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The West Bank is on the verge of catastrophe

By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | September 9, 2025

The Israeli regime seeks to collapse the notion of the so-called “two-state solution” once and for all, as part of its broader final solution to the Palestinian question. In order to do this, even the Palestinian Authority will have to fall, and with it will come a new series of horrors for the occupied West Bank.

Since October 7, 2023, the Zionist entity has waged a regional campaign that its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has branded the “seven-front war”. The publicly stated goal of this regional war is to achieve “total victory”. While many analysts continue to cover the Gaza war as a separate issue from the other fronts, this is a misreading of the realities we are seeing on the ground.

When looking at how the West Bank factors into the ongoing regional war, it would make no sense to view it outside of its proper context. To begin with, the October 7 operation was used as a pretext for the acceleration of the most extreme goals sought after by the Zionist entity.

The Israelis had suffered their greatest ever military blow, shattering their power projection model and shaking the very foundations of Zionism’s core pillars. In reaction to this, the supremacist entity decided to go all out in every conceivable way, although this came quicker on some fronts than others.

Specifically looking at the occupied West Bank, the Israelis did not waste any time in deploying a large number of soldiers to the territory and began immediately placing countless new movable checkpoints, dirt mounds, cement barriers, and gates to isolate villages from one another, ensuring the further fragmentation of an already divided territory.

In conjunction with this, Israeli settlers were armed with a seemingly unlimited supply of light weapons and encouraged to begin carrying out pogroms against villages and collections of communities, with the aim of ethnic cleansing. This was fully backed by the Israeli military, which had even begun creating settler-controlled units the year prior, including the infamous “Desert Frontier”, which sought to legitimize settler extremist militias that had once been deemed terrorists by the Zionist entity itself.

Then came the imposition of curfews, lockdowns targeting specific areas, and road closures that would leave West Bank Palestinians stranded. Military raids also increased, as did the murder rate against Palestinian civilians, which reached levels not witnessed since the Second Intifada.

The Israelis committed countless on-the-ground raids and airstrikes, focused primarily in the northern West Bank, where young Palestinian fighters had formed groups since 2021 to confront the occupying entity’s raids on their refugee camps and villages.

Following these frequent attacks, which often resulted in civilian massacres along with the killing of fighters, in August of 2024, the Zionist regime announced “Operation Summer Camps”, aimed at destroying the armed resistance in the northern West Bank. The operation ultimately failed to inflict a defeat on the resistance groups, taking its largest toll on the civilian populations living in the Nur al-Shams and Jenin refugee camps.

By September 9, 2024, the Palestinian Authority (PA) had reached a deal with the Israeli military that would see its forces work alongside the occupying army to root out the Palestinian resistance forces. In early December, the PA’s security forces then launched their “Operation Protect The Homeland”, where they arrested Palestinian Resistance fighters, killed civilians, and removed IEDs planted in Jenin that were set to target Israeli military jeeps.

By January, amid a failure of the PA to uproot the resistance from Jenin alone, the Israeli military launched a renewed military effort alongside the PA that would lead to the mass displacement of tens of thousands of civilians. The Israeli forces launched airstrikes, carried out assassinations, desecrated mosques, blew up homes, and imposed siege warfare on both the Jenin and Nur al-Shams refugee camps.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority was further demonized and delegitimized by the incoming Trump administration in the United States, after failing to prove its effectiveness at combating the Palestinian resistance alone.

A steep economic decline has also plagued the West Bank since October 7, 2023, plunging hundreds of thousands into poverty, as the Israeli settlers and military continue to construct new settlements and uproot olive trees and have ethnically cleansed over 30 communities and villages, while imposing a regime of all-out intimidation across the territory.

The results have proven catastrophic; the Zionist regime is taking over more of the Ibrahimi Mosque in al-Khalil, entering Area A of the West Bank at will despite it being technically under PA control, while refusing to release tax revenue back to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.

Although the Palestinian Authority has repeatedly sought to combat resistance, runs security coordination for the Israeli occupying entity, frequently blames the genocide in Gaza on Hamas, and attempts to follow the rules laid out by its US, EU, and UK sponsors, it is now being totally delegitimized and pushed to the brink of collapse.

The PA is the perfect example of what happens when you lay down your arms, denounce resistance, and cooperate with the Israelis in search of a so-called “peace agreement”. The Zionists only take this as a weakness and continue to pursue their agendas, except that there is no substantial resistance now to protect the people.

With Western nations like Canada, France, Belgium, Australia, and the UK all declaring they will recognize the State of Palestine, the Israelis have reacted by pursuing a policy that completely eliminates the Palestinian Authority and its global standing. The E1 settlement project is one step; imposing annexation is another, yet perhaps the biggest factor here may be the Israeli refusal to release the necessary funds that the PA needs to keep afloat.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump notably banned the Palestinian Authority’s officials from travelling to the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York this month, while his own officials openly talk about the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria”; the Israeli settler name for the occupied territory.

Another major issue is the ongoing Israeli-manufactured water crisis in the occupied West Bank, making it so that some residents of Ramallah only get water access at home twice per week, causing them to go to public areas to fill up on supplies.

The Israeli settlers have exacerbated this crisis by destroying and poisoning water wells and pipes. It is of note that Palestinians are not permitted to drill for water without specific permits, and the West Bank’s natural basin has long been hijacked by the Israelis, who supply their West Bank settlements with all the water they need.

So far, the population of the West Bank has not risen up into an Intifada either, so the Israelis get away with whatever they choose. In addition to this, the armed resistance that was in its early phases in the north of the territory has been forced into hiding and is no longer active.

Unlike the Gaza Strip, which had built a sophisticated underground tunnel network and armed itself with every weapon it could create or smuggle in, the West Bank is all but defenseless. However, the West Bank does have one advantage over Gaza: there are settlements littered throughout it, and the population there is very close to the occupiers physically.

Whether the Israelis choose to suddenly collapse the Palestinian Authority, annex portions of the territory, and begin a mass ethnic cleansing campaign, or they simply seek to slowly achieve this goal over time, the people of the West Bank have one way to combat it: a mass popular uprising. This uprising also must involve frequent violent assaults on Israeli settlements and operations that cross over into the territories occupied in 1948.

Currently, many people in the West Bank, particularly those living in the major cities, have not shown such resolve and determination. Instead, they have been slowly ground down into the material distractions that the Israelis intended for them to occupy themselves with, using their loans and credit cards to purchase cars and handbags or live cafe lifestyles they cannot afford.

The biggest employers in the West Bank are the Palestinian Authority, Israeli businesses, and Western NGOs, while the loans that people take are often impossible for people to pay back. Therefore, they have become enslaved to the material system of occupation. This is why you only really see armed resistance coming from a handful of villages and refugee camps, where the people have nothing to distract themselves from the occupation they live under.

The West Bank is perhaps one of the most sophisticated and ruthless social engineering testing grounds in modern history. In order for the people to break free, they will have to fight. This uprising will bring about countless horrors, some similar to what we have seen in Gaza, but the alternative is simply losing everything without a fight. Perhaps fewer people will die in such a short period, but the result of doing nothing will unfortunately be the loss of their homeland. The path of resistance is the only way that victory and liberation are even possible.

The Israelis will not allow for 3.3 million Palestinians to live in what the regime considers “Israel’s biblical heartlands”; they seek “Greater Israel” with as few Palestinians there as possible. There is no “two-state solution”, no “peace deals”, no “security agreements”, only an agenda to completely destroy the Palestinian people and implement the genocidal regime’s final Solution. Although the situation appears bleak, the people are still strong and will undoubtedly resist.

September 9, 2025 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment