Netanyahu locks down West Bank and threatens biggest military operation since 1967

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had reviewed a “very extensive operation in the West Bank that will be unprecedented since 1967,” when Israel seized the territory, raising fears of invasion, bombing and destruction on the scale Israel has inflicted on Gaza in recent years.

The Israel Defence Forces said two Palestinians from Hebron had attacked a “military position” near the Yehuda Junction near the city, armed with a handgun and an M16, and that three Israeli soldiers were wounded as well as the two slain. Under international law, Palestinians have the right to armed resistance to the Israeli occupation.

Mr Netanyahu’s office said security forces would immediately cordon off Hebron.

Bulldozers were sent in within hours to start tearing down Palestinian homes — the houses of families of people who attack Israeli troops are often demolished, but residents said the destruction appeared more general than that and that Hebron families were being given five minutes to evacuate before demolitions began.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said houses built without a permit — almost all of them, since Israel rarely grants such permits — would be eligible for demolition while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir even called for the Palestinian Authority to be dismantled and for “freedom of movement” in the West Bank — something already denied by multiple illegal Israeli settlements and checkpoints, Jew-only roads and a 440-mile “apartheid wall” — to be further restricted.

US Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander, who was detained in the West Bank by Israeli forces on Wednesday, said the sweeping crackdown was an example of Israel’s apartheid system and “part of an effort… to make Palestinian life impossible.”

Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has risen steeply this year, and combined with the mass Palestine solidarity movement in many countries has prompted even Israeli allies, including Britain, to target illegal West Bank settlements with trade restrictions.

But Mr Netanyahu, who faces elections on Tuesday, vowed following yesterday’s attacks that Israel would “establish more and more settlements” on Palestinian land.

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