Palestinian Toll Mounts As Israel Steps Up West Bank Raids
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – At least 85 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank this year as Israeli forces have carried out nightly raids in cities, towns and villages, making it the deadliest in the occupied territory since 2016.
The tally, from the Palestinian Health Ministry, includes several Palestinians civilians, among them a veteran journalist and a lawyer, as well as local youths who took to the streets in protest against the invasion of their neighborhoods, according to AP.
The length and frequency of the raids has pulled into focus Israel's tactics in the West Bank, where nearly 3 million Palestinians live under a decades-long occupation and Palestinians view the Israeli regime military’s presence as a humiliation and a threat.
Israeli troops have regularly operated across the West Bank since Israel occupied the territory in 1967.
The Palestinian Health Ministry has reported 85 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem al-Quds since the start of the year.
With four months to go this year, that already is the highest number since 2016, the tail-end of a previous wave of violence, when 91 Palestinians were killed, according to yearly data compiled by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
The ministry's tally includes the veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, and a 58-year-old man who was shot in the head outside a bakery earlier this month.
The dead include 17 teens under the age of 18, as well as six women, according to the ministry.
Teenagers and women are often the targets of Israeli violence, as the critics accuse the Israeli army of using excessive force in many cases.
Israel is also holding more than 600 Palestinians without charge or trial in a so-called administrative detention — the highest in six years.
Rights groups say that many Israeli missions are intended as a show of force, or to protect the growing population of Zionist settlers.
Ori Givati is the head of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group opposed to the occupation that gathers testimonies of former Israeli soldiers. Some soldiers recall carrying out mock arrests, in which fully armed soldiers raid a home in the middle of the night — for training purposes.
Even more common, Givati says, are so-called “stimulus and response” operations, which he said he took part in himself when he served in the West Bank. In those, Israeli troops roll through Palestinian areas, sometimes with lights and speakers on, hoping to lure stone-throwers or gunmen into the streets so they can arrest or confront them.
“The way we occupy the Palestinians is by creating more and more friction, making our presence felt," Givati said. "We invade their towns, their cities, their homes.”
Israel says it investigates all cases in which Israeli troops are suspected of killing civilians, but rights groups say most of those investigations are quietly closed with soldiers rarely facing serious repercussions.