Israel: Is a West Bank war imminent?

Fears of an escalation between the Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian militant factions in the occupied West Bank have reached a new peak this week.

Dozens of Palestinians have been killed in Israel's largest ground-and-air operation in the West Bank since the war in Gaza began almost 11 months ago.

Meanwhile, Hamas, the Islamist militant organization that carried out the October 7 attacks that sparked the current conflict in Gaza, has called on Palestinians in the West Bank to rise up against Israel.

So far, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has condemned the Israeli raids, yet his forces are not expected to heed the call from Hamas. The Palestinian Authority, which officially governs the West Bank, lacks a standing army and cooperates in part with Israel.

However, members of the two largest militias in the West Bank, the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, both of which many countries categorize as terror organizations, could prove willing to carry out more attacks.

"The risk of a major escalation in the West Bank is certainly growing and looks far more likely now than it has done since October 7," Neil Quilliam, associate fellow of the Middle East and North Africa program at the London-based think tank Chatham House, told DW.

Since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, when around 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 people kidnapped, the resulting Israeli military operations in Gaza have caused almost 41,000 deaths, according to the Hamas-run health authorities, which don't distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Increasingly popular Iran-backed militias

The occupied West Bank is home to around 3 million Palestinians. While the Palestinian Authority officially administers the region from Ramallah, the West Bank capital, analysts widely agree Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, as well as their affiliated militias, are the ones that run the refugee camps near Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarm in the north.

These areas are the focus of the current Israeli offensive as at least 150 attacks with weapons and explosives have originated there since October 2023, according to the Israeli military.

"In these refugee camps, there is no faith in diplomacy, no faith in the Palestinian Authority, no faith in the possibility of a two-state solution or any alternative arising," Nathan Brown, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, told DW.

In Brown's view, the combination of all these factors has led to political despair, and he added that the situation has been further exacerbated by Israel's steady stream of violence in the West Bank.

Since October 2023, at least 652 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. These numbers resemble a recent tally by the United Nations.

Some of the 600,000 Israeli settlers who live in settlements that are considered illegal under international law have increasingly taken up arms and attacked Palestinian civilians in the West Bank since October 7.

B'Tselem, an NGO that documents Israeli settler violence in Palestinian territories, concluded recently that settlers have forced at least 18 Palestinian communities — over 1,000 people — to flee their homes since October.

A comprehensive research paper by the independent Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) concluded that Israeli raids and worsening economic conditions have also driven more young men into the arms of Iran-backed militias. 

Brown agrees. "Especially for some younger Palestinians in small groups, this has become a time to act," he said.

However, while the authors see an increase in cooperation between militias with different affiliations, they see it as unlikely that the various militias would be willing to fully join forces.

"The West Bank's militant groups remain to be loosely organized and poorly trained," they wrote.

In Israel's view, however, these militias are increasingly supported by Israel's arch-enemy Iran, which also backs Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

Iran's influence in the West Bank

This week, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said the current offensive in the West Bank is necessary to prevent attacks on Israelis but also to curb Iran's influence. 

In his view, the West Bank is on the brink of turning into a hot spot for Iran, which seeks to fund and arm terrorists and smuggle advanced weapons to the groups it supports. Katz also accused Iran of destabilizing Jordan by establishing an "eastern terror front," including drug smuggling. Jordan, however, has rejected these accusations.

Yet Fabian Hinz, a defense and military analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told DW that building up some kind of armed resistance in the West Bank has been an Iranian priority for years.

"Drug smuggling from Syria to Jordan is currently flourishing, and the Iranians are very happy to use existing private smuggling networks from Syria via Jordan into the West Bank," Hinz explained.

He added that it is very difficult to estimate how many weapons have been smuggled successfully into the West Bank.

"What we have seen so far in the West Bank are mainly small arms, assault rifles and submachine guns," he said.

"What I haven't seen yet are the more powerful weapons that are available in Gaza, such as longer-range rockets or anti-tank missiles."

West Bank war 'very different'

Quilliam, the Chatham House associate fellow, echoes this view. "A war in the West Bank would be a very different proposition to the one in Gaza," he said.

"Israel would struggle to contain a major conflict in the West Bank, and it will put at risk Israeli civilians in population centers, something that the Gaza war has hardly done since October 8," he told DW.

In turn, he said Israel would be "leery about deploying a large military presence and, in effect, reoccupy the territory, as the cost in political, security and human terms would be very high."

Brown agrees. He, too, considers it far more likely that a level of violence within the West Bank will persist "in which Palestinians in small groups try to organize against Israel, and the Israelis acting basically as the occupier, take whatever actions, however heavy-handed they think is necessary to suppress those opportunities."

"What we're witnessing right now might be called the new normal," Brown told DW.

Edited by: Davis VanOpdorp