Attachments
Introduction
For over a year, Israel has been waging an unrestrained war on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and within the State of Israel. Its response to the heinous attack led by Hamas on October 7 – and largely, to the shock and anxiety that gripped the Israeli public – unleashed a wave of violence that swept through the region, taking almost all remnants of humanity or morality with it. The death and destruction wreaked by Israel's war machine in the past year have reached unimaginable proportions.
The indiscriminate violence that has always marked the Israeli apartheid regime's approach to Palestinians living in the area under its control is now appearing in its most direct and exposed form. This report focuses on one of its manifestations in the West Bank: recurring incidents of severe abuse of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in the center of Hebron throughout the summer of 2024.
The context in which the abuse took place
The Hamas-led attack on 7 October greatly exacerbated the ongoing dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli discourse, which filled with explicit calls for violence and revenge by politicians and opinion leaders. With Palestinians collectively presented as an undifferentiated mass of enemies, causing them harm is considered not only legitimate but even welcome. Throughout 2024, many Jewish-Israelis have adopted the view that every Palestinian is guilty until proven otherwise – including military officers directly in charge of running the daily lives of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. This approach takes different forms in the various territories under Israel's control. Its most aggressive manifestation is in the Gaza Strip, with extensive, indiscriminate use of lethal weapons in crowded residential areas,1 massive destruction of civilian infrastructure,2 mass deportation, starvation and forcible transfer,3 and the creation of "kill zones" where anyone spotted is shot regardless of their involvement in the fighting.4 All these are presented to Israelis as necessary military achievements, whose cost in human life is negligible.