While the world is watching the Israel-Hamas war unfold in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank are suffering some of the worst violence and restrictions on their daily life in years.
Since Hamas militants entered Israel on October 7 and killed an estimated 1,200 people, Israel's security forces have cracked down on Palestinian factions in West Bank cities, while also detaining a huge number of Palestinians and allowing settlers threaten and attack West Bank residents without consequences.
In this week's episode of the Haaretz Weekly podcast, Haaretz West Bank correspondent Hagar Shezaf speaks to host Allison Kaplan Sommer about why ignoring settler violence and other deepening problems in the occupied West Bank is a very dangerous course of action for Israel.
Since October 7, more than 200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. "There have been mass arrests of Palestinians suspected of being part of Hamas and also other groups, and settler violence has increased – not that it wasn't very high before the war," says Shezaf. "This has resulted in some Palestinian villages evacuating themselves due to the settlers threats and violence."
One of the main friction points has been the olive harvest. According to Shezaf, many Palestinians find themselves unable to harvest this year at all: "They [young settlers] have WhatsApp groups where they notify others about where there are Palestinians picking olives, and then they show up to scare them."
Another critical issue in the conversation was the number of Palestinians detained in Israel since the start of the Gaza war. "One of the first things that Israel did on October 7 is cancel the work permits of thousands of Gazans," who were in Israel, working legally at the time.
This has led to overpopulation and mistreatment of detainees. "A couple weeks into the war, I found out that two Palestinians had died in Israeli detention," in unrelated incidents, Shezaf shares. "Both of them were sick. One had diabetes and one was a cancer patient. When I spoke to the family of the detainee that had diabetes, they did not know that he died. It was a very unfortunate role that I played, confirming to his family that he died. He was a diabetic, but he basically died because no one gave him his medicine."
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