Israel has sealed off large parts of the Tubas governorate after sending heavy troops into the northern Jordan Valley, sealing off the area from the rest of the occupied West Bank and imposing a widespread siege.
Residents told Al Jazeera on Wednesday that military bulldozers piled up soil on every approach road before dawn, while Israeli Apache helicopters fired on empty fields around Tubas to intimidate Palestinian residents.
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Troops then began house-to-house searches in the city of Tubas as well as four surrounding cities, including Tammun and Aqaba, as the army announced a new military operation it claimed was targeting resistance fighters.
Ahmed Assad, the governor of Tubas, rejected that justification, and told Al Jazeera that the Israeli attack had nothing to do with security and everything to do with geography.
“The attack is targeting Tubas, located near the Jordan Valley, in a new effort to impose new realities,” he said.
Assad said about 30 families were forced from their homes, and troops had seized several buildings on high ground overlooking the governorate.
More than 50,000 Palestinians live in five cities besieged by the army.
collective punishment
Assad condemned it as a new round of collective punishment on a community already facing daily incursions and constant harassment at nearby checkpoints.
He said local authorities have suspended schools and public institutions and activated emergency committees across the governorate due to the military curfew being imposed.
Movement of ambulances and medical teams has also been restricted. Assad said Israeli forces blocked access to many patients who needed urgent care.
Local authorities have contacted the International Committee of the Red Cross to intervene and secure medical transfer.
ethnic cleansing
At least two Palestinians were transferred to hospital on Wednesday after being beaten by soldiers during raids in Tubas and Tammun, according to medics with the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
Residents told Palestinian news agency Wafa that the scale of the operation, which began shortly after midnight, resembles major attacks Israel has carried out in the West Bank since the Gaza massacre began in 2023, where troops have demolished homes, bulldozed roads, detained thousands and tried to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homes.
Hamas condemned the “criminal Zionist occupation army”, saying the latest siege, curfew and raid revealed “the extent of the systematic crimes committed by the extremist occupation government”.
The group said the attack is part of a policy aimed at “crushing out any Palestinian presence in order to gain complete control over the West Bank” and an effort to “ethnically cleanse” the occupied territory.
Hamas said, “This operation is part of the ongoing occupation and displacement plans, through which the occupiers seek to turn the cities and villages of the West Bank into besieged and depopulated areas.” He said that Israel’s “colonial project … will not break the will of our people”.
Another resistance faction, the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement, issued a separate statement condemning the raid as part of an Israeli “open war” to occupy the West Bank and forcibly remove its residents. It accused the United States of enabling Israel’s “systematic aggression”.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Israeli forces have conducted approximately 7,500 raids in the West Bank this year alone.
“The occupied West Bank is facing its worst displacement crisis in decades,” OCHA said, citing demolitions, military operations and increasing violence against Israeli settlers.
More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank over the past two years.
Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch said Israel’s large-scale displacement of three refugee camps constituted a war crime and a crime against humanity.
UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, estimates that approximately 32,000 Palestinian refugees have been forced from those camps and surrounding areas.
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