The view from the ground in the West Bank
The West Bank has been the primary region for the Israeli colonisation of Palestine for decades. There, Israeli settlers attack Palestinians and steal their land and homes under the protection of the Israeli military.
In the mid-1990s, the Oslo Accords divided the territory into zones under Palestinian Authority control, joint Israel-Palestinian Authority administration, and total Israeli control. The last of these zones covers most of the land.
Israeli military violence in the West Bank escalated when the genocide in Gaza began. It has now increased further since the delicate Israel-Hamas ceasefire was signed in January. Far-right Israeli politicians, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have openly declared that they want to annex the entire West Bank.
Ghaied Hijaz is a student activist with the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University, which defends the right of Palestinians to education in the West Bank and Gaza. She spoke to Red Flag about the current situation. The text has been edited for length and clarity.
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The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza must have been a great relief. But there are reports that Israel has since escalated its operations in the West Bank. What’s going on?
When the ceasefire was announced, it was of course the moment we’ve all been waiting for, especially for the people in Gaza. It gave this moment of relief and comfort.
But since the beginning of the ceasefire, everything in the West Bank got much worse.
Even though through the last fifteen months of war the West Bank was not technically living in war, we were witnessing daily raids, daily attacks on the villages and towns, daily arrests, daily killings. But when the ceasefire was announced, many troops that were in Gaza came to the West Bank, and they started by completely closing all the checkpoints, the entrances of all cities in the West Bank, and everybody was stuck.
It was very, very sudden. At my university, we turned to online learning because there was no way anyone could reach the university if they were outside of Ramallah. People were stuck at the checkpoints for hours.
They continued closing everything for two weeks. And then, after two weeks, it started to get a bit easier, but now they’re going back at it again, they are pushing for more troops to go into the West Bank.
Yesterday [23 February], they decided that they’re going to have tanks inside the cities, especially in Jenin. The last time Palestinians in the West Bank saw Israeli tanks in the middle of our cities and towns was during the Second Intifada in 2002-04.
Now what we’re seeing is that the war is paused in Gaza because we’re still not sure if the ceasefire is permanent. And we’ve been hearing statements from Israeli officials claiming that they will go back to war very soon, and that they will not go on with the deal and so on.
But the war in the West Bank is just starting. We’re just starting to see the plans that they have for the refugee camps, especially for the cities inside of the West Bank, to displace people, to change how cities look, to change the structure of cities and towns.
They started in Tulkarm and Jenin. They are completely wiping out the refugee camps, they’re destroying all houses, they are building new streets, and they loudly say that they will not leave the cities for at least a year, and some say that they will never leave.
So Israeli forces are saying they’re going to be in Palestinian cities in the West Bank long term?
Because of the Oslo Accords the areas in the West Bank are separated into A, B and C areas, and the A area is for the Palestinian Authority, where the Israeli military is not supposed to enter. But of course, that was never a reality—the Israeli military would enter any city or town that is in the Palestinian area anytime they want.
But they were never inside the city or town for a long time. Now they’re saying that they are going to create bases inside the cities and the towns. They demolished most of the homes in the Tulkarm refugee camp and in Nur Shams refugee camp. Just like how they did the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza, they want to do this in the heart of towns and cities and refugee camps, and they don’t want to leave.
They say that this will be the new reality. No A areas, no Palestinian Authority. They’re going to rule everything, which they already did, but this is in a different way. This is more intense. It puts the West Bank in the middle of a war and creates new questions. What’s the future of the Palestinian Authority, if everything that the Palestinian Authority is based on is being torn apart?
Has there been more violence and land theft by Israeli settlers?
Yes. After the ceasefire was announced, with the plans for annexation, with what Trump is saying, with Netanyahu’s promises to Israeli officials on the right wing to increase attacks in the West Bank instead of Gaza, they’ve just got more nerve now. They keep blocking roads for everyone, attacking people in their farms. In the olive picking seasons, we’ve seen settlers go into lands burning trees [and] hurting people.
And they also organise attacks on a city or a town, and they shoot and kill people because they are all armed. And most of the time, that would be with the protection of the IDF [the Israeli military]. So the IDF would be there just to protect settlers from people who are throwing stones at them as they are shooting with their machine guns at everyone.
In many areas, especially the C areas in the West Bank, you would have land. It’s in your name; it’s yours. The Israeli government hasn’t exactly taken it, but you’re not allowed to do anything in it. It’s yours, but you can’t go there, sometimes you need a permit to go there, you can’t remove anything, you can’t grow anything. You can’t even pick the fruits of the trees.
Since the right-wing politicians and officials in the Israeli government refused a ceasefire and didn’t want to halt the attack in Gaza, Netanyahu promised [Bezalel] Smotrich, who is the finance minister and is kind of the de facto ruler of the West Bank, to take the war from Gaza to the West Bank to achieve what they’re planning for annexation and displacement of Palestinians.
The ceasefire deal has included the release of hundreds of Palestinians from Israeli prisons. How has the community responded?
We have been waiting for our detainees and prisoners to be released for years, especially the ones who were sentenced to life sentences. And also many of the women, many of the children who were living under cruel circumstances in Israeli prisons, under torture, starvation and everything.
So it was a moment of happiness that was long waited for. On the first day of the ceasefire, many people gathered to welcome the released Palestinian women and children that day. And even though it was so cold we were waiting in the streets under the threat of Israeli forces attacking. And they did, throwing tear gas, live bullets or rubber bullets.
We needed to give our prisoners the welcome they have long been waiting for. And so even though it was delayed for six hours, there were a lot of people who were not going to let Israeli forces ruin this moment for us. And every week after that, when there’s a release as part of the exchange deal, hundreds gather to welcome their loved ones.
But as we’re seeing people getting out, we’re hearing more horrible stories about the situation they were living in. When they get out of the bus and we see them, sometimes we don’t even recognise them. Like, if you saw Khalida Jarrar—she was right next to me and I didn’t recognise her. She was in such bad shape and bad condition that it was tearing my heart apart. [Jarrar is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was released as part of the prisoner exchanges.]
Last Saturday [22 February], it was supposed to be the last day of prisoner exchange. Six hundred Palestinian prisoners were supposed to be released. More than half of them were women, children, and men who were detained in Gaza after 7 October [2023]. And Israel, after delaying and delaying again and again, at 2am the next day decided they are not going to release the Palestinian prisoners, and they still haven’t released them [as of 25 February].
Has your activism with the Right to Education campaign been able to continue?
There’s a whole discussion in universities whether we should be on campus or just go to online learning because of how bad the situation is, because they always live with the threat of the settler attacks, threat of arrests, killing at checkpoints, and it’s actually dangerous. But what we always say is that getting to the university and moving between cities is a form of defiance and resistance, because what they want is to separate cities, and for every community to live alone, separated, isolated. And we don’t want that to happen.
We want to keep connected, no matter the hardships. And we continued doing that, even though it was becoming more difficult and challenging by the day. But since the ceasefire agreement, it became impossible.
Students were separated again. The campuses are really important for students to gather and communicate, and to organise together, to have the spirit of community. When everyone at home can’t move, that just crushes it.
And so for the past fifteen months, we’ve been on and off. When we go home, we need to come back and rebuild things again, rebuild the spirit, rebuild the organising efforts. But as the Right to Education, we continued working, because our work with advocacy and building alliances is just more online.
Other student groups and campuses have taken really big hits. Most of their activists are currently in prison or just released from prison, traumatised and not able to work or maybe not able to come back to university. So we’re going through difficult times where we’re trying to maintain student activism overall, not just in the Right to Education, but in all universities with all student groups.
US President Donald Trump recently declared his intention to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip. How did people in the West Bank respond?
Palestinians have been living under the threats of displacement, and in the West Bank, annexation, for 75 years. It’s not new. So when Trump said it, it was not really a new thing since in his previous term, he suggested the “deal of the century”, which was not exactly the same, but was leading to the same thing: to liquidate the Palestinian cause and get Palestinians scattered around the world.
It is [now] much more difficult circumstances, in a much more tense environment. But what we know is we’re not leaving. The core of the Palestinian cause is that Palestinians don’t want to leave. Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza are either refugees or they are residents from these cities. If they are refugees, they don’t want to become refugees again. And if they are originally not refugees, they don’t want to become refugees at all.
So, leaving is not an option for us. And it doesn’t matter if Trump said it or not. People are defiant of what Trump is saying. And that is just the stance of everyone. Every single political group, no matter the differences between them, they all say clearly we don’t want to leave.
I personally think that Trump’s plan is not about displacement. And it’s not going to work, because there’s no way to do it unless he wants to take Palestinians to the US, because nobody is willing to take Palestinians in, as we’ve seen statements from around the world. I think that Trump’s plan is about pushing normalisation [with Israel] in an economic trade way, especially with Saudi Arabia.
And I think that’s what’s dangerous about the plan. He’s just proposing something big that would make everybody say no, especially Arab countries, who are not exactly allies, but still hold on some grounds in supporting Palestinians. So he proposes this big thing to achieve other things he wants.
So it seems that, yes, they rejected the displacement plan, but they accepted normalisation with Israel. They accepted increasing cooperation with Israel, which is the kind of peace Trump is looking at. Trump is a businessman who’s just looking at everything and everyone as a profit. So when he’s trying to manipulate the Middle East, he’s just trying to make more profit.
Is there anything else you would want our readers to know about what’s happening in the West Bank?
I don’t think that what’s happening in the West Bank is getting much coverage or much attention. Right now, I think we have 40,000 people displaced from three refugee camps, and these displaced people went to surrounding cities and towns. And we hear Israelis, what they’re saying is that they’re going to attack them.
It’s not enough for them that they’ve destroyed the refugee camp, that they have destroyed the houses, that they displaced everyone. They want to go after every single refugee. And we see this as they are attacking UNRWA and suspending their services in Jerusalem.
If we’re still under the threat of displacement and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and in Gaza, and the threat of going back to genocide as Israeli officials want to resume the fighting, the fight is not over. It’s just starting, even though the past fifteen months were mentally exhausting and physically exhausting, and it caused a lot of damage and losses for a lot of people in the West Bank and in Gaza and around the world. People lost their jobs. They were getting harassed by Israeli activists and [the] Israeli government and everything.
But we still have to keep going, because it’s not over.
