[News] Israeli Bulldozers Flatten Mile After Mile in the West Bank

[Anti-Imperialist News]

nytimes.com
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/world/middleeast/west-bank-raids.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NU4.zLe8.qUTrJlwXwEaZ&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ngrp=mnp&cbgrp=c>
Israeli Bulldozers Flatten Mile After Mile in the West Bank
Erika Solomon, Lauren Leatherby, Aric Toler
September 25, 2024
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*Despite the source (The NYT) This documentation is important to view to
get a sense of what the Zionist strategy is and what actual war crimes are
being committed.*

Videos from Tulkarm and Jenin show bulldozers destroying infrastructure and
businesses, as well as soldiers impeding local emergency responders.

Sept. 25, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET

Over two weeks, Palestinians watched as Israeli military bulldozers tore up
mile after mile of their streets and alleys, sewage seeping into the dusty
ruts left behind.

The people of Tulkarm and Jenin, the two West Bank towns that were the
focus of Israel’s latest military raids, said they had never before
experienced such a scale of destruction.

Residents pointed to one video that shows an Israeli armored bulldozer
flattening a decorative roundabout and nearby vegetation.

Video


CreditCredit...QudsN, via Telegram

Visual evidence analyzed by The New York Times supports accounts from
residents about the damage from Israel’s latest raids. Videos filmed in
Tulkarm and Jenin show bulldozers destroying infrastructure and businesses,
and soldiers impeding local emergency responders.

“We watched their bulldozers tear up streets, demolish businesses,
pharmacies, schools. They even bulldozed the town soccer field, and a tree
in the middle of a road,” said Kamal Abu al-Rub, the governor of Jenin, a
governorate in the northern West Bank. “What was the point of all of this?”

In late August, the Israeli military launched one of its most extensive and
deadliest raids in the West Bank in years, an escalation from the nearly
nightly raids that have become the norm since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks.

Israel has described the operations as counterterrorism efforts, aimed at
rooting out Hamas and other armed militants who have increased their
attacks against Israelis. The military said it had found stockpiles of
weapons in its recent operations in the northern West Bank, killed 23
militants and arrested 45. One Israeli soldier was killed in Jenin, it said.

In a response to a detailed list of questions from The Times, the Israeli
military said that it operated in accordance with international law and
“undertakes all feasible precautions to avoid damaging essential
infrastructure.” It said military engineers had to undertake such
operations to demine roads or destroy arms stores hidden on private
property.

But it acknowledged that these “operations in the area have caused
unavoidable harm to certain civilian structures.”

Residents in Jenin and Tulkarm, towns with a history of rebellion against
Israeli occupation, had long been accustomed to targeted, nighttime raids.
But many of them who spoke to The Times said the raids that lasted for nine
days in Jenin and even longer in Tulkarm went far beyond, noting that the
extent of the damaged roads and infrastructure surpassed any previous
assaults.

Several districts were declared “disaster zones,” officials said, because
so many buildings were bombed or blown up that they threatened the
stability of the broader neighborhood. And incursions that once focused on
the towns’ refugee camps spread deeper into other parts of the city.

Rights groups have also tracked Israeli forces’ intensifying use of
airstrikes in the West Bank, which they say violates international law.

“They are imposing conditions, materially and psychologically, that make
people feel: Gaza is coming to you,” said Shawan Jabarin, the director of
Al Haq, a rights group based in the West Bank. “There is a feeling among
Palestinians across the West Bank that what is coming is very bad — that it
will be a plan to kill and expel us.”
A Morning Raid

The most recent operations began early on Aug. 28 when residents of Tulkarm
and Jenin awoke to Israeli military bulldozers ripping up streets.

Video


CreditCredit...Reuters

The digging damaged water and sewage pipes. In Tulkarm, home to one of the
largest refugee camps in the West Bank, videos showed water gushing down a
street from what appeared to be a destroyed water main.

Video


CreditCredit...Noursams, via Telegram

For months, Israeli raids destroyed roads and other infrastructure that
local officials said they repeatedly fixed, only to see their work razed
again in the next assault.

Muhanad Matar, the head of general relations for the municipality of
Tulkarm, estimated that in the latest operations alone, more than 90
percent of water and sewage lines had been destroyed.

In Jenin, some 70 percent of roads have been damaged or destroyed by the
recent raids, according to the mayor, Nidal Obeidi. Internet, electricity
and phone lines were shut down in some areas. Sewage and water lines were
also cut, leaving about 80 percent of Jenin without running water, local
officials said, including the main hospital.

“The problem with trying to calculate the costs is that it doesn’t stop,”
Mr. Matar said. “It’s an unending string of raids.”
Businesses Destroyed

Israeli bulldozers have also plowed through commercial areas. Videos showed
them digging up streets in Cinema Square, the heart of Jenin’s business
district.

Israel’s military said the risk of militants hiding explosives necessitated
the use of “engineering tools when entering areas where the terrorist
organizations operate, in order to uncover the axes where explosive devices
were planted, and to remove the danger that arises from the terrorist
organizations’ use of civilian structures.”

Residents highlighted such efforts as examples of needless destruction.
Local business owners who spoke to The Times insisted this area had no
links to militants in the city.

Rami Kmail, 35, is the owner of Rami Center, overlooking the square — the
corner building with a red storefront seen in the video below.

Video


CreditCredit...Reuters

Mr. Kmail said his store had been damaged in 10 Israeli raids since Oct. 7.
It has cost him up to $20,000 in repairs each time.

Like other shopkeepers, he has stopped replacing some window panes and shop
signs. “There was no way to keep up with the cost,” he said.

Video


CreditCredit...Jenin Municipality, via Facebook

Mr. Kmail insisted this kind of destruction was aimed at hurting society
and daily life.

“It felt like we were targeted. That was very clear — there was an
intentional effort to destroy businesses,” he said. “They think they’re
teaching people a lesson. The army’s message is: No one is getting out of
this without being punished.”

The owner of the jewelry store being bulldozed in the video below said that
all of his display cases were crushed when the facade was destroyed. He
spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for his safety.

“I think we lost everything,” he said. Asked if he would reopen, he said:
“I don’t know if we are going to be able to. For now only God knows.”

Video


CreditCredit...Hisham Abu Shaqrah, via Storyful

In Tulkarm’s Nur Shams refugee camp, the Kinwa family sold cooking gas
canisters for three decades from the ground floor of the building that had
long been their home in the Manshiya District. It is one of several
districts that municipal officials have declared “disaster zones” to be
evacuated.

The business, the family said, went up in flames this month, after Israeli
soldiers rigged and detonated explosives in the shop — ignoring neighbors’
warnings that some 50 gas canisters were inside.

Video

CreditCredit...Kinwa family

“Every other night, we move and find someone else to stay with,” said Ayman
Al-Kinwa, who ran the family’s business. “We were a big home, and now we
are scattered.”
Unanswered Emergency Calls

Perhaps the heaviest cost of the raids has been the effect on medical care.

Several videos showed ambulances unable to navigate destroyed roads.
Ambulance drivers said they sometimes could not find alternate routes among
the cratered roads.

Video

CreditCredit...QudsN, via Telegram

Even when roads were intact, Israeli bulldozers, other videos showed,
appeared to block emergency vehicles from passing.

Video

CreditCredit...QudsN, via Telegram

Mahmoud Al-Saadi, the head of the Red Crescent branch in Jenin, said that
calls for help increased significantly during the recent raids. His teams,
he said, failed to respond to 500 to 600 calls per day because they simply
could not reach them.

The sudden rise in calls was not only related to the fighting, medics and
municipal officials said, but also to soldiers encircling hospitals. The
soldiers, they said, granted entry only to ambulances and not civilian
vehicles, so rescuers also had to escort patients needing regular
treatments, like dialysis or radiation.

One video showed Israeli soldiers inspecting an ambulance in Jenin.


Israel’s military, in response to The Times, said it “does not intend to
harm medical personnel. However, in several cases, terrorists have carried
out terror attacks via the exploitation of ambulances and medical
institutions.”

As a result, the army said it “has been compelled, in some instances, to
search ambulances leaving the camps and villages,” but said it tried to
minimize the delays.

Mr. Al-Saadi said some of his teams were forced to wait for long periods of
time, putting some patients’ lives at risk.

With evacuations so difficult, many volunteers said they put together
first-aid kits to treat people at their homes. And in cases where emergency
vehicles could not reach people, some Red Crescent officials said, teams
sometimes guided people through treatments by phone until one could.

“This is collective punishment,” said Laith Hassan, 25, a volunteer for the
Red Crescent in Tulkarm. “I don’t know what else you could call it.”
Increase in Airstrikes

Since the second intifada, or uprising, ended in the early 2000s, Israeli
airstrikes on the West Bank have been extremely rare. After Oct. 7,
airstrikes by drones, fighter jets and helicopters increased rapidly,
killing 41 Palestinians in August alone — more than at any point in close
to two decades, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs and the rights group Al-Haq.

In its latest raid, the Israeli military said it carried out 50 airstrikes
“on buildings, infrastructure, and weapon storage sites.” It also said it
launched targeted strikes on militants.

A video posted by the military shows what appears to be gunmen being
corralled by an Israeli military vehicle. When they open fire and try to
flee, an airstrike kills one as they run away.

Video

CreditCredit...Israel Defense Forces

Such airstrikes violate Israel’s obligations under international law, said
Sari Bashi, a program director for Human Rights Watch, which stipulates
that an occupying power must conduct security operations as a policing
force, not an army.

“One of our concerns is that lethal force is actually a first resort — that
the Israeli military is trying to kill people, as opposed to arrest them,
under circumstances where it’s possible to arrest them,” she said.

Israel’s army said that it had complied with international law, and that
aerial strikes “are carried out in cases where the option of arrest was
ruled out in view of the immediate risk to the forces.”

The U.N. office and Al-Haq have both documented more than 150 Palestinians
killed by airstrikes in the West Bank since Oct. 7. Palestinians in Jenin
and Tulkarm say they increasingly fear the drones that almost constantly
circle overhead. Medics and municipal workers repairing roads say they have
come under drone surveillance, and have sometimes been fired on.

“They even shot at my car,” said Mr. Obeidi, Jenin’s mayor.

Some Palestinian men, like the shop owner Mr. Al-Kinwa, say they now avoid
going outside or gathering in groups.

“The fear of drone strikes is with me 24 hours a day,” he said. “It’s there
even when I sleep.”

The intensity of these latest raids, some residents warn, may backfire
against Israel’s efforts to ensure its security and lead to more people
joining groups like Hamas.

“If you deliberately destroy the place, what do you think those people are
going to do?” asked the shopkeeper Mr. Kmail. “Israel just added to the
numbers in the resistance.”

Video production by Ainara Tiefenthäler.

Aric Toler <https://www.nytimes.com/by/aric-toler> is a reporter on the
Visual Investigations team at The Times where he uses emerging techniques
of discovery to analyze open source information. More about Aric Toler
<https://www.nytimes.com/by/aric-toler>
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