Israel’s legalization of settlements in the northern West Bank, explained
Israeli settlers return to the illegal Israeli outpost of Homesh, 23 December 2021
Qassam Muaddi writes in Mondoweiss on 16 July 2024:
Israel’s offensive against the West Bank, both political and military, has concentrated on its northern part in recent months, mainly in Jenin and Tulkarem. Israeli military raids have become a daily occurrence, unleashing levels of violence that have not been seen there in two decades. Since the beginning of the year, Israeli forces have killed 149 Palestinians in the Jenin governorate, 117 in the Tulkarem governorate, and 31 in the Tubas governorate, most of them in the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem, Nur Shams, and Far’a.
At the same time, the Israeli political establishment has launched a political offensive against the area, concentrated around the efforts to restart settlement expansion and colonization in a region that has been the least affected by Israel’s land grabs over the years.
This process didn’t start on October 7 either. The northern West Bank returned to the forefront of the news as far back as late 2021, when settlers north of Nablus began to go regularly to the evacuated site of what was once the illegal outpost of Homesh, almost halfway between Nablus and Jenin on the lands of the Palestinian village of Burqa.
Settlers tried to impose their presence in the village with the intent of rehabilitating the outpost, despite the fact that the villagers of Burqa had obtained a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court in 2013 to reclaim their confiscated lands.
Then, in December 2021, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on an Israeli settler car on its way to Homesh, killing one settler and wounding another. Israel accused two brothers of the shooting — Ghaith and Omar Jaradat, aged 17 and 20, from the town of al-Sila al-Harthiyya north of Jenin. The Israeli army arrested both of them and destroyed their family’s home, leaving nine people, including both of their elderly grandparents and three children, homeless.