The Gaza ceasefire was many agonising months in the making, and mere days after it started on 19th January, as Palestinians and Israelis dared to hope, at last, for some respite, Israel launched a major military operation in the West Bank. Ostensibly aimed at uprooting terrorist infrastructure after an increase in attacks inside Israel and in the occupied territories, “Iron Wall” has killed civilians and disrupted life for millions of Palestinians.
The operation, striking from the air and blowing up buildings, has claimed at least 16 lives, according to the Palestinian health ministry, after initially focussing on armed Palestinian groups in Jenin. On 25th January, in a village near Jenin, a two-year-old girl, Laila Al-Khatib, was shot in the head and killed by Israeli troops. Her pregnant mother was also wounded. On Saturday, the 12th day of the operation, the Palestinians report that four people were killed, including a 73-year-old man, and several wounded, as the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) carried out drone strikes in and around Jenin. The Israeli military itself has claimed that it has killed at least 50 militants and destroyed 23 buildings since the operation began.
In the UK, at the Foreign Affairs Committee’s recently launched inquiry into the Israel-Palestine conflict, Bassem Aramin told MPs what daily life in the West Bank has been like since the operation started. Amid IDF strikes and an uptick in army raids, freedom of movement has been even more limited than usual. According to a UN report from 28th January, “Suffocating restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement across the West Bank… [are] practically tearing communities apart and largely paralysing daily life.”
“We are living in a big jail,” Aramin, a bereaved father (and co-director of the Parents Circle-Family Forum peace group), said via video call at the parliamentary session on 27th January. There are “no consequences, no rules, they can do whatever they want”.
Also addressing the committee, Alon-Lee Green, a co-director of the grassroots movement Standing Together, noted that Ramallah, one of the main cities in the West Bank, “has been closed—all entrances and exits—so people there are dependent on the Israeli army to allow them to move in or out”.
Even before the latest IDF operation began, violence in the West Bank was at record levels. Increased settler attacks made 2023 the most violent year for West Bank Palestinians in 18 years. According to the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (OCHA), Israeli operations accounted “for 42 per cent of all displacement documented by OCHA between January 2023 and December 2024, compared with less than 2 per cent in the two years prior”. For months, Israeli forces have been more active in the West Bank. Since the start of 2025, the OCHA reports that the IDF has killed 53 West Bank Palestinians, among them eight children.
These tensions risk derailing the ceasefire, under which 18 hostages, including five Thai nationals, have been exchanged for hundreds of prisoners. More than 70 hostages are still in Hamas’s hands, though many are thought to be already dead. Donald Trump managed to push through the agreement before his inauguration, much to the chagrin of the more extreme right-wing members of the Netanyahu coalition who had long tried to torpedo it. As such, the recent increase in West Bank activity can be seen as a “gesture” to the right, according to Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group based in Israel. The trend is “you might have to stop what you are doing in Gaza, but the West Bank is yours”.
Some figures on the right are “using it to demonstrate hard-line bona fides”, says Chuck Freilich, formerly a deputy national security adviser under Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister who withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005. Two days before the Gaza ceasefire came into force, Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz released West Bank settlers from administrative detention. Katz linked the move directly to the Palestinian prisoners due to be exchanged for Israeli hostages, saying “it is better for the families of Jewish settlers to be happy than the families of released terrorists”. On 19th January, ahead of Palestinians being freed from Israeli jails as part of the Gaza truce, settlers rampaged in a number of West Bank towns, setting fire to vehicles and homes. The following day, Trump’s first day in office, the new US administration cancelled sanctions imposed by Joe Biden against settlers accused of violence.
Trump’s move emboldened settlers, Issa Amro, a Hebron-based activist, tells me in a phone call. International sanctions were “the only way of stopping them. The Israeli system is not making them accountable.”
Meanwhile, Iron Wall has severely restricted life in his city. The UN reported in January that the army had shut all entrances to Hebron, cutting off “thousands of Palestinians from neighbouring communities”. When we speak, Amro tells me only one Hebron checkpoint is open, and that four or five days earlier the army had raided all the Palestinian neighbourhoods in the city. “Making the occupation felt, this is what they are doing.” A video shared on social media by Standing Together, a grassroots Palestinian-Jewish movement, seems to show army trucks running down a vegetable stall in the West Bank on purpose. In another video, soldiers film themselves in a Palestinian home putting on women’s underwear that they found there.
The Gaza truce remains fragile. Fifteen months after the start of the war, the hostage families continue their excruciating wait. On Monday, the day negotiations between Israel and Hamas were due to start for phase two of the deal, Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Washington to meet with Trump’s Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff. On Tuesday, Netanyahu is set to meet Trump in the US president’s first meeting with a foreign leader since taking office. Biden was unable to get a Gaza ceasefire deal over the line, but Trump and Witkoff managed to push Netanyahu—wary of destroying his coalition and leaving himself politically vulnerable—to acquiesce. Utterly self-interested, the prime minister wishes to avoid culpability for 7th October, when hundreds of Israeli citizens (and some foreign nationals) were murdered and kidnapped by Hamas on his watch, and his ongoing criminal trial.
On 29th January, Witkoff visited the Gaza Strip, the first senior US official to do so in more than 10 years. Witkoff was escorted by the IDF and Ron Dermer, a key Netanyahu ally. As the analysts I speak to point out, he was there to send a message to the Israelis that the US is serious about the ceasefire. It may also have been a message to the wider region, HA Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the thinktank Rusi, tells me: “He went to an occupied territory with the occupying power and did not even bother talking to the occupied people. That will be poignantly noticed. It wouldn’t surprise me if his trip was a way of telling Arab allies in the region: see, I went to Gaza.”
The ceasefire itself will not solve the enormous humanitarian crises in the Strip. With most of its infrastructure destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people wounded and an official death toll now raised to more than 61,000, Gaza will need billions of dollars in reconstruction and a political resolution as to who governs it. Whether anyone is expecting reconstruction to start any time soon is another matter. Some powers in the region may be wondering, says Hellyer, why they should pay towards rebuilding Gaza “if the Israelis will go and destroy it again?”
Trump has ruminated out loud about ethnically cleansing Gaza of Palestinians, with Jordan and Egypt taking the refugees. This has long been a talking point on parts of the Israeli right—even before 7th October and this Gaza war—but it seems highly unlikely that Egypt or Jordan would ever agree to it. On 29th January, Egypt’s President Sisi said so publicly, describing the displacement of Palestinians as “an act of injustice”.
For Trump, the big prize in the region is normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, following on from the Abraham Accord agreements he brokered with countries such as the UAE in his first administration. Riyadh needs the Gaza war to be over to make normalisation work, and the Saudis could be in a position to link an agreement to conditions such as Palestinian statehood. Yezid Sayigh, the academic and former Palestinian negotiator, tells me in an email that Saudia Arabia “is the one country whose preferences might influence what ‘deal’ Trump pursues and what he tries to get Netanyahu to accept”.
But as all eyes remain on the Gaza ceasefire, Israel’s activity in the West Bank is an urgent reminder of the far larger matter at hand. Whether the truce holds through its subsequent stages is “merely transitional”, says Sayigh. “What takes us all back into deadlock and then bloodshed every time is that Netanyahu and the Israel right generally wish to prevent Palestinian statehood altogether, and yet have no answers to the question of what to do with the five million Palestinians under various forms of military occupation (let alone the two million Palestinian citizens of Israel who are being pushed more and more into unambiguous second-class status).”
Indeed, Hamas is still in charge in the Strip, and a Palestinian state remains elusive. The status quo ante, declared dead after 7th October, seems less dead than it did.
