Jerusalem shooting and Jenin raid: Why Israel-Palestine violence is spiking

It has been two violent days in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. On Friday evening in East Jerusalem, Palestinian gunmen killed at least seven Israelis in the city’s deadliest attack since 2008. Israeli officials described the shooting outside a synagogue as an act of terrorism. Earlier on Friday, three rockets were fired from Gaza and an Israeli jet struck a ground-level Hamas bomb-making facility, according to the Israeli military.

A day earlier, in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, Israeli commandos attacked an apartment building and the surrounding area, killing nine Palestinians and wounding 20, which the spokesman for the Palestinian Authority called a “massacre”. Israel said the site of the attack was a terrorist cell of the Islamic Jihad group.

More than one Palestinian person was killed on average a day in the first month of 2023, on the way to double the tragic rate of deadly violence in the occupied West Bank last year – which has been the highest record since the United Nations began collecting this. data, and twice in 2021.

Little is known about the shooter there or his motives; he was killed by the police after attacking a synagogue.

The escalating cycle of violence when CIA director Bill Burns visited Israel and Palestine; Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived on Monday. “We underscore the urgent need for all parties to de-escalate, prevent further loss of civilian life, and work together to improve the security situation in the West Bank,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price in a statement Friday.

But analysts describe the increasingly deadly and volatile situation as a product of dashed hopes and other structural factors, exacerbated by the far-right Israeli government that took power earlier this month. To say the least, the situation could not be calm.

The situation for the Palestinians has been bad and is getting worse, said Mairav ​​Zonszein, an analyst at the International Crisis Group. “With the new right-wing government committed to continued occupation of Palestine and settlement expansion, with the Palestinian body politic in tatters and no international stakeholders taking proactive measures, the crisis will continue to escalate,” he wrote in a message.

What do we know about the attack

It is not common, if not unprecedented, for Palestinian attackers to respond quickly to an Israeli attack like the one on Thursday in Jenin, an Israeli analyst told me on condition of anonymity. While it’s too soon to draw any grand conclusions about the details of each unfolding story, it’s clear that an already dire situation could take a turn for the worse.

On Friday evening outside a synagogue in the Israeli settlement of Neve Yaakov in East Jerusalem, Palestinian militants shot at least 10 people and were later killed by police. The situation is still ongoing, and no Palestinian militant group has 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 shared.

Jerusalem’s police chief pledged an “aggressive and outstanding” pursuit of anyone who supported the attacker. “Israel will continue to act strongly against the threat of terrorism. We will pursue and apprehend every terrorist who harms Israeli citizens,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

A day earlier, a deadly Israeli attack on a Palestinian home in the Jenin refugee camp killed nine, among them an elderly woman named Majida Obaid. “Most of the injuries that came to the hospital today were in the head and chest area,” read a statement from the Palestinian Ministry of Health on Thursday about the attack, as quoted by the Mondoweiss news site. “This means the direct firing of ammunition at civilians with the intent to kill.” Israeli forces also blocked the movement of ambulances with guns, the head of the hospital, Wissam Baker, told Al Jazeera.

Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Armed Palestinian resistance groups have flourished in the occupied territories, including in Jenin, partly in response to the corrupt nature of Palestinian leadership, the lack of opportunities for Palestinians, and stalled negotiations that could lead to a sovereign Palestinian state. Over the past year, Israeli forces have responded to these new groups, especially Lion’s Den, with intensive attacks with a high civilian death toll.

The State Department’s top Middle East official, Barbara Leaf, told reporters Thursday that the deadly attack on Jenin has dismantled “the ticking time bomb of the threat – of the terrorist threat,” apparently amplifying the comments of a senior Israeli military official.

In response to the Israeli operation, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Mahmoud Abbas said it would cut security coordination with the Israeli government. Some experts note that it is often a talking point for Abbas, but that is not always done.

UN special rapporteur for human rights Francesca Albanese noted Israel’s obligation as an occupying power to protect Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and emphasized “the alarmingly high level of extrajudicial killings of Palestinians in 2022 continues into this new year.”

Should we expect more violence under Israel’s new government?

In November, Israel elected the most extreme government in the country’s history. More than 80,000 demonstrators demonstrated against the new members of the government and judicial measures that would undermine the authority of the country’s Supreme Court. Even Moshe Ya’alon, a former defense minister who was once a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s center-right Likud Party, called the new Israeli government a “dictatorship of criminals.” But less attention in Israel has been paid to the radical new governing drastic implications for Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians living in the occupation.

“The death toll in the West Bank and now in Jerusalem is in fact a predictable result of the extremist Israeli government spreading violence,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the advocacy and research organization Democracy for the Arab World. Now.

The Biden administration, for its part, has held back criticism of the administration so far. Although the Biden administration still has the prospect of a two-state solution and an independent Palestinian state, the talks have been frozen since 2014, and more recently Israel has established diplomatic relations with Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. , giving the Israeli government little incentive to advance any two-state outcome.

It is unclear how Secretary of State Blinken will be able to ease tensions between Israel and the Palestinians during his upcoming trip. Priorities for the visit include “maintaining a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and protecting human rights and democratic values,” all of which appear to be at risk of devolving further.

Tom Pickering, a career ambassador who previously served in Israel, worries that the escalating violence could lead to a third Intifada, or uprising, among Palestinians. “At the moment, the two-state result, as most people say, is dead,” he said. “But there is no success in the creation of a state” – that is, the status quo sought by the current Israeli government, which the Palestinian state is likely to be viable.

But the tragic violence of the past two days shows that there is no solution.