Israel is expanding military operations in the northern West Bank. The battle plans for conducting raids in five Palestinian villages. Tel Aviv is expanding attacks across the West Bank as it is less concerned about retaliation.
According to Ynet, Operation Five Stones will target the sealing off of the Palestinian communities while Israeli soldiers search homes. The operation will involve air strikes and ground maneuvers.
The operation began on Wednesday, the day after the IDF declared there were no active terrorists in the West Bank responsible for past attacks.
The IDF has conducted similar operations in across the West Bank. The IDF raids have been violent, with home destructions, mass arrests, and the killing of over 1,000 Palestinians over the past two years. Israeli officials told Ynet that Tel Aviv feels less restrained in attacks on the West Bank because Hamas is unable to fire rockets into Israel as a response.
“Since the war, they understand that Israel and the IDF have changed—both in posture and mindset,” one official explained. “In the past, if intelligence identified a target for elimination, we’d hesitate—calculating the potential fallout and weighing how many senior approvals or troops it would require. Today, it’s different—smoother, faster and easier.”
A second official explained that the IDF has fewer restrictions when launching raids in the West Bank. “Today, our forces can reach every centimeter of the West Bank. That hasn’t happened since 1967,” they said.
Israeli security sources said that the lack of Palestinian resistance in the West Bank has been due to the IDF crackdown. One official explained that Palestinians from multiple generations are meant to understand the “cost of loss” for supporting terrorism.
Tel Aviv has also expanded the definition of terror to include “soft terrorism. The IDF has rounded up Palestinians for online posts or who were carrying “propaganda material.”
Israeli military officials are pushing back against some in Tel Aviv who want to scale back operations in the West Bank to pre-October 7, 2023, levels.
