Israel’s armed forces said today that they began a new “large-scale counter-terrorism operation” overnight in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.
“Overnight, our forces began operating as part of a wide counter-terrorism mission in the northern Samaria area,” they said, using the biblical name for the northern West Bank commonly used by Israeli authorities.
“We will not allow terrorism to take root in the area,” they added.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since the 1967 Six-Day War.
When asked by AFP, the army explained that this is not a continuation of the earlier “counter-terrorism operation” launched in January 2025, which focused on refugee camps. They described it as a “new” mission but did not clarify its objectives.
The military has not released further details so far.
Violence in the West Bank, already at high levels, surged after the war in Gaza began, triggered by Hamas’s deadly assault in southern Israel on 7 October 2023. It has not eased, despite the fragile ceasefire that took effect in Gaza on 10 October.
Since then, more than a thousand Palestinians—both fighters and civilians—have died in raids carried out by soldiers or settlers, according to an AFP tally based on Palestinian Authority data.
During the same period, at least 43 Israelis—civilians and soldiers—have died in Palestinian attacks or during military operations, according to official Israeli figures.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recorded in October the highest level of “settler attacks causing casualties, property damage, or both” in nearly two decades of monitoring the area.
On 10 November, a Palestinian knife attack near Bethlehem left one Israeli dead and three wounded. Soldiers shot dead the two Palestinian attackers immediately afterwards.
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