For more than a week, Israel has been carrying out large-scale military raids in the occupied West Bank, where the decades-long conflict with some elements of the Palestinian population has worsened since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
Israel maintains that the operations, which are the largest in the area since the start of the war, are designed to break up terror cells and prevent attacks on its citizens. Palestinians view the raids as a combination of harassment in support of settler demands for retribution and further efforts to cement Israeli control over a disputed territory that houses approximately three million Palestinians who live under Israeli military rule.
Last week, hundreds of Israeli forces took part in simultaneous raids across the northern West Bank, focused on Jenin’s urban refugee camp, which has been a major militant center, camps in Tulkarem and the Al-Faraa refugee camp in the Jordan Valley.
The notoriously unreliable Palestinian Health Ministry said that 16 people were killed in the military actions, without saying whether they were fighters or civilians. Israel claimed that all of those killed were militants. Hamas claimed 10 of those killed were its fighters. But regardless of who is right, similar raids have killed hundreds of militants over the years, including senior commanders, all of whom have been quickly replaced with new recruits in far greater numbers than those killed.
Israelis have long referred to such operations in both the West Bank and Gaza as “mowing the lawn” — a reference to a recurring, sprouting problem that needs to be trimmed back, even if any security gains achieved though the effort will be short-lived. But it must be done.
And so, the cycle of violence continues, with no end in sight.
Without a political plan or strategic solution, the Palestinian population in the West Bank will continue to seethe under the restrictive military control of the Israel Defense Forces, with little assistance or support from the deeply unpopular and largely unresponsive Palestinian Authority, which is supposed to be their governing body and intermediary in dealings with Israel.
While the West Bank continues to fester, the IDF faces growing challenges. It is locked in its Gaza effort to defang Hamas, rescue the painfully diminishing number of live hostages and return the bodies of those murdered, while seeking to assure Israeli security from the south. At the same time, the IDF needs to fend off barrages of missiles and other coordinated attacks in the north from Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The Whack-A-Mole effect is clear. And the never-ending attacks from one or another of the terror groups committed to Israel’s destruction is exhausting IDF troops, resources and patience.
Israel’s more aggressive policing of the West Bank and willingness to engage more forcefully with Hezbollah in the north is at odds with the Biden administration’s efforts to de-escalate conflict in the region. The problem is that de-escalation needs to be reciprocated. And there is no evidence that Hezbollah, Hamas or militant Palestinians in the West Bank have any interest in meaningful de-escalation.
That directive is going to have to come from Tehran, the home of the Middle East Whack-A-Mole Wizard.
