Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Monday that villages in the Israeli-occupied West Bank should look like cities in Gaza that have been reduced to rubble in response to the shooting at a bus stop in Jerusalem that killed six Israelis.
Smotrich, a West Bank settler who recently proposed a plan to annex 82% of the Palestinian territory, said that the Palestinian Authority must “disappear from the map,” even though after the attack, PA President Mahmoud Abbas condemned “any targeting of Palestinian and Israeli civilians,” and “denounced all forms of violence and terrorism, regardless of their source,” according to a statement from his office.
“The State of Israel cannot accept a Palestinian Authority that raises and educates its children to murder Jews,” Smotrich wrote on X. “The Palestinian Authority must disappear from the map, and the villages from which the terrorists came should look like Rafah and Beit Hanoun.”
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed that the IDF would escalate its operations following the Jerusalem shooting. At the beginning of the year, the IDF began military operations in the West Bank’s northern refugee camps that involved the destruction of homes and displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians.
“Just as we crushed Palestinian terror in the Jenin terror camp and the terror camps in northern Samaria—so we will soon do in additional terror camps. Whoever sponsors terror and directs terror will pay the full price,” Katz wrote on X.
Following the Jerusalem attack, Israeli troops conducted a raid in the Jenin refugee camp, which killed at least two 14-year-old boys. The IDF also raided the home of one of the Palestinians accused of being a shooter in the Jerusalem attack in the central West Bank town of Qatana. According to Al Jazeera, Israeli forces arrested the suspect’s father and brother. So far, no group has taken responsibility for the shooting.
On top of the stepped-up Israeli military raids in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians has also spiked in recent years as settlers are emboldened by the Israeli government. Smotrich recently approved a major settlement expansion, which he said would “erase” the idea of a Palestinian state.
