By Athena Papakosta

Israeli forces began withdrawing on Tuesday night from the city of Jenin after an Israeli defense ministry official said Israel’s largest military operation in the occupied West Bank in two decades had achieved its objective, which was none other than with Tel Aviv, in addition to neutralizing armed Palestinian organizations hiding within the city’s settlement. According to Israel, these organizations are responsible for the increase in bloody attacks against Israelis.

The region had not experienced such a wave of violence since the second Intifada in 2000 that had lasted about five years.

Analysts say the tactics of airstrikes, armored bulldozers and a brigade of troops are the only things in common with Israel’s tactics during the second Palestinian uprising. Today, they explain, Tel Aviv’s targets have been limited to specific militant cores while the Palestinian leadership – compared to the early 21st century – is weakened and protests against the raids have not spread to the West Bank.

But fears of a slide into a more violent period of the long-running conflict between the two sides remain. Already in Tel Aviv, a young Palestinian drove his vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians and began attacking with a knife until he himself was shot dead. For Hamas, which claimed responsibility, it is a “martyr” with the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine applauding.

Last year was the bloodiest in the West Bank since 2005 when the UN began recording deaths in the region. At least 150 Palestinians, including 33 children, were killed by Israeli forces and at least two by settlers, while ten Israelis, including five settlers, were killed. But those numbers are higher in the first six months of 2023.

As the British newspaper The Guardian explains, the residents of the Jenin refugee camp are children and grandchildren of those who lost their lands after the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948.

The poison of hatred has been running for almost a century now. Whatever hopes were born back in the 1990s for peace by resolving the Palestinian issue through the two-state solution are now extinguished.

Today, Israel lives with its most extreme right-wing government that tries to match its rhetoric with its actions, while the opposite bank lives represented by a Palestinian Authority that now seems to be fading in the minds of the younger generation. As far as the international community is concerned, it spoke for the last 24 hours with its silence. Washington supported Israel’s “right to self-defense” while Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates condemned the operation.

All that remains now is this thick crust of black ash from the tires that young Palestinians used to set fire to, choking the atmosphere with that thick smoke that covered everything and protected those who emerged armed either with weapons or simply with stones to block the Israelis’ armored vehicles and bulldozers. Those fires may now be out but perhaps the first spark for a new wildfire has already been ignited.