Netanyahu orders very extensive West Bank operation after two soldiers killed near Hebron

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Israeli forces patrolling Hebron as Benjamin Netanyahu visited the area on Friday. Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters theguardian.com

Two Israeli soldiers and two Palestinians were killed in a gunfight lasting more than twenty minutes at a temporary checkpoint outside Hebron, after which Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the army to prepare a 'very extensive' operation in the West Bank and instructed forces to cordon off the city. The Israeli military said the two Palestinian attackers, armed with a handgun and an automatic rifle, had failed to reach a nearby highway where soldiers believe they intended to attack civilians. Five Israelis were wounded in the exchange; two later died.

Netanyahu held an emergency meeting of his security cabinet and announced the military would go house to house, demolish homes, seize weapons and displace the residents of the attackers' neighbourhood — a model previously applied in refugee camps in the northern West Bank during the 'Iron Wall' operation launched in January 2025, which the UN rights office says forcibly displaced tens of thousands. A full closure of the West Bank begins Friday, the fourth such lockdown in a month. The closures shut gates and checkpoints connecting Palestinian villages to major roads, which remain open to Israeli drivers, including settlers.

The timing is difficult to ignore. Israel goes to the polls next week, Likud sits well short of a majority in the polls, and human rights groups say Netanyahu may use the attack to justify harsher measures and bolster his security credentials before election day. He has already claimed Hamas was 'planning a major attack aimed at murdering innocent civilians.' Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also holds a post inside the defence ministry, went further and called for a military campaign in the West Bank 'exactly like in Gaza' — including dismantling the Palestinian Authority — as a first measure of the next government.

The machinery of occupation and the machinery of electioneering now run on the same fuel. Yariv Oppenheimer, former director of Peace Now, told Al Jazeera the army is already inside Palestinian cities. Netanyahu's promised operation would be on a scale unseen in the West Bank for decades, by his own account — announced days before the country votes, with the residents of one Hebron neighbourhood first in line for evacuation.