Spiking West Bank violence adds another front to Israel's collection of conflicts
After almost a year of a brutal war with Hamas in Gaza, Israel is at the center of a tinderbox of multiple, interrelated Middle East conflicts.
A steady escalation with Hezbollah in Lebanon. A brewing all-out confrontation with Iran. Strikes from Yemen's Houthis. And now, growing deadly violence in the West Bank.
Here's what's happening with each of them.
Gaza fighting closes in on a year
Israel launched its military operation in Gaza after Hamas attacked communities on Israel's southern border on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage. More than 40,000 Palestinians have since been killed in Gaza by Israel, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Gaza itself is a humanitarian disaster zone.
Some of Israel's hostages were released as part of a truce and prisoner exchange with Hamas in November. Others have been killed or murdered while in captivity. A fresh cease-fire and hostage deal aimed at releasing Israel's remaining 101 captives, about a third of whom are believed to be dead, has proved elusive.
Israeli airstrikes on Gaza tent camp: more than 40 dead, dozens injured
In the absence of that deal, Israel has pushed on with its military offensive in Gaza aimed at rooting out Hamas and freeing its hostages. On Tuesday, Hamas said at least 40 people were killed when Israeli missiles struck a designated humanitarian area in the Gaza city of Khan Younis.
Israel's military disputed the casualty figure and said its aircraft attacked senior Hamas commanders who were embedded inside a command and control center in the area. It said some of those killed were "directly involved" in the Oct. 7 attacks and had recently been carrying out "terror activities" against Israel.
On Wednesday, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, said six of its staff were killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza. There were reports that as many as 34 people may have died in all. Israel's military described the incident as a "precise strike on terrorists" who were planning attacks from the school. It said it took measures to avoid harming civilians.
UNRWA said the six deaths were "the highest death toll among our staff in a single incident" since the start of Israel's war in Gaza. "No one is safe in Gaza," it said. The U.N. recently fired nine UNRWA workers after Israel brought allegations that UNRWA staff in Gaza were involved in Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks. A U.N. probe, completed in August, examined allegations against 19 UNRWA employees. The probe did not release specific findings about the extent of the UNRWA workers' alleged involvement but concluded they "may have been involved."
Israel-Hezbollah tit-for-tat
Since Oct. 7, Israel and Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based group with ties to Iran, have swapped near-daily tit-for-tat strikes. Israel has also undertaken targeted assassinations of senior Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon.
But hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, are not new. They have been clashing and exchanging fire along their shared border since the mid-1980s. They fought a major war in 2006.
Hezbollah says it has upped its attacks on Israel as part of its support for Hamas in Gaza. But they are also connected to a broader regional commitment to oppose and pressure Israel. Lina Khatib, an expert on the Middle East at London think tank Chatham House, noted recently that Hezbollah’s fight with Israel may not ultimately be about helping Palestinians, or even Hamas, but about self-preservation.
"The group could have intervened on a large scale in October before Israel significantly weakened Hamas’s military capability, but it did not. Hezbollah would only engage in all-out war with Israel if the group felt it was facing an existential threat of its own (which, currently, it does not). It will not sacrifice itself for Palestine."
Israel-Iran war forever on the brink
Israel and Iran have been fighting a so-called shadow war for decades after Tehran's 1979 Islamic Revolution made opposition to Israel, until then a notional ally, a key part of its Iran's political ideology.
Iran has long backed Hamas and Hezbollah with weapons and finance as a means to pressure Israel.
The two sides were brought to the brink of a direct war in April after an Israeli airstrike on an Iranian consulate building in Damascus, Syria, killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, including two generals. Iran retaliated at Israel with a barrage of drones and missiles, but almost all of them intercepted.
Fears of a wider war between Israel and Iran were stoked again in late July when Israel blamed Hezbollah for a rocket that struck a soccer field and killed children in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Israel then assassinated Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, on Iranian soil where he was attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president. Tehran has promised to retaliate harshly but so far it has yet to act on that threat.
A spike in Houthi Red Sea attacks
Since November, Iran-linked Houthi rebels in Yemen have conducted dozens of missile and drone attacks on ships traveling in the Red Sea commercial waterway, a key trade route.
The Houthis have sporadically attacked ships in these waters for years, but the attacks have spiked since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas. Those increased attacks have prompted a growing number of U.S.-led strikes against Houthi targets including radars, runways, missile launch sites and logistics hubs.
Israel carried out air strikes on the Houthi-controlled Red Sea port of Hodeidah in Yemen in July after a drone launched by the group hit Tel Aviv, killing one person and injuring 10 others.
The Houthis claim they target ships linked to Israel, the U.S. or the U.K. because of Israel’s campaign against Hamas ? and American and British support for it. But many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the conflict, including some that were actually bound for Iran. Experts on Yemen say the attacks serve the rebels' broader ideological purpose of lining up, with Iran, against the U.S. and Israel and boosting their domestic popularity.
Israel's West Bank operations
Tension and violence in the West Bank, long a trouble spot, have spiked since the start of the war in Gaza.
And in recent weeks as Israeli forces have launched large-scale operations in the territory fears have increased that the war in Gaza could potentially be slowly spreading to the area that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war and that Palestinians ? widely backed by the international community ? view as part of their future state.
Israel launched the raids to dismantle what it says are terrorist cells in northern parts of the West Bank. The Palestinian health ministry has said that at least 30 Palestinians have been killed during these ongoing operations.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded the Israeli military reform its operations in the occupied West Bank after the fatal shooting of an American protester against settlement expansion. Blinken said the death of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was "unprovoked and unjustified." Separately, three Israelis were killed Sunday after a Jordanian gunman opened fire on security personnel at the border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank.
More: Blinken demands overhaul of Israeli conduct in West Bank after killing of US protester
More broadly, Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza has diverted attention from what the International Crisis Group think tank has called "systemic and growing violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians" in the West Bank.
In a report published this month the ICG said settler violence against Palestinians ? which it characterized as "Israelis living in the occupied West Bank" who "terrorize, harm and at times kill Palestinians and destroy their property," sometimes "acting in concert with the army" – has reached an all-time high.
From Oct. 7 to Aug. 12, there were 1,264 settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, resulting in 21 Palestinian deaths and 643 injuries, according to U.N. data supplied to the ICG.
More than 1,300 Palestinians have been driven from their homes over this time, according to the ICG. Over a similar period, five Israeli settlers have been killed in the West Bank, according to U.N. data.
Overall, 273 Palestinians have been killed in conflict-related incidents in the West Bank in 2024 as of mid-Aug., according to the U.N. There have been 17 Israeli fatalities.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: West Bank violence adds to Israel's growing conflict collection
