JENIN: Palestinian militants said on Monday that an unusual deployment of Israeli tanks in the occupied West Bank, part of a major offensive that has displaced tens of thousands, may be a step toward annexation.
The torn-up streets surrounding the Jenin refugee camp in the territory’s north were empty on Monday, an AFP journalist reported, as three Israeli Merkava tanks stationed at higher vantage points overlooked the area.
Displaced camp residents occasionally entered through a back alley to retrieve belongings from their homes.
“We go back in to get things, whatever we can. We take the risk because we have to,” said 52-year-old Ahmad Al-Qahrawi.
“We had nothing when we left, no clothes, nothing. We go back to get clothes because it’s cold.”
Israeli leaders have repeatedly pledged to annex at least parts of the West Bank, which has been occupied since 1967, but any such proposal has been met with strong opposition from Palestinians and much of the international community.
In a weeks-long military operation in the north of the territory, launched around the time a truce took hold in the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces looking for militants have cleared three refugee camps and deployed tanks in Jenin.
Militant group Islamic Jihad said that the mass evacuations and first deployment of Israeli tanks in the territory since the early 2000s “confirms the occupation’s plans to annex the West Bank by force.”
The group, which has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza and has a strong presence in the northern West Bank, denounced “a new act of aggression” which it said was “aimed at uprooting our people from their land.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross said many residents who fled have taken shelter in “crowded mosques and schools.”
The damage has hampered displaced residents’ “access to basic needs such as clean water, food, medical care and shelter,” and the winter cold “has made it more difficult to survive,” it added in a statement.
"Lethal war-like tactics"
The United Nations’ humanitarian agency OCHA said the military offensive “appears to exceed law enforcement standards” and has had severe consequences.
“The continued use of lethal war-like tactics in residential areas is extremely concerning,” OCHA said.
Throughout the Gaza war, violence in the West Bank — a separate Palestinian territory — has soared, as have calls to annex it, most notably by Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Since the start of the war in October 2023, Israeli troops or settler attacks have killed at least 900 Palestinians, including many militants, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Palestinian attacks and clashes during military raids have killed at least 32 Israelis over the same period, according to official figures.
UN chief Antonio Guterres on Monday rejected “calls for annexation” and said he was “gravely concerned by the rising violence.”
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said that “we are closely watching developments, and cannot hide our concern when it comes to the West Bank.”
Israel said on Sunday that its troops would remain for many months in the evacuated refugee camps in the northern West Bank — Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams — aiming to “prevent the return of residents and the resurgence of terrorism,” according to Defense Minister Israel Katz.
He put the number of displaced Palestinians at 40,000, the same figure provided by the United Nations which said the offensive has killed at least 51 Palestinians including seven children, and three Israeli soldiers.
Islamic Jihad accused Israel of attempting to consolidate “military domination by creating settler corridors that reinforce the separation of West Bank cities and their camps.”
The West Bank, excluding Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, is home to around three million Palestinian as well as nearly half a million Israelis who live in settlements that are illegal under international law.
Israeli tanks have not operated there since the end of the second Palestinian intifada, or “uprising,” in 2005.
Islamic Jihad says Israeli tanks part of ‘plans to annex West Bank by force’
https://arab.news/8numw
Islamic Jihad says Israeli tanks part of ‘plans to annex West Bank by force’
- Israeli leaders have repeatedly pledged to annex at least parts of the West Bank
- Israel deployed Merkava tanks in Jenin for the first time since the second Intifada
Iraq’s dreams of wheat independence dashed by water crisis
- Iraq ranks fifth globally for climate risk
- Average temperatures in Iraq have risen nearly half a degree Celsius per decade since 2000
NAJAF: Iraqi wheat farmer Ma’an Al-Fatlawi has long depended on the nearby Euphrates River to feed his fields near the city of Najaf. But this year, those waters, which made the Fertile Crescent a cradle of ancient civilization 10,000 years ago, are drying up, and he sees few options.
“Drilling wells is not successful in our land, because the water is saline,” Al-Fatlawi said, as he stood by an irrigation canal near his parched fields awaiting the release of his allotted water supply.
A push by Iraq — historically among the Middle East’s biggest wheat importers — to guarantee food security by ensuring wheat production covers the country’s needs has led to three successive annual surpluses of the staple grain.
But those hard-won advances are now under threat as the driest year in modern history and record-low water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have reduced planting and could slash the harvest by up to 50 percent this season.
“Iraq is facing one of the most severe droughts that has been observed in decades,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Iraq representative Salah El Hajj Hassan told Reuters.
VULNERABLE TO NATURE AND NEIGHBOURS
The crisis is laying bare Iraq’s vulnerability.
A largely desert nation, Iraq ranks fifth globally for climate risk, according to the UN’s Global Environment Outlook. Average temperatures in Iraq have risen nearly half a degree Celsius per decade since 2000 and could climb by up to 5.6 C by the end of the century compared to the period before industrialization, according to the International Energy Agency. Rainfall is projected to decline.
But Iraq is also at the mercy of its neighbors for 70 percent of its water supply. And Turkiye and Iran have been using upstream dams to take a greater share of the region’s shared resource.
The FAO says the diminishing amount of water that has trickled down to Iraq is the biggest factor behind the current crisis, which has forced Baghdad to introduce rationing.
Iraq’s water reserves have plunged from 60 billion cubic meters in 2020 to less than 4 billion today, said El Hajj Hassan, who expects wheat production this season to drop by 30 percent to 50 percent.
“Rain-fed and irrigated agriculture are directly affected nationwide,” he said.
EFFORTS TO END IMPORT DEPENDENCE UNDER THREAT
To wean the country off its dependence on imports, Iraq’s government has in recent years paid for high-yield seeds and inputs, promoted modern irrigation and desert farming to expand cultivation, and subsidised grain purchases to offer farmers more than double global wheat prices.
It is a plan that, though expensive, has boosted strategic wheat reserves to over 6 million metric tons in some seasons, overwhelming Iraq’s silo capacity. The government, which purchased around 5.1 million tons of the 2025 harvest, said in September that those reserves could meet up to a year of demand.
Others, however, including Harry Istepanian — a water expert and founder of Iraq Climate Change Center — now expect imports to rise again, putting the country at greater risk of higher food prices with knock-on effects for trade and government budgets.
“Iraq’s water and food security crisis is no longer just an environmental problem; it has immediate economic and security spillovers,” Istepanian told Reuters.
A preliminary FAO forecast anticipates wheat import needs for the 2025/26 marketing year to increase to about 2.4 million tons.
Global wheat markets are currently oversupplied, offering cheaper options, but Iraq could once again face price volatility.
Iraq’s trade ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the likelihood of increased imports.
In response to the crisis, the ministry of agriculture capped river-irrigated wheat at 1 million dunams in the 2025/26 season — half last season’s level — and mandated modern irrigation techniques including drip and sprinkler systems to replace flood irrigation through open canals, which loses water through evaporation and seepage.
A dunam is a measurement of area roughly equivalent to a quarter acre.
The ministry is allocating 3.5 million dunams in desert areas using groundwater. That too is contingent on the use of modern irrigation.
“The plan was implemented in two phases,” said Mahdi Dhamad Al-Qaisi, an adviser to the agriculture minister. “Both require modern irrigation.”
Rice cultivation, meanwhile, which is far more water-intensive than wheat, was banned nationwide.
RURAL LIVELIHOODS AT RISK
One ton of wheat production in Iraq requires about 1,100 cubic meters of water, said Ammar Abdul-Khaliq, head of the Wells and Groundwater Authority in southern Iraq. Pivoting to more dependence on wells to replace river water is risky.
“If water extraction continues without scientific study, groundwater reserves will decline,” he said.
Basra aquifers, he said, have already fallen by three to five meters.
Groundwater irrigation systems are also expensive due to the required infrastructure like sprinklers and concrete basins. That presents a further economic challenge to rural Iraqis, who make up around 30 percent of the population.
Some 170,000 people have already been displaced in rural areas due to water scarcity, the FAO’s El Hajj Hassan said.
“This is not a matter of only food security,” he said. “It’s worse when we look at it from the perspective of livelihoods.”
At his farm in Najaf, Al-Fatlawi is now experiencing that first-hand, having cut his wheat acreage to a fifth of its normal level this season and laid off all but two of his 10 workers.
“We rely on river water,” he said.
