Israel on Monday threatened a “full-scale war” against the Palestinian Authority if it prepared an attack against Israeli forces or settlements similar to the one launched by Hamas from Gaza on October 7, 2023.
The remarks from Defence Minister Israel Katz came after a stabbing attack in the northern occupied West Bank, with the Israeli military saying it had shot and killed the Palestinian assailant.
Violence has surged in the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967, after Hamas’s October 2023 attack sparked the war in Gaza. Recent months have seen soaring attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, often with little or no legal consequence.
“If… the Palestinian Authority’s security mechanisms and related bodies initiate, or we know with certainty that they are about to initiate, a terror attack in the style of October 7 against IDF forces and Jewish settlements — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I have instructed the IDF to prepare for the opening of a full-scale war,” Defence Minister Israel Katz said in a statement from his office, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
Katz said the military campaign would target the “senior leadership and mechanisms” of the Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, as well as “all terror infrastructure” in the territory.
He said it would include “targeted killings of senior figures” and the “evacuation of residents from the cities and villages from which terror activity is carried out”, with a permanent Israeli military presence in those areas.
Katz said the operation would emulate the so-called “security zones” in which the Israeli military currently operates in Gaza and southern Lebanon.
On Monday, the Israeli military said it shot and killed a Palestinian assailant who had stabbed an Israeli settler in the northern occupied West Bank.
Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency services said a man in his 20s had been taken to hospital in a moderate to serious condition with multiple stab wounds.
Praising the soldiers who killed the assailant, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed: “No terrorist can hide.”
“We will continue to eliminate terrorists, hunt down those who dispatch them, and destroy the terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria,” he said in a statement, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
In response to the attack, Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas called to “escalate the resistance and engage with the enemy soldiers and settler gangs”.
Hamas’s attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Militants also took 251 hostages, 44 of them already dead, into Gaza.
Israel responded with a massive offensive in Gaza that has killed at least 73,651 people, according to the Palestinian territory’s health ministry, which operates under Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.
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