For the fifth consecutive day, southern Hebron awakens to the sound of a military campaign that resembles less “security measures” and more a harsh test of the will of the place and its inhabitants. Tens of thousands of Palestinians found themselves besieged within a closed geography, managed by force, where the details of daily life are suffocated, in a scene that redefines chaos not as popular anarchy, but as a systematic policy managed from above.
The occupation declares its goal is to “establish security” and dismantle what it calls “terrorist cells,” but the facts on the ground expose the true meaning of this campaign. The alleged security begins with closing the southern area of the city with iron gates, confiscating the movement of citizens and their vehicles, and transforming public space into a monitored and punished area. Here, suspicion is not besieged; rather, the entire society is punished.
The widespread arrest campaigns and night raids advance the repressive scene, where the sanctity of homes is violated, their residents are abused, and houses are turned into military barracks. The home, as the last remaining sanctuary for Palestinians, is stripped of its meaning, becoming merely an extension of military control.
With the obstruction of movement and the imposition of curfews, life stops at the asphalt's edge. Patients are prevented from accessing their treatment, and appeals for medical and municipal relief escalate, while students are deprived of their school seats by the closure of nearly twenty government schools. This is how Hebron's generations are targeted: its sick and its students, its present and its future, all at once.
The economic cycle was not spared from this strangulation; shops were closed, movement in the markets was paralyzed, coinciding with power outages and basic services, as if the city is being pushed towards darkness, not as a side effect, but as a deliberate political choice.
All of this cannot be separated from the broader context: the attempt to Judaize Hebron and impose a new reality, demographically and geographically, within the framework of annexation and settlement expansion. The goal is beyond a temporary campaign; it is a slow emptying of the area of its original inhabitants, and an expansion of the closed area within the Old City and the vicinity of the Ibrahimi Mosque, i.e., the H2 areas under Israeli control since the 1997 agreement.
The striking irony is that the occupation, which has controlled these areas for nearly three decades, is the same one that fueled chaos and disorder within them, and today it returns wearing the mask of “counter-terrorism.” How can the creator of chaos claim to fight it? And how can he who confiscated sovereignty claim to restore order?
The picture becomes clearer with what is leaked about the occupation's intention to link the Kiryat Arba settlement with the Tel Rumeida settlement area, in a step that redraws the map by force, and transforms Palestinian neighborhoods into isolated islands within a continuous settlement sea. This coincides with the withdrawal of the Ibrahimi Mosque's powers from the Hebron municipality, and the expulsion of Sheikh Moataz Abu Sneineh from the Ibrahimi Sanctuary for two weeks, in a direct targeting of the religious and symbolic dimension of the place, and an attempt to empty it of its visitors and guardians of its spirit.
What is happening in Hebron is not a fleeting event or a limited security measure; it is a comprehensive project, in which the tools of siege, arrest, services, economy, and religion are used to re-engineer the city and its inhabitants. It is a battle for existence, where Hebron is intended to be reduced to security maps, while it remains, despite everything, a city resistant to erasure, writing its daily resilience with life itself.
In Hebron, Judaization intersects with manufactured chaos, and humans are tested in their most basic rights. But Hebron, which has endured centuries of oppression, knows well that the place besieged today is the same place that will witness tomorrow the survival of its people, no matter how intense the siege.
شارك برأيك
Hebron... Between Judaization and Chaos