From November 3, 2023: Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, the Israel-Hamas war has largely been fought in Gaza, a small strip of land along the border of the Mediterranean Sea. But farther inland, there has been an uptick in hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem says that at least 13 Palestinian herding communities in the West Bank have been forcibly displaced since the beginning of the war due to Israeli settler violence and intimidation, and nearly 100 Palestinians in the territory are reported to have been killed since the war began by both Israeli military strikes as well as settler violence. 

The fraught relationship between the Israeli government, Israeli settlers, Palestinians, and the Palestinian Authority are not new. But in part because of those existing issues, the West Bank has the potential to expand and complicate the bounds of the Israel-Hamas war—and some may argue that that is already underway. 

To understand how the West Bank fits into the ongoing hostilities between Israel and Hamas, Lawfare Associate Editor Hyemin Han spoke to Dan Byman from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, who is also Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Editor; Ghaith al-Omari of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; and Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare Senior Editor and Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. They talked about the international law that currently governs the rules of engagement in the West Bank, the political responses of the Israeli government and other Arab states, and how West Bank dynamics will impact the broader outcomes of the Israel-Hamas war. 

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