‘No place will be safe in all of Palestine’: Palestinians brace for prospect of regional war
Palestinians inspect the destruction following an Israeli raid in Jenin city in the occupied West Bank on 6 August 2024
Qassam Muaddi writes in Mondoweiss on 14 August 2014:
As the rest of the world braces for the prospect of an all-out regional war in the wake of Iran and Hezbollah’s impending attacks against Israel in retaliation for the assassinations of top Hezbollah and Hamas leaders, Palestinians living under Israeli occupation have their own fears about what a wider conflagration might mean for them.
For Palestinians in Gaza, things can hardly get any worse. They have already been the subject of a relentless genocide that now marks the bloodiest period in Palestinian history. Some have even wondered whether a regional war with Hezbollah and the “Axis of Resistance” might actually take some pressure off Gaza since the Israeli military would likely be tangled with other fronts.
But things are different for the Palestinians living in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the part of historic Palestine that now makes up the Israeli state. While paling in comparison to the Gaza genocide, these communities have also faced unprecedented levels of Israeli repression since October 7. But a major war in the Middle East might be a game-changer for them, with its potential impact raising more apprehensive questions than answers.
As Israel launched its assault on Gaza following the October 7 attack, Israeli forces ramped up repressive measures on Palestinians in the West Bank, launching a wave of mass arrests and increasingly violent raids in West Bank towns and cities. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers have increased their attacks on Palestinian rural communities, expelling some 20 Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley and the eastern slopes of the West Bank with little media attention.
‘They have shelters. We only have the sky.’
“If a war breaks out and includes the West Bank, we have no place to go,” Habes Ka’abneh, a father of three and member of the displaced community of Wadi Seeq east of Ramallah, tells Mondoweiss.