With All Eyes on Gaza, West Bank Palestinians Are Facing Unprecedented Violence

While the world is watching the Israel-Hamas war unfold in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank are suffering some of the worst violence and restrictions on their daily lives in years.

Since Hamas infiltrated Israel on October 7 and killed an estimated 1,200 people, Israel's security forces have cracked down on Palestinian factions in West Bank cities. They have also detained a huge number of Palestinians and allowed settlers to threaten and attack West Bank residents without consequence.

In this week's episode of the Haaretz Weekly podcast, Haaretz West Bank correspondent Hagar Shezaf speaks to host Allison Kaplan Sommer about why ignoring settler violence and other deepening problems in the occupied territory is a very dangerous course of action for Israel.

Since October 7, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. "There have been mass arrests of Palestinians suspected of being part of Hamas and also other groups, and settler violence has increased – not that it wasn't [already] very high before the war," says Shezaf. "This has resulted in some Palestinian villages evacuating themselves due to the settlers' threats and violence."

One of the main friction points has been the olive harvest. According to Shezaf, many Palestinians find themselves unable to harvest this year at all: Young settlers "have WhatsApp groups where they notify others about where there are Palestinians picking olives, and then they show up to scare them. In one area, settlers put leaflets on Palestinian cars saying they will suffer a 'Great Nakba.' Not in all cases, but in some cases, it's the army that is preventing people from harvesting their olives."

In Turmus Ayya, a town that was attacked by settlers in June, Shezaf says she heard from the mayor that "about 80 percent of the residents are not going out to harvest this year because they are afraid."

Another critical issue in the conversation was the number of Palestinians detained in Israel since the start of the Gaza war. "One of the first things that Israel did on October 7 is cancel the work permits of thousands of Gazans," who were in Israel working legally at the time.

"In the first couple of days, many of them tried to stay where they are. Some tried to reach the West Bank, but quite soon after that Israel started to arrest them. Most of them were not suspected of anything. They were detained because their permits were canceled."

This has led to overpopulation and mistreatment of detainees. Some soldiers even posted their abuse of detainees online. "A couple weeks into the war, I found out that two Palestinians had died in Israeli detention," in unrelated incidents, Shezaf shares. "Both of them were sick. One had diabetes and one was a cancer patient. When I spoke to the family of the detainee that had diabetes, they did not know that he died. It was a very unfortunate role that I played, confirming to his family that he died. He was a diabetic, but he basically died because no one gave him his medicine."