Israeli bulldozers flatten miles in the West Bank

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 Tulkarem 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 armoured bulldozer flattening a decorative roundabout and nearby vegetation.

Visual evidence analysed by The New York Times supports accounts from residents about the damage from Israel’s latest raids. Videos filmed in Tulkarem 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 October 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.

In a response to a list of questions from the Times, the Israeli military said 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 Tulkarem, towns with a history of rebellion against Israeli occupation, had long been accustomed to targeted, night-time raids. But many of them who spoke to the Times said the raids that lasted for nine days in Jenin and even longer in Tulkarem went far beyond, with the extent of the damaged roads and infrastructure surpassing 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 neighbourhood. 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.”

A Morning Raid

The most recent operations began early on August 28 when residents of Tulkarem and Jenin awoke to Israeli military bulldozers ripping up streets. The digging damaged water and sewage pipes. In Tulkarem, home to one of the largest refugee camps in the West Bank, videos showed water gushing down a street from what appeared to be a destroyed water main.

Muhanad Matar, the head of general relations for the municipality of Tulkarem, estimated that in the latest operations alone, more than 90% of water and sewage lines had been destroyed.

In Jenin, some 70% of roads have been damaged or destroyed by the recent raids, according to the mayor, Nidal Obeidi. Internet, electricity and phone lines were shut down in some areas. Sewage and water lines were also cut, leaving about 80% of Jenin without running water, local officials said, including the main hospital.

Israeli bulldozers have also ploughed through commercial areas. Videos showed them digging up streets in Cinema Square, the heart of Jenin’s business district.

Israel’s military said the risk of militants hiding explosives necessitated the use of “engineering tools when entering areas where the terrorist organisations operate, in order to uncover the axes where explosive devices were planted, and to remove the danger that arises from the terrorist organisations’ use of civilian structures.”

Residents highlighted such efforts as examples of needless destruction. Local business owners who spoke to the Times insisted this area had no links to militants in the city.

Rami Kmail, 35, is the owner of Rami Centre, overlooking the square — a corner building with a red storefront. He said his store had been damaged in 10 Israeli raids since October 7. It has cost him up to $20,000 in repairs each time. Like other shopkeepers, he has stopped replacing some window panes and shop signs. Kmail insisted this kind of destruction was aimed at hurting society and daily life.

“It felt like we were targeted. That was very clear — there was an intentional effort to destroy businesses,” he said.

Perhaps the heaviest cost of the raids has been the effect on medical care.

Several videos showed ambulances unable to navigate destroyed roads. Ambulance drivers said they sometimes could not find alternate routes among the cratered roads.

Even when roads were intact, Israeli bulldozers, other videos showed, appeared to block emergency vehicles from passing.

Mahmoud Al-Saadi, the head of the Red Crescent branch in Jenin, said that calls for help increased significantly during the recent raids. His teams, he said, failed to respond to 500 to 600 calls per day because they simply could not reach them.

The sudden rise in calls was not only related to the fighting, medics and municipal officials said, but also to soldiers encircling hospitals. The soldiers, they said, granted entry only to ambulances and not civilian vehicles, so rescuers also had to escort patients needing regular treatments, like dialysis or radiation. One video showed Israeli soldiers inspecting an ambulance in Jenin.

Israel’s military, in response to the Times, said it “does not intend to harm medical personnel. However, in several cases, terrorists have carried out terror attacks via the exploitation of ambulances and medical institutions.”

As a result, the army said it “has been compelled, in some instances, to search ambulances leaving the camps and villages,” but said it tried to minimize the delays.

Since the second intifada, or uprising, ended in the early 2000s, Israeli airstrikes on the West Bank have been extremely rare. After Oct 7, airstrikes by drones, fighter jets and helicopters increased rapidly, killing 41 Palestinians in August alone — more than at any point in close to two decades, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the rights group Al-Haq.

In its latest raid, the Israeli military said it carried out 50 airstrikes “on buildings, infrastructure, and weapon storage sites.” It also said it launched targeted strikes on militants. A video posted by the military shows what appears to be gunmen being corralled by an Israeli military vehicle. When they open fire and try to flee, an airstrike kills one as they run away.

Such airstrikes violate Israel’s obligations under international law, said Sari Bashi, a programme director for Human Rights Watch, which stipulates that an occupying power must conduct security operations as a policing force, not an army.

“One of our concerns is that lethal force is actually a first resort — that the Israeli military is trying to kill people, as opposed to arrest them, under circumstances where it’s possible to arrest them,” she said.

Israel’s army said that it had complied with international law, and that aerial strikes “are carried out in cases where the option of arrest was ruled out in view of the immediate risk to the forces.”

The UN office and Al-Haq have both documented more than 150 Palestinians killed by airstrikes in the West Bank since Oct 7. Palestinians in Jenin and Tulkarem say they increasingly fear the drones that almost constantly circle overhead. Medics and municipal workers repairing roads say they have come under drone surveillance, and have sometimes been fired on.