It’s been two violent days in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. On Friday night, a Palestinian gunman killed at least seven Israelis in east Jerusalem in the deadliest attack in the city since 2008. Israeli officials described the shooting outside a synagogue as an act of terrorism. According to the Israeli military, three rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip earlier on Friday and Israeli jets attacked a Hamas underground bomb factory.
A day earlier, Israeli commandos raided a home and surrounding area in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, killing nine Palestinians and wounding 20 in what a Palestinian Authority spokesman called a “massacre.” Israel said the site of the raid housed a terrorist cell from the Islamic Jihad group.
More than one Palestinian per day was killed on average in the first month of 2023, on track to double the tragic rate of deadly violence in the occupied West Bank over the past year – which was already the highest on record by the United Nations and doubled as much as 2021.
Little is known about the Friday shooter or his motives; He was killed by police after attacking the synagogue.
Escalating cycle of violence comes as CIA Director Bill Burns visits Israel and Palestine; Foreign Minister Antony Blinken arrives there on Monday. “We underscore the urgent need for all parties to de-escalate, prevent further civilian casualties and work together to improve security in the West Bank,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement Thursday.
But analysts described the increasingly deadly and volatile situation as a product of forsaken hope and other structural factors, exacerbated by a far-right Israeli government that took power earlier this month. At the very least, things are unlikely to settle down.
The situation for the Palestinians was already bad and continues to deteriorate, says Mairav Zonszein, an analyst at the International Crisis Group. “With a new far-right government committed to continued dispossession of Palestinians and settlement expansion, with the Palestinian body in shambles and no proactive steps by international interest groups, the crisis is likely to escalate further,” she wrote in a message.
What we know about the attacks
It is unusual, if not unprecedented, for a Palestinian attacker to react so quickly to an Israeli raid as it did in Jenin on Thursday, an Israeli analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me. While it’s still too early to jump to any big conclusions about the specifics of each unfolding story, it’s clear that the already dire situation could get very ugly.
On Friday night, a Palestinian militant shot at least 10 people outside a synagogue in the Israeli settlement of Neve Yaakov in east Jerusalem and was then killed by police. The situation is still unfolding and no Palestinian militant groups immediately claimed credit, but police have identified the shooter as a 21-year-old resident of East Jerusalem. The attack occurred on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. No information about the victims was immediately released.
The Jerusalem police chief vowed to “aggressively and meaningfully” pursue anyone who supported the attacker. “Israel will continue to act vigorously against the threat of terrorism. We will pursue and reach out to any terrorist who harms Israeli citizens,” the State Department said in a statement.
A day earlier, nine people were killed, including an elderly woman named Majida Obaid, in a deadly Israeli raid on a Palestinian home in the Jenin refugee camp. “Most of the injuries that arrived at the hospital today were in the head and chest,” the Palestinian Health Ministry said in a statement Thursday about the raid, quoted by news site Mondoweiss. “It means that the shooting of live ammunition at local residents was done with intent to kill.” Israeli forces also obstructed the movement of ambulances with gunfire, the hospital’s director, Wissam Baker, told Al Jazeera.
Relatives mourn during the memorial service on January 19 for two Palestinians who were killed by Israeli army bullets in a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Armed Palestinian resistance groups are expanding in the occupied territories, including in Jenin, in part in response to the fragmented Palestinian leadership, the lack of opportunities for the Palestinians and the protracted negotiations that could lead to a sovereign state of Palestine. Over the past year, Israel Defense Forces have responded to these new groups, particularly Lion’s Den, with intensive crackdowns that have resulted in high civilian deaths.
The State Department’s top Middle East official, Barbara Leaf, told reporters Thursday that the deadly attack in Jenin “dismantled a ticking time bomb of a threat — a terrorist threat,” apparently adding to comments from a senior Israeli military official.
In response to the Israeli operation, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Mahmoud Abbas, said he would cut security coordination with the Israeli government. Some experts noted that this was often a topic of conversation for Abbas, but one he has not always followed.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Francesca Albanese, pointed to Israel’s obligation as an occupying power to protect Palestinian civilians in the West Bank stressed The “deeply alarmingly high rate of apparent extrajudicial killings of Palestinians of 2022 continues into this new year.”
Should we expect more violence under Israel’s new government?
In November, Israelis elected the most extreme government in the country’s history. More than 80,000 protesters demonstrated against the new government members and their legal action that would weaken the authority of the country’s Supreme Court. Even Moshe Ya’alon, a former defense minister who was a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s centre-right Likud party, has described the new Israeli government as “a dictatorship of criminals”. But within Israel, less attention has been paid to the drastic impact of the radical new coalition government on the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Palestinians living under occupation.
“The death toll both in the West Bank and now in Jerusalem is indeed the entirely predictable result of an extremist Israeli government that promotes violence,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the advocacy and research organization Democracy for the Arab World Now.
For its part, the Biden administration has so far been reluctant to criticize the government. Although the Biden administration still holds out the prospect of a two-state solution and an independent Palestinian state, those talks have been frozen since 2014, and more recently Israel has forged diplomatic ties with Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco , giving the Israeli government little incentive to push for a two-state outcome.
It is not entirely clear how Secretary of State Blinken will manage to de-escalate tensions between Israelis and Palestinians during his upcoming trip. The visit’s priorities include “upholding the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and protecting human rights and democratic values,” all of which risk further shifting.
Tom Pickering, a career ambassador who previously served in Israel, is concerned the escalating violence could lead to a third intifada, or uprising, among Palestinians. “Right now, as most people like to say, the two-state result is dead,” he told me. “But there is a non-state outcome that is emerging” – that is, a status quo sought by the current Israeli government, in which a Palestinian state is no longer a viable option.
But the tragic violence of the last two days shows that this is not a solution at all.
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