LONDON: Israeli operations in the West Bank have killed 12 Palestinians since Tuesday and could threaten the newly agreed ceasefire in Gaza, United Nations Human Rights office spokesperson Thameen Al Kheetan said on Friday.

Hundreds of Jenin residents fled their homes as the military demolished a number of houses on the third day of a major operation in the West Bank city on Thursday.

The operation was launched within days of the start of a ceasefire in Gaza that saw the first exchange of Israeli prisoners for Palestinians held in Israeli jails since a brief truce in Nov 2023.

The UN rights office raised the alarm over the killing of mostly unarmed people, calling for an immediate end of the violence and a halt on expanding settlements. “Our office has verified that at least 12 Palestinians have been killed and 40 injured by Israeli forces since Tuesday, most of them unarmed,” Al Kheetan told a televised briefing.

“We are also concerned by repeated comments from some Israeli officials about plans to expand settlements further still and a fresh breach of international law. We recall again that the transfer by Israel of its own civilian population into territories it occupies also amounts to a war crime.”

Israel has occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River, which Palestinians want as the core of an independent state, since the 1967 Middle East war. It has built Jewish settlements there that most countries deem illegal. Israel disputes this and cites historical and Biblical ties to the land.

Since the Gaza ceasefire announcement last week, settlers have been attacking Palestinian villages and stoning vehicles, injuring several Palestinians, Al Kheetan said, with houses and vehicles set on fire.

“Indeed it is very concerning that what’s happening today in the West Bank may have an impact on the ceasefire in Gaza. It is imperative that the ceasefire in Gaza holds,” he said.

Meanwhile, a UN official said that funding shortages may affect the world body’s ability to maintain aid flows at target levels throughout the Gaza ceasefire deal.

New front for Israel

The city of Jenin, a Palestinian fighters stronghold in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has become a new front for Israel days after it reached a ceasefire deal with Hamas.

Jenin is a small city in the hilly far north of the West Bank, near the border with Israel, and contains a teeming, concrete and cinder-block urban refugee camp by the same name. About half of the camp’s 18,000 people fled after the latest Israeli raids, Jenin’s deputy mayor told Al Arabiya TV. Jenin produced many of the suicide bombers who spearheaded the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, between 2000 and 2005.

Jenin used to be a bastion of 88-year-old Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, a rival of Hamas. But Fatah has lost ground to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Their growing presence has arisen in part from inaction by the security forces of Abbas’s West-backed Palestinian Authority (PA), which exercises limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank and says Israel has undercut its credibility on the street.

In a bid to show they could take part in ruling post-conflict Gaza, in line with demands by some Arab states, PA security forces conducted a weeks-long operation to reassert control over the city Jenin prior to the Israeli offensive on Jan 21.

Between May and June 2024, Israeli forces killed at least 13 Palestinians and wounded 38 in attacks in Jenin. In September, Israeli forces left Jenin after a nine-day operation, one of the biggest in the occupied West Bank in months, leaving a mass of damaged buildings and infrastructure.

Three days after the ceasefire went into effect, Israeli chief of staff Herzi Halevi said the military must be ready for significant operations in the West Bank. Next day Israel’s military said it began the operation “Iron Wall” in Jenin, acting two weeks after a shooting blamed by Israel on fighters from Jenin.

Hamas, based in Gaza, soon after the announcement called on Palestinians in the West Bank to escalate fighting against Israel. Israel’s defence minister said forces were applying lessons learned in Gaza to the Jenin operation. France has called on Israel to show restraint. The foreign minister of Jordan, which borders the West Bank, said the region could not afford another conflict in the occupied West Bank.

Published in Dawn, January 25th, 2025