In the West Bank, the media describes relative ‘calm’. Our reality couldn’t be more different.
Israeli military excavators demolish a Palestinian building in Idhna village, west of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, on 28 April 2025
Qassam Muaddi writes in Mondoweiss on 30 April 2025:
A few years ago, I witnessed a human rights organization’s interview with a released Palestinian prisoner. He was a 16-year-old teenager who had spent four months in Israeli detention, and when the human rights lawyer asked him if he had been tortured, he shrugged and said that he hadn’t.
Then the lawyer asked him how he was treated. He said that he was deprived of sleep and kept in the cold on his first night of detention; he was handcuffed to the chair during interrogation sessions, placed in stress positions, and had been threatened with violence, cursed at, and insulted. The teenager had no idea that these practices constituted torture. To him, as long as he wasn’t beaten, there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was just “normal.”
This skewed perception of what is considered “normal” for Palestinians is not just true for that teenager. It’s reflected in how the mainstream media treats Palestinians’ reality in the West Bank, especially after October 7.
For the past three weeks, the West Bank has been largely absent from mainstream media headlines. The relative stability that accompanied the period after the end of Ramadan and Passover was marked by a lack of news, and the Israeli army hasn’t expanded its mass expulsion campaign to new refugee camps. There also hasn’t been any Palestinian attack on Israeli troops or settlers, and the over 900 Israeli checkpoints that dot the entire West Bank have remained open most of the time, slightly easing Palestinians’ everyday movement. Most Palestinians noted this period of “relative calm” through Eid and Easter, comparing it to the past few months in which military assaults across the West Bank had become the new normal.
But the relative (and temporary) “stability” of the West Bank isn’t the only thing that is not deemed newsworthy. For the mainstream media, Israel’s daily violence against Palestinians in the West Bank no longer qualifies as deserving of coverage. It simply isn’t out of the ordinary.
Here’s a brief list of what has happened in the West Bank in just the last week.