Flatten the West Bank? Why Israelis Are Apathetic About the War Crimes Committed in Their Name

Before the sun rose over Israel, Gaza and the West Bank on Thursday, scores of people were already dead. In Gaza, around 70 Palestinians were reportedly killed overnight in over 10 Israeli airstrikes, which included strikes on two barely functioning hospitals in Khan Yunis. Some bodies arrived in pieces, with several body bags containing the remains of multiple people. In the West Bank, Tzeela Gez, a 30-year-old Israeli woman who was on her way to the hospital to give birth, was shot by a Palestinian assailant as she drove from her home in a settlement. She died of her wounds, while her baby took his first breaths in the world in serious but stable condition.  By lunchtime on this hazy day, the death toll in Gaza had already climbed past 100, reportedly including children, with the smoke from bombings blending into the gray skies overhead.

For Palestinians, this Nakba Day – commemorated on Thursday to mark the displacement of hundreds of thousands during the 1948 war – must feel especially catastrophic. For most Israelis, it was just another Thursday.
While U.S. President Donald Trump is shifting some of the Middle East's tectonic plates during his visit with the region's local strongmen, Israel is choosing to fortify itself in more war.

Qatar, which hosted both Trump and the Gaza cease-fire negotiating teams, said plainly overnight into Thursday that Israel's heavy attacks in Gaza show it is not interested in reaching a hostage deal. The two U.S. envoys who visited Israel this week, Steve Witkoff and Adam Boehler – who were able to release Edan Alexander from Hamas' horriffic captivity despite Israeli military pressure, and not because of it, as Netanyahu ludicrously claimed – made it clear during their visit to Tel Aviv's Hostage Square that whether what comes next is a Gaza deal or a military escalation "is up to Israel."

The Netanyahu government is choosing the latter, already announcing last week plans for expanding the Gaza offensive to occupy it and expel its citizens who have survived the past 19 months. After the Israeli pregnant mother's death was announced early in the morning, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, set the equation: "Exactly like we are flattening Rafah, Khan Yunis, and Gaza, we must flatten the terror hubs" in the West Bank, he said, adding that the Palestinian village of
Bruqin, near where the attack took place, "must resemble" the destroyed cities in the Gaza Strip.

Israel's destructive campaign has never required a fresh atrocity in the West Bank to justify leveling Palestinian neighborhoods. But the far-right minister made it unapologetically clear that revenge is – and should be – the government's offcial policy, and that since Hamas' October 7 attack, death and massacres can only be met with more of the same. And perhaps the real tragedy is that there was nothing particularly new or striking about this day, one of the deadliest in this 19-month war. Engulfed in despair, growing apathy and with no political opposition to the war crimes committed in their name – alongside ongoing terrorist attacks inside Israel and the West Bank – most Israelis have come to accept this reality.

This leaves figures like Smotrich, one of Israel's most senior ministers, completely unchallenged as the only voice in the debate, touting revenge.
As Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson put it, while tweeting a censored image of a man holding a limb of a child in the aftermath of an attack in Gaza this morning: "At what point will Israel say their revenge is complete?".

David Issacharoff

Source: Haaretz