Hebron Mayor Calls Mass Displacement Collective Punishment
Nearly 2,000 Palestinians — 370 families by the municipality’s count — have been driven from the Ein Deir Baha district of Hebron after two Israeli soldiers were killed at a checkpoint on Friday. The city’s mayor, Yousef al-Jabari, calls it “collective punishment”. The army says those who wished to evacuate were permitted to leave temporarily; residents say they were ordered out.
Israel votes tomorrow, and the connection is not incidental: the prime minister’s coalition is narrowly trailing with two days of campaigning left, and he has warned of operations in the West Bank on a scale not seen in nearly sixty years of occupation. The strongest evidence against the voluntary framing comes from Israel’s own defence minister, who put the number forcibly displaced at “about 2,000” and said they “will not be allowed to return to their neighbourhood until we’ve finished dealing with all the Hamas issues in Hebron”. The industrial district nearest Friday’s attack has been flattened — car workshops, a ceramics plant, nothing left but rubble. An imam woken at midnight by loudspeakers moved thirty relatives out and was telephoned by a neighbour telling him not to come back; a man of seventy-seven was given ten minutes, and his villa now flies Israeli flags as an army headquarters. The army says the two thousand belong to a clan it associates with Hamas; residents number that clan at 150 at most. All West Bank crossings shut to Palestinians tomorrow. They have no vote in it.