Above photo: Young victims are numerous. Mural of Milad al-Raee, age 16. Shot in the back by an Israeli sniper, September 2023. Al–Arroub refugee camp, Occupied Palestine. C.M.
Israel’s seven-front war.
14 July—I had been back from the West Bank one month when I called a friend in al–Bireh, a friend I cannot name. It was Friday, 14 June. I had been worrying, and it was something of a relief to hear her voice. When I asked after her family she said, “We are as well as it is possible to be.” And then she added, “Things are worse here. Two hours ago they shot a young boy in al–Am’ari. They haven’t left the city yet.”
Al–Am’ari is a refugee camp within the municipality of al–Bireh. It is among the smallest camps in the West Bank. “They” are the Israeli Occupation Forces. Like all refugee camps, al–Am’ari is officially under the control of the Palestinian National Authority. And like all camps it is frequently and indiscriminately raided by the IOF. Residents are routinely detained and imprisoned without charge. Sometimes they are shot. Most of the victims are young men and boys.
All of this happened weeks ago. I report on it now, as my first West Bank Alert, because in Occupied Palestine it is both old news and new.
What is new—and what very few Westerners are even aware of—is that the West Bank is one front of a larger war. If this has gone un– or underreported in Western corporate media, the Israeli government has been very clear about its intentions all along.
In late December The Times of Israel and Anadolu, the Turkish wire service, quoted Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, saying Israel was “in a multi-front war.” Here is what Anadolu reported on 26 December,
Israel has been attacked on seven fronts since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday.
Israel is “in a multi-front war,” he said at a Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee hearing at the Knesset.
“From the beginning, we were attacked from seven fronts—Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. We have already reacted and acted on six of these fronts,” he added, without providing further details.
“There is no immunity for anyone,” Gallant said, citing a Defense Ministry statement.
There is no immunity for anyone. Certainly not a young boy in al–Am’ari.
Speaking before officials in a televised address on 27 June, Prime Minister Netanyahu pushed this narrative further, arguing for an all-out regional war he clearly wants to drag the United States and Europe into. Writing for Consortium News, Patrick Lawrence—my colleague and partner—makes the case that this is the moment “Netanyahu goes for broke.”
Quoting the Israeli prime minister,
Iran is fighting us on a seven-front war. Obviously, Hamas and Hezbollah. The Houthis, militias in Iraq and Syria. Judea and Samaria on the West Bank. Iran itself.
They’d like to topple Jordan. Their goal is to have a combined ground offensive from their various fronts, coupled with combined missile bombardments. We’ve been given the opportunity to scuttle it. And we will.
Referencing Hamas and events of 7 October, Netanyahu said,
People who do these things to us are not going to be there. We will have a long battle, I don’t think it’s that long, but we’ll get rid of them. We also have to deter the other elements of the Iran terror axis. We have to deal with the axis.
The axis doesn’t threaten only us. It threatens you. It’s on the march to conquer the Middle East—conquer the Middle East—conquer. That means conquer Saudi Arabia, conquer the Arabian Peninsula, it’s just a question of time.
This is as close as Netanyahu has come to declaring open war on the West Bank. Let us take Netanyahu at his word, and let there be no mistake: the Occupation Forces in the West Bank are engaged in a military campaign against the people who live there, even if we cannot or do not recognize it as such.
As Israeli’s primary backer and biggest supplier of armaments, the United States, is complicit in what is in effect an undeclared stealth war being waged against a civilian population in the West Bank. Stealth because it’s being conducted under cover of the genocide in Gaza and in a manner not recognizable as traditional warfare.
Unlike Gaza, which Israel carpet bombed into almost total oblivion, this front in Israel’s war of aggression is being conducted through sustained acts of terror: daily raids and shootings, the destruction of homes and infrastructure, destruction of agricultural lands, accelerated land theft and displacement, and the mass imprisonment of Palestinians who are locked away without charge in facilities where starvation, beatings, and torture are now commonplace.
One distinct feature of the war against West Bank civilians is that a significant amount of the violence is being perpetrated by Israeli settlers, armed with military-grade weapons by the government—a de facto citizen militia under the watchful eye and protection of the IOF.
This is what Israel’s war on the West Bank looks like. It is a war of ethnic cleansing and annexation in which children are routinely shot. And in which the violence inflicted on a civilian population is perversely overshadowed if not erased by the exponentially worse violence in Gaza.
I texted my al–Bireh friend a few days ago to ask about the boy. Her reply, across the nine timezones that separate us, was almost immediate: “He survived, thank God.” But she had no other details.
One way or another this boy, named but whose name I never learned, son and probably a sibling, will now walk among countless others like him. Does the fragile body of a child ever fully recover from the damage inflicted by the bullet of a sniper’s rifle—to say nothing of the damage to his mind?
If citizens in the West do not understand that Israel is conducting a war against the people of the West Bank, the Palestinians who live there certainly do. They understand quite well that Israel is intent upon finishing their conquest of the land and people of Palestine.
As I was told over and over again back in April, “When they are finished with Gaza they will come for us.” They have already started.
It is with this in mind that I begin publishing West Bank Alerts—updates from Israel’s war on the West Bank. Each, like this one, will be in effect a dispatch from the front.