Latest news with #Gazafication
New York Times
05-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
‘I Want to Be Martyred,' a Palestinian Boy Declares
'Little Gaza' is the nickname locals use for a battle-scarred area here where buildings are destroyed and roads torn up, where families have been driven away, where the alleys throb with loss, grief and fear of snipers. But this isn't Gaza at all, it's a refugee camp in Tulkarm in the West Bank. Without attracting much notice or protest, Israel increasingly is using the tools of war familiar in Gaza — tanks, airstrikes and massive destruction and displacement — here in the West Bank. Human rights groups like B'Tselem call this the 'Gazafication' of the West Bank. A centerpiece of this Gazafication is a wave of Israeli military assaults that started in January in West Bank refugee camps, forcing some 40,000 people from their homes. Historians say that is the highest number of civilians displaced in the territory since Israel seized it in 1967. In the short run, the Israeli military actions seem to have succeeded in suppressing Palestinian militants in the camps, but at immense cost in lives and suffering. One of those reportedly shot dead by Israeli forces was Sondos Shalabi, a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant with her first child. In the longer run, the destruction may just sow the seeds of violence. On the edge of a no-go area, where groups of Palestinians looked at their homes but dared not enter for fear of Israeli snipers, I spoke to a 12-year-old boy, Mohammed Abdul Jalil. He said his home had been demolished and his school classes canceled for the last two months because of the military occupation of the camp. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Child deaths surge amid ‘Gazafication' of West Bank, report says
Israel has brought the military tactics of its war in Gaza to the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians face mass forced displacements, a surge in airstrikes, and a sharp rise in attacks on children and other civilians, a Palestinian-Israeli rights group has said. B'tselem has detailed the impact of Israel's most intense operations in the area for at least two decades in a report that describes what it calls a 'Gazafication' of Israel's occupation there. Israeli airstrikes in the West Bank since 7 October 2023, the beginning of the Gaza war triggered by Hamas's attack on southern Israel, have killed more Palestinians than during the violence of the second intifada of the 2000s with children killed at an unprecedented rate during the territory's occupation, according to data collected by B'tselem over more than two decades. Military operations launched in three West Bank refugee camps in January also forced 40,000 people from their homes, the largest displacement since Israel's occupation began in 1967. Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, said troops would remain 'for the coming year', meaning residents would not be allowed back in that time. Israel says its operations target militant Palestinian groups. The refugee camps are historically home to fighters who consider themselves armed resistance. 'Israel's complete disregard for international law in the war in Gaza is now being replicated to the West Bank,' said B'Tselem's executive director, Yuli Novak. 'Its activity there, as yet on a smaller scale than in Gaza, is already causing indiscriminate and disproportionate killing and destruction.' The parents of a boy shot when he went to buy bread, and the uncle of two children, aged five and eight, who were killed in an airstrike are among relatives of six child victims who told the Guardian about how attacks documented by B'tselem have shattered their lives. Rigd Gasser, father of 14-year-old Ahmad Rashid Jazar, said his son was hit in the chest by a single bullet on 19 January while leaving a shop in his home village of Sebastia, where he had been on an errand to buy bread. Gasser was in a cafe when he heard the gunshots and rushed out when he heard calls for help. 'I got closer and recognised my son. I knew him by his clothes, his body was all covered in blood,' he said. 'Since the beginning of the war, they [Israeli forces] have been coming here every day. They launch raids in the morning and evening.' Israel sent in a surge of troops, including tanks, to the West Bank after the Gaza ceasefire began in January. Military operations in the three refugee camps – Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams – came on top of what had been Israel's deadliest bombing campaign in the occupied territory. In the 17 months since 7 October 2023, B'tselem documented64 airstrikes that killed 261 Palestinians, including both militant and civilian casualties and at least 41 minors. That is more than three times the total toll from airstrikes during the second intifada, which lasted more than four years, when B'tselem recorded 78 deaths including 10 children between 2000 and the end of 2004. The group's report described the increased use of airstrikes as part of a 'broader conceptual and operational shift' in Israeli military tactics which put civilians at greater risk. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to questions. Muhammad Khreiwish's niece and nephew were among the youngest victims. Sham Abu Zahara, eight, and Karam Abu Zahara, five, were killed with both their parents and another uncle on 3 October 2024, when an airstrike targeted a cafe in Tulkarm. The cafe was on the ground floor of an apartment building, and the Abu Zahara family lived next door. Khreiwish was arriving to visit his sister Saja when an explosion threw him off his bike. As people raced away from the site, he ran in to look for the family. Inside he was met by a horrific scene of destruction in their bloodied apartment. 'I found pieces of bodies that I couldn't recognise, and then I saw my niece,' he said. He called for help but she had been killed immediately. All he could do was wrap her shattered body and take it to the hospital morgue. The strike killed 18 people and at least six of them, or a third of the total, were civilians, B'tselem investigators found. The Abu Zahara siblings were two of 180 children killed by Israeli forces over the 17 months since the Gaza war began, the deadliest period in the West Bank of Israel's nearly 60-year-long occupation according to B'tselem. Until 2023 the most dangerous time for Palestinian children in the West Bank was the second intifada, when B'tselem documented 246 children killed in 63 months – a rate of killing half current levels from all Israeli operations. B'tselem said looser rules of engagement were one reason for the rise in child deaths. The Israeli military has expanded its 'open fire' rules, with soldiers now allowed to shoot to kill targets including anyone they suspect is 'messing with the ground', Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. Reda Basharat, eight, and Hamza Basharat, 10, were killed just outside their house by a drone strike on 8 January. The children couldn't go school that morning because Israeli forces had launched a raid on near their village, Tammun, and so roads were closed, Hamza's mother, Eman Basharat, said. Hamza, born after a years-long IVF struggle, was a cheerful child who normally loved studying and was angry about missing an English test scheduled for that day. Because their own area was quiet, the boys were sitting outside with their 23-year-old cousin Adam, who was drinking a morning coffee when they were targeted. Eman raced out to look for her son as soon as she heard the explosion. She found Hamza injured and struggling to breathe. 'I held his body. I cleaned the blood from his face and I recited the shahada (the Muslim profession of faith). He died in my arms, he didn't look like he was in pain.' Israeli soldiers arrived soon after and took away all three bodies for several hours, before returning the children to their grieving families without explanation. 'When I think about what happened to my son and remember the images of their bodies, and I see what is happening in Gaza on TV, I felt suddenly that they are doing the same thing,' Eman Basharat said. It is a comparison that has also been made by Israeli officials. The West Bank campaign was a based on 'a lesson from the activity that took place in Gaza and other places', Katz told the Knesset, Israel's parliament. 'We need to clean up a place and not allow terrorism to return to it.' Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has said Palestinians in the West Bank should know 'If they continue with terrorism … their fate will be like Gaza'. The 'Tulkarm and Jenin (refugee camps) will look like Jabaliya and Shujayah'. A IDF spokesperson has previously denied that soldiers forced Palestinians from their homes, saying camp residents who chose to leave to escape fighting were 'allowed' to do so. Dozens of homes have already demolished. Similarities with larger scale displacement and destruction in Gaza were clear to Palestinian families crowded into mosques, wedding halls and the homes of relatives where they had sought refuge. The Guardian spoke to three families who said they were ordered to leave their homes either directly by Israeli forces or through messages broadcast on loudspeakers. Fatma Shab, 63, is living in the women's area of wedding hall, separated from her severely ill husband, Yusuf Shab who is 68. Permanently connected to oxygen, he cannot walk and had to be evacuated by ambulance. As Israeli forces advanced they fled from their home in Nur Shams refugee camp to the house of their son, which has since been demolished. Soldiers broke into the building and told them to leave immediately, with no time to pack. So they moved again to a nearby Kafr al-Labad town where they have found temporary, basic shelter in al-Diah wedding hall. They only have two bathrooms for 14 people, and just drapes separating crowded sleeping areas. Even so, the families sheltering there are terrified they will have to leave after Ramadan, as it will be needed again for weddings once the holy month is finished. 'People here are kind, but in my home I am more comfortable,' Shab said. 'Even just being able to go to my closet to choose some clothes to wear. Now I'm just wearing what I have on, there are no choices.' She doesn't know if she will see the house she built with her husband for their retirement ever again. 'It's just a short distance away, but I can't go home,' she said. 'In Gaza they were forced out and killed, and here now it's the same.'
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- The Guardian
Gunshots and a surge of panic: footage shows last moments of boy, 12, killed in the West Bank
The last time Nassar al-Hammouni talked to his son, Ayman, it was by telephone and the 12-year-old was overflowing with plans for the coming weekend, and for the rest of his life. He had joined a local football team and planned to register at a karate club that weekend. When he grew up, he told Nassar, he was going to become a doctor, or better still an engineer to help his father in the construction job that took him away from their home in Hebron every week. None of that – the football, the karate or his imagined future career – will happen now. Last Friday, two days after the call to his father, Ayman was killed, shot by Israeli fire, video footage seen by the Guardian suggests. The killing of children on the West Bank is no longer out of the ordinary, particularly since the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stepped up operations in the occupied territory after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and the beginning of the Gaza war. The intensity has increased since the January ceasefire in the strip. So far this year about two children a week have been killed, slightly over the average rate for 2024 when 93 children were killed. Human rights workers fear the numbers may continue to increase as the IDF brings Gaza techniques to the West Bank, ejecting tens of thousands of people from their homes, flattening districts and loosening further the 'rules of engagement' covering when a soldier is permitted to open fire. They are calling it 'Gazafication' and it is becoming the new normal. But what sets Ayman al-Hammouni's case apart is the clarity of the evidence, illustrated by footage from two security cameras, that tells the story of the child's last moments. Ayman and his 10-year-old brother, Aysar, had gone with their mother, Anwar, to visit their grandfather and their uncles who lived in another part of Hebron, Jabal Jawhar. The trip across town took an hour in Hebron's grinding traffic and involved crossing from Palestinian-controlled Hebron to an area run by the IDF, part of the complex patchwork of territorial division imposed on the West Bank. Jabal Jawhar is not far from the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and his biblical family are supposedly buried, a site sacred to Muslims, Jews and Christians. On Friday nights before Jewish settlers come to pray there, the IDF has been conducting aggressive patrols in the surrounding Palestinian districts. The army, increasingly staffed and led by Israelis from the national religious right, is widely perceived on the West Bank to be acting as the armed wing of the settler movement. At about 6.30pm, Ayman had just run an errand to his grandfather's flat and returned to his uncle Tariq's house when there was a commotion on the main road, 60 metres away down a sloping paved alleyway. A shot was heard and people began to run, and a young man from the neighbourhood whose uncle lived next door drove up the alley in a white car, its windscreen pierced by a bullet. He parked outside Tariq's house and got out, examining a wound where a fragment of glass had nicked his shoulder. The scene was recorded by two security cameras, one at the corner of Tariq's courtyard pointing down the alley, and the other perched outside the top-floor flat of Ayman's grandfather, Mohammad Bader al-Ajlouni, looking over the cars in front of Tariq's house and across the alley, at 90 degrees to the other camera angle. Both sets of footage show Ayman and two of his cousins coming out of Tariq's house along with another of his uncles, Nadeem al-Ajlouni, who gives the injured man a tissue for the cut in his shoulder. Ayman looks on, a slight figure leaning on the back of the white car, a brown bag slung around his shoulder. Then there is more commotion from the alleyway and another shot, sending the small knot of people scurrying for cover, including Ayman and his cousins. Ayman runs inside the gate of Tariq's house and out of view of the cameras, and then another shot rings out from down the alleyway. This was the bullet that is believed to have hit Ayman. The footage does not prove beyond question who fired it, but it does make clear it came from the direction of Israeli soldiers who were advancing on the house and who arrived at the scene seconds later. In the confusion, it seems to take a few seconds before Ayman is noticed. It was Nadeem, his young uncle, who saw him first. 'He was lying on the steps of the house, just inside the gate. I went to pick him up but I could tell he was already gone,' Nadeem said. Then the cameras show another surge of panic and the silhouettes of three soldiers advancing up the alley, guns pointed, one with a bright torch shining along the barrel. The injured neighbour, Ayman's cousin, and his little brother Aysar, who by now had come down from his grandfather's flat, all scramble away between the parked cars. Nadeem runs out of Tariq's front gate carrying Ayman but drops his jacket and then Ayman in his desperation to get away. The boy's body is left lying on the ground between a car and Tariq's garden wall as the soldiers reach the house. They look around for a few seconds and then spot the body, and at that point they turn around and calmly walk away, the screams of Ayman's mother at their backs after she stumbles on the body of her son. Nadeem scoops Ayman's limp body up once more and he and Tariq head off down the alley in the footsteps of the retreating soldiers, in the direction of a nearby hospital. It was already too late. The family have yet to receive the medical report but an advocacy group, Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), drawing on its contacts in the Hebron hospital where Ayman was taken, said the bullet entered his back and lodged in his lungs. Nassar and Nadeem also said Ayman was shot in the back, while Mohammad, the grandfather, said the wound was to the upper abdomen. Nassar got the call in Ramallah, where he works in a construction and a security job for the Palestinian Authority. First a relative told him Ayman had been shot, but Nassar demanded the truth and by the time he was on the road he already knew his son was dead. A friend drove him through the night, navigating the army checkpoints along the way. At one spot north of Bethlehem, known as the 'container checkpoint', Nassar was told to get out of the car with a gun pointed at him. The bereaved father said that on hearing of what had happened in Hebron, an Arabic-speaking soldier began to taunt him, claiming to have been the one who shot Ayman, telling Nassar: 'Convince me that I shot him for nothing. 'We hope that you will follow your son,' he recalled the soldier adding. The IDF did not respond to questions about Ayman's death. In some previous cases, under media pressure an investigation is announced, although it rarely results in substantive action. In 2019 a soldier was sentenced to one month of community service for shooting dead a 14-year-old boy in Gaza. But even such trivial accountability is vanishingly rare. An Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, has calculated the probability of an Israeli soldier facing prosecution for killing Palestinians to be just 0.4% – one prosecution in 219 fatalities brought to the military's attention. On Wednesday, Aysar went back to school for the first time since the shooting, but he could not face seeing his older brother's classroom across the corridor from his own. Nassar asked the teacher if he could be moved. Ayman was a premature baby and was in a hospital incubator for more than a month, Nassar recalled. But being a child is not much of a protection on the West Bank. 'It is about rage and revenge,' Nassar said. 'They don't care if it's a child, or a woman, or an old person. No one's safe any more.'
The National
28-02-2025
- Business
- The National
PKK leader Ocalan calls for group to disband and Nvidia beats revenue forecasts
The leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) Abdullah Ocalan made a historic call for the group to lay down arms and disband. Meanwhile, escalating violence in Jenin and Tulkarm has displaced 40,000 Palestinians, recalling decades-old military operations and adding to Gaza's destruction, with more than 48,300 dead. Nvidia beats forecasts for its latest quarterly results. On today's episode of Trending Middle East: PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan calls on Kurdish group to disarm and dissolve Israel's 'Gazafication' of West Bank forcing 'largest displacement since 1967' Jenin's devastation recalls darkest chapter of violence in occupied West Bank Nvidia posts record quarterly revenue and projects strong outlook This episode features Robert Tollast, military affairs reporter and Greg Tanner, head of multimedia.
The Guardian
26-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Family mourns grandfather's death as Israel brings Gaza tactics to West Bank
Waleed Lahlouh was 73, with a shock of white hair that marked his age, when Israeli soldiers shot him dead on a sunny February morning outside his home in Jenin refugee camp. Relatives said he was killed while trying to collect some winter clothes for his family. He had fled with his children and grandchildren a week earlier when Israeli troops moved into the camp and ordered residents out within an hour. They scrambled to gather documents, valuables and phones, and had little time to pack clothes. 'He went to get some things we need, but he was shot before he even got into the house,' said his daughter Samia Lahlouh, 45. 'The grandchildren ask us: 'Grandpa was old, and didn't do anything bad, why did they want to kill him?' She didn't have an answer. The Lahlouhs are among 40,000 people forced out of their homes in refugee camps across the occupied West Bank this year, the largest displacement since Israel seized the territory in 1967. The Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Sunday that 'evacuated' Palestinians would not be able to go back home this year, and sent three tanks to Jenin. Palestinians who have lost homes and loved ones over the past month have described Jenin as a 'little Gaza' because of the scale of destruction, death and displacement. The same comparison is made inside Israel, with some cabinet members demanding the use of military tactics from Gaza, as domestic critics warn against the 'Gazafication' of the West Bank. The far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for Palestinian cities there to be emptied and destroyed, as a pre-emptive strike to prevent attacks on Jewish settlers. 'Nablus and Jenin need to look like Jabaliya,' he said in January, referencing one of the worst-hit areas of Gaza. At least seven Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces since the operation began in January, including a two-year-old girl shot dead in her home just outside Jenin, the UN said. Other victims include a heavily pregnant woman shot at a checkpoint. Lahlouh was a gentle, playful taxi driver born and raised in Jenin camp, who for decades poured his energy and money into educating his eight daughters, Samia said. All of them went to university, two became headteachers and one completed a doctorate. He would visit their homes every Friday, bringing a plate of freshly made hummus and other local favourites for breakfast. Then he would gather his grandchildren round for reading and spelling contests, with prizes for the winners, focused as always on education. The day he was killed, Lahlouh got up early and left before anyone was awake. The family is crowded into the home of a relative in a village outside Jenin, separated from the camp by a few small rolling hills, but close enough that drones and planes buzz constantly overhead. His son, Sami, 40, rang to check in with him. 'He told me: 'I'm having coffee with my sister, then I'm going to the camp.' I told him not to go, the [Israeli] army are there.' Lahlouh told Sami there was a break in the fighting so he wanted to collect a few warm things for everyone and check on the house. He had lived through multiple raids on Jenin camp, and fled his home once before, during the second intifada. He had seen neighbours killed and buildings razed by Israeli troops, and watched the death toll from Israeli attacks in Gaza climb toward 50,000. So he was wary of the Israeli military. But he didn't believe soldiers would open fire on an old, unarmed man in broad daylight. 'He thought it would be safe,' Samia said. A neighbour who worked as a medic called the family later that morning to break the news that Lahlouh had been picked up, badly injured. By the time the family reached the hospital, he was dead. 'He was in front of the house, the paramedic told us. He never made it inside,' said Sami. 'He so much wanted to go back home.' There was just one shot, medics told the family, which went through his abdomen. Israeli forces barred the family from burying him that day, which is required by Muslim tradition, and blocked all but one relative from attending. Sami – Lahlouh's only son – was ordered to do a brief, solitary interment at 6.30am, driving from the hospital to the cemetery along a route fixed by Israeli forces. 'Were were given one hour for the journey and burial; they asked us to leave very fast,' he said. 'They prevented his daughters, his sisters, his other relatives from coming to bury him. We were not granted this basic right.' The Israeli military said forces had killed Lahloul when they 'carried out the standard suspect arrest procedure'. They fired warning shots at 'a suspect' moving towards troops, then aimed at Lahloul, a spokesperson said. The military permitted only 'a limited burial ceremony to take place under IDF escort and security' because the graveyard was an active combat zone, they said. Operation Iron Wall was announced on 21 January by Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, 'to defeat terrorism in Jenin', a new objective in the multifront war Israel has been fighting in Gaza and across the region, including in Lebanon. The last major military operation across the West Bank was during the second intifada, more than two decades ago, when Israeli forces moved in to crush a coordinated uprising across the occupied territories and in a series of suicide attacks inside Israel. Jenin camp is a dense urban area settled by families expelled from homes in what is now northern Israel during the war surrounding the state's creation in 1948. It has long been a centre of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and has been repeatedly targeted by Israel. In 2002, after a 10-day operation in Jenin camp, a UN envoy described the situation as 'horrific beyond belief'. Operation Iron Wall has already lasted longer than that campaign and displaced residents on a scale not seen since 1967. At least 44 Palestinians have been killed, including seven children, since it began. Many of those killed were unarmed and posed no imminent threat, the UN said, describing their deaths as part of a 'continuously increasing number of apparently unlawful killings documented by the UN Human Rights Office'. The statement condemned the operation and called for an 'immediate halt to this alarming wave of violence and mass displacement'. The Israeli military had loosened their rules of engagement, with troops allowed to shoot to kill anyone 'messing with the ground', Haaretz newspaper reported. The Israeli military denied changing open fire rules. Homes in Jenin have also been demolished in mass detonations, a new tactic amplifying an old strategy. In 2002 much of the camp was razed, and the army has used armoured bulldozers and other military vehicles to destroy homes, but they move at a slower pace. Hassan Amin, 50, had a home at the edge of one demolition zone. Now he shares a small apartment with 20 relatives in a village just outside Jenin. Like the Lahlouhs, Amin said they were ordered to leave by loudspeakers on drones, and told which route to follow out of the camp. 'We left against our will,' he said. 'They gave us a certain route to follow, with checkpoints. As we walked there were drones over our head. Children, women and the elderly were all terrified.' The exodus on foot felt terrifyingly similar to all the reports about forced evacuations inside Gaza, Amin said, and what followed seemed copied from there, too. Katz said he had ordered Israeli forces 'not to allow residents to return' in the coming year. The Israeli military said: 'The IDF does not evacuate the population in [the West Bank]. However, the IDF has allowed local residents who wish to distance themselves from combat areas to leave safely through designated crossings secured by the forces.' Barred from returning home, Amin spends his days alternating between immediate worries about how to feed his family and longer-term fears they will never go home. His day-rate work has dried up, after the operation effectively shut down Jenin. Israeli military convoys have turned even the outskirts into a ghost town, with shops shuttered and usually crowded streets almost empty of cars. Schools are not opening, so his frightened and anxious children are at home all day, slipping behind on education. With the camp off-limits, he has spent long hours looking through Israeli military videos from Jenin for any clues as to whether their home survived. He spotted it, damaged and surrounded by rubble, briefly captured as a soldier walks past. 'This is all we saw: part of our home is destroyed,' he said, freezing the frame on the video for a second. 'We don't know what happened.'
