When the Gaza ceasefire was announced on January 15, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were overjoyed that Israel’s devastating war on the besieged enclave would finally end.

However, Israeli state violence has quickly escalated across the West Bank in what local monitors and analysts describe as an apparent attempt to formally annex more land.

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The sudden uptick in settler attacks and Israeli military operations has frightened Palestinians in the occupied territory, who believe they could now face the same kind of violence meted out to their countrymen and women in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 46,900 Palestinians in Gaza since its war started on the enclave in October 2023.

“We watched a genocide unfold in Gaza for 14 months and nobody in the world did anything to stop it and some people here think we’ll suffer a similar fate,” said Shady Abdullah, a journalist and human rights activist from Tulkarem.

“We all know we fear that the situation could get much worse here in the West Bank,”  he told Al Jazeera.

Shifting battlefield

Hours after the Gaza ceasefire began on January 19, Israel began erecting dozens of new checkpoints in the West Bank to prevent Palestinians from gathering and celebrating the release of political prisoners, who were let go in a swap for Israeli captives held by Hamas as part of the deal.

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The checkpoints also prohibited farmers from reaching their farmlands and sealed civilians in entire cities, such as in Hebron and Bethlehem.

Israeli settlers then began expanding illegal outposts in the West Bank and attacking Palestinian villages. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, and many of the haphazardly constructed outposts are even illegal under Israeli law, although often little is done to remove them, and many later become formalised.

“The implications of the violence is that it leads to direct or associated displacement and that falls in line with Israel’s objective of preventing any Palestinian state on their land,” said Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Israel-Palestine with International Crisis Group.

In addition, the Israeli army announced plans to carry out major operations in the West Bank, which began on January 21 with a major incursion into Jenin camp, ostensibly to root out armed groups. Israeli raids on the West Bank predated the war on Gaza, but scaled up in violence and intensity with the onset of the war.

“The settler violence and incursions we are seeing … is an indicator of where we are heading now,”  Mustafa told Al Jazeera.

Trade-off?

The uptick in violence has led some to believe that new United States President Donald Trump made a trade-off with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pause the war on Gaza in exchange for stepping up aggression in the West Bank.

“The ceasefire in Gaza – which looks more like a humanitarian pause and “trade of hostages and prisoners” – comes with a price. Israel never ever relinquishes anything without a price to be paid and I think we are seeing that in the West Bank, given the sort of [officials] the Trump administration is composed of,” Mustafa said.

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Trump has not indicated that there is any kind of deal with Netanyahu to allow him to increase violence in the West Bank, but he has also refused to commit to a two-state solution, and has nominated several figures who are opposed to Palestinian statehood to prominent positions in his administration.

The potential for an increased crackdown on Palestinian fighters in the West Bank, as well as the growth of illegal settlements and even potential annexation, appears to have incentivised Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to remain in Netanyahu’s frail coalition, rather than pull out and collapse the government as a way to protest the ceasefire in Gaza.

Under Smotrich, Israel has quietly confiscated more land in the West Bank over the last year than it has in the last 20 years combined, according to Peace Now, an Israeli nonprofit monitoring land grabs.

Both Smotrich and the broader settler movement have long viewed the occupied West Bank as an integral part of “greater Israel”, and refer to the territory as Judea and Samaria.

Smotrich’s rapid annexation of the West Bank went largely unnoticed due to the much larger crisis in Gaza, where, in addition to the mass killing of Palestinians, nearly the entire pre-war population of 2.3 million people were uprooted and displaced.

Settler attacks

Palestinians across the occupied West Bank now say that settlers are stepping up attacks in coordination with the Israeli army to confiscate and seize more land.

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On January 20, settlers violently attacked two villages in the northern West Bank, Funduq and Jinasfut, as well as villages further south in Masafer Yatta and around Ramallah.

The settlers set homes and cars ablaze and beat up Palestinians under the full protection and watchful eye of the Israeli army, according to local rights groups.

However, the head of the Israeli army’s Central Command, General Avi Bluth, said in a statement that any “violent riot harms security and the army will not allow it”.

The attacks came during Trump’s inauguration as US president – in one of his first actions as president he reversed sanctions on groups and individuals who the US had previously deemed part of the “extremist settler movement”.

“The aim of the settlers is known,” said Abbas Milhem, the executive director of the Palestinian Farmers Union. “They want to transfer Palestinians outside of the West Bank and annex the land to Israel and impose Israeli law.”

Ghassan Aleeyan, a Palestinian living in Bethlehem, expressed his frustration to Al Jazeera.

“What these people are doing is illegal, but they don’t care about international law, or Palestinian law or Israeli law,” he told Al Jazeera. “They don’t even care about God’s law.”

Raid on Jenin

In early December, armed groups in Jenin began clashing with the Palestinian Authority (PA), an administration created as a result of the 1993 Oslo Accords.

The accords jump-started a now-defunct peace process that ostensibly aimed to establish a Palestinian state across the occupied Palestinian territory, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

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A key element of the Oslo Accords was tasking the PA with rooting out and disarming armed groups as part of its security coordination with Israel.

But as hopes for statehood faded and Israel entrenched its occupation, a number of neighbourhood armed groups loosely connected with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and even Fatah – the faction in control of the PA – emerged in Palestinian camps across the West Bank.

With the PA unable to crush the armed groups in Jenin camp, Israel launched a major operation on January 21, which has already killed at least 10 people.

Local monitors told Al Jazeera that Israel is justifying its operation under the guise of buttressing Israel’s security and ensuring that another October 7-style assault does not occur, even though the armed groups in the West Bank are far less capable and organised than Hamas in Gaza.

“We believe Israel’s plan is to attack the north of the West Bank in the same way it did during the second Intifada when it invaded Palestinian camps,” said Murad Jadallah, a human rights monitor with al-Haq, a Palestinian rights group.

Israel previously occupied the Jenin camp for 10 days in 2002, destroying about 400 houses and displacing about a quarter of the residents during the second Intifada in 2002, according to the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA).

Mustafa, from the ICG, believes Israel will conduct more incursions and major military operations across the West Bank in the coming days in an attempt to crush all forms of resistance.

“The battlefield is about to shift from Gaza to the West Bank,” she said.

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