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