Israel Imports Gaza Playbook into the West Bank, Daily Brief February 27, 2025

This week, Israeli tanks rolled into the occupied West Bank for the first time in twenty years. 

Israel has escalated an intense military operation in the West Bank, home to more than 3 million Palestinians.  

Focused – for now – on the northern West Bank, the campaign is already the longest and most intense in the West Bank since the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. 

For weeks, the Israeli military has conducted air strikes and raids in the northern West Bank that have killed more than 50 Palestinians, many who were apparently unarmed and posed no imminent threat. 

Additionally, Israeli forces have destroyed a vast number of homes and critical infrastructure, such as sewage networks and water pipelines. This has made several West Bank refugee camps “near unhabitable”, according to the UN. 

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced – a scale not seen in the West Bank since the 1967 war and the start of the Israeli occupation. 

Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz said the operations will continue for a year and that displaced Palestinians will not be allowed to return. 

We have seen this playbook before. In Gaza. 

In Gaza, Human Rights Watch found no plausible legal justification for Israel’s massive, deliberate displacement of Palestinian civilians. These actions amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and in at least parts of Gaza, ethnic cleansing.  

HRW also determined Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water infrastructure was part of a policy calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the Palestinian population, amounting to the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide. 

Israeli authorities have for months been escalating their repression in the West Bank. Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks, Israeli forces have killed more than 800 people, an unprecedented rate. 

These actions go hand in hand with increased settlement construction, settler violence, home demolitions of Palestinian homes, and reports of torture of Palestinian detainees. 

The repression is part of Israel’s ongoing crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians. 

To prevent further atrocities, governments should impose targeted sanctions and suspend arms transfers to Israel, ban trade with illegal settlements, and support the International Criminal Court. 

We have seen in Gaza how this playbook plays out—states must urgently act to avoid the West Bank facing the same fate.