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TEL AVIV — In a week when US-made helicopter gunships shelled a Palestinian town and Israeli settlers rampaged through a village full of American citizens, the Biden administration finds itself mired in a rapidly escalating conflict.
Both sides are also introducing new and more powerful weapons and tactics reminiscent of the all-out war of the second intifada more than 20 years ago, when Israel reoccupied large parts of the West Bank.
For months, the White House, which has been mired in an ongoing diplomatic crisis with the far-right Israeli government, has expressed concern over rising violence in the West Bank, where Israel is confronted with increasingly effective Palestinian militants that its forces have been fighting This week it comes to long street battles.
Israeli settlers riot in a Palestinian village after Hamas fired on them
On Monday, an Israeli pre-dawn raid in Jenin quickly escalated into a highly unusual eight-hour gunfight, during which Israel had to use Apache helicopters to extricate its under-fire soldiers from the city after street bombs trapped them in the city. The vicious circle continued when the next day, in retaliation, two Hamas armed fighters killed four Israelis in the West Bank.
On Wednesday, 400 armed settlers rampaged through Turmus Ayya, a West Bank city that the city’s mayor said is 85 percent Palestinian-US dual citizen. The settlers set fire to dozens of houses, cars and orchards and shot at civilians. A Palestinian was killed by Israeli police as clashes broke out.
Later that night, in another rare move, Israel announced that it had used drones to kill three members of a Palestinian “terror cell” for the first time since 2006. Settlers from the hard-line settlement of Yitzhar also cut power lines to the Palestinian village of Ourif, the hometown of the two Hamas armed fighters.
“All hell is going to break loose in the near future,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul in New York, adding that an Israeli-Palestinian escalation is “the last thing the Biden administration wants to deal with.”
The last time the United States engaged meaningfully in the region was in 2014, when then Secretary of State John F. Kerry oversaw the collapse of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. At the 2016 Saban Forum, an annual gathering of senior Israeli and American politicians, Kerry said he found the views of some right-wing Israeli leaders “disturbing” and said they had deliberately sabotaged efforts to negotiate a deal.
4 Israelis are killed by Palestinian gunmen as violence mounts in the West Bank
But as violence across the West Bank mounts in both ferocity and sophistication — and the number of U.S. citizens on both sides of the divide — the United States may be forced to resume some level of engagement.
Israel, which is under the far-right, most settler-friendly government in the country’s history, appears poised to annex the West Bank, home to three million Palestinians, as part of the stated goal of a two-state solution.
“We continue to work directly with our Israeli partners and the Palestinian Authority to advance steps to promote de-escalation,” U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said in a news conference on Wednesday, speaking after the U.S. weapons presence recently asked about battles in which both militants and civilians were killed.
However, former Israeli consul Pinkas said the United States may soon have to abandon these platitudes as Israeli far-right politicians, who have openly called for collective punishment of civilians as part of a deterrence strategy, gain greater influence over military and civilian policies in 2019 west bank
On Monday, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also holds a special position at the Defense Ministry, called on Israel to launch a full-scale anti-terrorist operation involving the Israeli Air Force to root out “the nests of terrorism” in the northern West Bank and surrounding densely populated cities.
When asked in an interview with the public broadcaster Kan whether he and his fellow politicians had pushed for the drone attack on Wednesday evening, Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of the far-right Jewish Power party, said: “We are pleased that our demands have been met.” be fulfilled.”
Hundreds of Palestinian Americans living in the West Bank, many in groups near the city of Ramallah, say the United States has an obligation to do more to protect its people as they fight against both the Israeli army and a growing number of armed Israeli settlers are stepping up to intimidate them out of their land.
“Why should my tax money fund the Israeli government that is killing American citizens?” said Tamer Naser Jbaraha, a Dallas resident whose cousin Omar Ketin, a US green card holder, was killed by Israeli forces in Turmus Ayya on Wednesday.
“As an American citizen, it is my duty and obligation to defend my country, so my country has an obligation to protect me wherever I go,” said Jbaraha, who is married to a US citizen. He said he and his family were in Turmus Ayya for the summer holidays, but his four children were traumatized by the experience of the settlers burning down their house and, out of insecurity, planned to return home as soon as possible.
“We need more pressure from the US government, which can order Israel to stop building settlements and stop arms shipments,” said Wasef Erekat, a Palestinian military analyst in Ramallah.
He said ongoing Israeli military attacks, focused on Jenin, have helped militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad and smaller local battalions recruit in unprecedented numbers and encouraged them to develop new weapons and tactics, such as manufacturing homemade bombs, etc. explosives. They also learn from the older fighters of the second Intifada period about the techniques of laying ambushes before Israeli military attacks and about traveling individually to avoid detection.
“The fighters now believe that the only way to confront the Israelis is to fight them and they are encouraged by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich who say there is no chance for Palestinians to live here,” Erekat said, referring to Israel’s two most prominent hard-line ministers – also zealous settler activists.
A senior Israeli military official said the raids over the past year and a half have become “longer and more complicated” due to the growing complexity of the Palestinians, making some sort of large-scale operation more likely, which analysts say could take the form of the reoccupation of Jenin.
Miri Eisin, a former senior Israeli intelligence officer, said the possibility should not be underestimated and that if it did happen, it would likely be a protracted affair with a high death toll.
“The occupation of Jenin, this low-technology but fortified arena, will have far-reaching implications for the West Bank, Gaza, Israel and even beyond,” she said, adding that Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group in Lebanon, might offer a chance to get involved.
“There will be no end,” she warned.
Hazem Balousha in Gaza City and Sufian Taha in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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