Are Israel’s West Bank raids preventing or fuelling bloodshed?

Two Palestinian militants were killed yesterday, four last week. The wave of military raids aims to prevent attacks on Israel, but they could provoke more violence, writes BEN LYNFIELD.

Perhaps, as Prime Minister Yair Lapid depicted it, the army's raid on a Jenin refugee camp on September 28 was a deterrent to Palestinian attacks.

After all, the IDF had killed the two wanted Palestinian men they had come for.

They also killed another two Palestinians and wounded 44 people after firefights broke out, according to Palestinian officials. It was the latest instalment of Operation Break the Wave, the military offensive launched after a deadly wave of Palestinian attacks in March and April.

Abed Khazem, the brother of Raad Khazem, the assailant who shot dead three Israelis in a Tel Aviv pub in March, and Mohammed Elwaneh, a Palestinian security forces member turned militant, were killed after troops surrounded them in a house. Both were said by the army to be planning attacks on Israeli targets.

Yesterday, Israeli forces killed two Palestinians who tried to run over soldiers operating in the Jalazone refugee camp on Monday and arrested 16 further suspects in the West Bank.

But it is unclear whether these raids will act as a deterrent or as fuel for further bloodshed. "The more Israeli violence there is, the more it increases the following of the armed groups," Palestinian analyst Jihad Harb told The Jewish Independent.

Thousands attended Khazem's funeral. And when IDF troops in August killed Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, a young militant leader in Nablus wanted for shooting attacks, thousands took to the streets for his funeral. Many youths in the West Bank now wear necklaces with the picture of "the Lion of Nablus".

Harb, a former senior analyst at the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, offers a perspective absent in much of the Israeli coverage of Operation Break the Wave.