Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday (October 23) promised a large-scale military operation in the occupied West Bank and the removal of residents from Hebron, hours after a shooting attack killed two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in the city. According to Folha de S.Paulo, Netanyahu visited Hebron after the attack and spoke of an offensive "like nothing seen since the Six-Day War", a reference to the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict in which Israel occupied the West Bank.
The attack took place on Friday morning: two men dressed in black, one carrying a rifle and the other a pistol, opened fire on soldiers at a junction north of Hebron, in the south of the territory, and were killed in the ensuing shootout. The Israeli military identified the dead as sergeants Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, and Yuval Shai Svilem, 20; three other soldiers were lightly wounded. According to CNN Brasil, a first responder at the scene said the gunfire lasted at least 20 minutes. In response, Netanyahu ordered the "immediate closure" of Hebron and asked the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to prepare to impose a "total closure" of the West Bank.
What it means for Brazil
An escalation in the West Bank puts immediate pressure on Itamaraty, Brazil's foreign ministry. Brazil has recognized the Palestinian state since 2010 and defends the two-state solution at the United Nations, a position the Lula government has repeated throughout the Gaza war that began in 2023 and that had already strained bilateral ties with Israel. Netanyahu's promise also lands two days before Brazil's own presidential runoff: whoever takes office in January will inherit the Middle East crisis as one of the sensitive files of Brazilian foreign policy.
In Hebron, the prime minister laid out the planned response and said the troops are ready. "The Defense Forces are ready to carry it out, and we will set the timing, but it is on its way", he said. According to Netanyahu's office, cited by Folha, the operation will reach directly into the local population:
"[The soldiers] will enter the neighborhood the terrorists came from, remove the residents, search the houses one by one, seize the weapons and destroy the terrorist infrastructure."
The announcement lays out the map of interests around the territory. Leading the most right-wing government in Israel's history, Netanyahu promised to expand Jewish settlements, considered illegal by the international community, and spoke of applying to Palestinian cities the "aggressive model" used in refugee camps, isolating Hebron and Halhul. According to reporting by CNN Brasil, 267 outposts have been established in the West Bank since Netanyahu returned to power in December 2022, and another 104 have been legalized. On the Palestinian side, Hamas, the armed group based in the Gaza Strip that carried out the October 7, 2023 attack, celebrated the Hebron shooting. Hebron is divided into two sectors: one administered by the Palestinian authorities and another, where Israeli settlers live, under military control.
Neither the timing of the operation nor the duration of the West Bank closure has been defined, according to CNN Brasil. The episode comes four days before Israel's legislative elections on October 27, the first since the 2023 Hamas attack. The vote is seen as a test of Netanyahu's political survival, as he has campaigned as a hard-line leader on security issues.