mu’arrajat, an even greater cause of fear was the belief that it “is not just a settler issue. It’s a project, it’s a state enterprise: they want to displace us from these areas . . . and the settlers are one of the tools of our displacement.”