Two days after a checkpoint shooting killed two Israeli soldiers, the army's operation in Hebron has displaced thousands, sealed a city of hundreds of thousands, and made return conditional on the dismantling of what the defence minister calls Hamas infrastructure; days before Israel votes.
Published 25 October 2026 · 18:14 GMT
Two days after a checkpoint shooting killed two Israeli soldiers, the army's operation in Hebron has displaced thousands, sealed a city of hundreds of thousands, and made return conditional on the dismantling of what the defence minister calls Hamas infrastructure; days before Israel votes. More than 2,000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in Hebron since Friday, 23 October 2026, after two gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded three others at a checkpoint near the city; the gunmen were shot dead.
A shooting at a checkpoint near Hebron on Friday morning killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded three others, the two gunmen were killed, and the Israeli military then launched a large operation, sealed the city, and forced thousands of residents from their homes while carrying out demolitions.
Whether the displacement is a targeted security measure against the neighbourhood of the attackers or collective punishment of an entire city, and whether the operation's timing, days before Tuesday's Israeli election, is coincidence or campaign politics.
When, if ever, the displaced families will be allowed back; how many homes and businesses will ultimately be demolished; what the black X marks residents report seeing on emptied houses mean; or how far the operation will spread beyond Hebron and Halhul.
On Friday morning, 23 October 2026, two Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a military checkpoint in the Farsh al-Hawa area near Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, killing two Israeli soldiers and wounding three others. The military said the gunmen were shot dead. Within hours, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a large-scale operation, and the army sealed Hebron and the neighbouring town of Halhul, closing every entrance to the city.
What followed was not a raid but an eviction campaign. Residents said soldiers announced evacuation orders over loudspeakers late at night, leaving families no time to prepare and few places to go. By Saturday, about 1,200 Palestinians had been forced from their homes, according to the municipality's head. By Sunday morning, with the lockdown beyond 50 hours, the figure had passed 2,000. The army says the operation in Al-Jaladah and Ein Deir Baha, near the checkpoint at the city's entrance, aims to search for militants and weapons, with demolitions to follow. It is the displacement, not the search, that has become the story; the latest phase of a days-long operation that began with the shooting itself.
The numbers tell the story in stages, and the stages matter. Reuters reported about 1,200 displaced on Saturday, with about 1,300 more facing the loss of their homes. By Sunday, Haaretz, citing deputy mayor Khaled Fahd al-Qawasmi, put the displaced at 2,231 people from 373 families, with about 30 more families threatened. The Palestinian Prisoner's Society, cited by Al Jazeera, counted 293 displaced families, about 2,200 people, including 127 infants, 81 pregnant women, 26 people with disabilities, 134 people with chronic illnesses and 265 people over the age of 60. The counts differ by source and hour, but they point the same way: up.
We also know what the operation looks like in practice. The army has demolished shops, factories, homes and roads, according to the municipality, and Wafa reported troops seizing houses in Khallat Manna and Dahiyat al-Zaytoun in southern Hebron for use as barracks, and forcing residents from other houses to use them as observation posts. Residents reported soldiers marking emptied homes with a black X, though its meaning is unclear. On arrests, the Palestinian Prisoners' Club counted about 70 arrested on Friday and Saturday, the Prisoner's Society at least 47 detained across Hebron since Friday, and the army said it apprehended about 40 suspects across 40 West Bank areas. Classes were suspended on Sunday and Monday, Hebron University and Al-Quds Open University moved online, and rubbish piled up because sealed entrances blocked collection teams.
The largest unknown is the simplest: when do these families go home? Defence Minister Israel Katz has tied return to the dismantling of what he calls Hamas infrastructure in Hebron, a condition with no deadline, no checklist and no arbiter. Nobody has published a list of which homes are slated for demolition, how many have already been destroyed, or whether the seized houses used as barracks will be returned intact. The meaning of the black X marks reported on emptied homes is unconfirmed, and the army has not commented on the arrest figures cited by Palestinian prisoner groups.
Nor is the ceiling known. The municipality has warned that the targeted neighbourhoods hold 500 families, and Turkish outlet Yeni Safak reported it warning that another 2,500 people face imminent removal. Whether the operation stays confined to Hebron and Halhul or widens, as the army's activity in 40 West Bank areas suggests, is open. And the political question, whether it changes a single vote on Tuesday, cannot be answered before any ballot box opens.
Hebron is not a village and this is not a skirmish. Al Jazeera's analysis notes that the lockdown and collective measures have affected about 900,000 Palestinians in the wider Hebron area, and the tactics are already being compared to the January 2025 Iron Wall operation in Jenin and Nur Shams, which displaced more than 30,000 people and destroyed over half of the residential buildings in those camps. What happens in Hebron therefore sets the template: if displacing hundreds of families after an attack becomes the standard response, the West Bank's urban centres all live under the same precedent.
The timing sharpens the stakes. Israel votes on Tuesday, and the operation is unfolding as Netanyahu's right-wing coalition faces polls suggesting it may lose its majority. The head of Hebron's municipality, Yousef Zouhair Al-Jabari, has said openly that Netanyahu and his ministers are trying to win votes from settlers. The government rejects that reading and frames the operation as security, full stop. But when a military operation and an election campaign share the same week, every demolition is read twice, once as tactics, once as message, and the second reading is the one that travels.
Listen to the condition, not just the operation. Katz did not say the displaced may return when the search ends, or when suspects are caught, or when demolitions are complete. He said they may not return until Hamas infrastructure in Hebron is dismantled; a goal that is political, open-ended and defined entirely by the army doing the dismantling. That turns a temporary evacuation into an indefinite one, and it turns the residents' homes into leverage: their return becomes contingent on an outcome they do not control and cannot verify. It is the sentence that converts this operation from a manhunt into a reshaping of who lives where.
The political layer points the same way. Netanyahu has promised an operation on a scale not seen since Israel first occupied the West Bank in 1967; language that echoes the closure warning he issued as the operation began; and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also oversees civilian affairs in the West Bank, said he personally ordered the immediate demolition of a row of structures, warning that anyone who challenges Israel will pay a painful price. Read together, the statements describe not a search but a demonstration: a price, publicly set, publicly exacted, days before voters judge the government that set it. The municipality's claim that the operation is vote-chasing may be self-interested, but the government's own language gives it something to point at.
First, across the West Bank. The army says it operated in 40 different areas over Friday and Saturday, and the Hebron precedent, mass displacement as the response to an attack, now hangs over every other city. Second, into the settler movement: Wafa reports two new outposts opening near Yatta while the army's attention is fixed on Hebron, a reminder that military operations and land moves often advance together. Third, into daily life far from the checkpoint: suspended schools, online universities, uncollected rubbish and sealed roads are the machinery of a city stopping, and a city that stops for days does not simply restart when the soldiers leave.
Fourth, into the region's diplomacy. The Palestinian Authority's call for international pressure that goes beyond condemnation to tangible and deterrent measures is a direct challenge to governments that have condemned and stopped there. And fifth, into Israel's own election: whatever voters decide on Tuesday, they will decide it with images of a sealed Hebron in front of them, and the parties will spend the campaign arguing over whether those images show strength or overreach. The operation's second-order effect may be that it becomes the election's final argument.
The near term is grimly legible. The military has projected an assault lasting several days, the lockdown is in place, and Katz's return condition means the displaced cannot count on going home this week. The displacement count will likely rise before it falls, as the threatened families are either removed or reprieved, and the demolition tally will clarify only once the army says so. The Palestinian Authority will keep pressing for international action, and rights groups will keep pressing the army to halt the removals and lift the closure.
Then comes Tuesday, and with it the question that will decide how this operation is remembered: whether voters reward a government that sealed a city after its soldiers were killed, or punish one that displaced thousands of civilians days before they voted. Our earlier coverage of the election arithmetic showed no bloc able to reach 61 seats on its own; which means the parties that rule each other out may decide who governs, and Hebron may decide how they argue. Either way, the families sleeping away from home tonight will still be waiting when the votes are counted.
The Western lens: a deadly attack, a disputed response Read from London, Jerusalem and Washington, this is a story that begins with an unambiguous fact, two soldiers dead at a checkpoint, and then splits. Reuters and Haaretz both centre the attack, the official Israeli response, and the municipal figures, and both give prominent space to the legal challenge: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel demanding the army halt the removals and lift the closure, on the basis that no security incident permits punishing an entire city. The Western reporting question is proportionality: how far may a state go, and against whom, after its soldiers are killed?
The Eastern lens: the operation lands in a region already on edge Read from Seoul and across Asia, the Hebron operation arrives as one more shock in a region whose wars no longer stay regional. The Korea Herald's coverage, carrying the wire account of the displacement, stresses the sequence the world will remember: an attack on Friday, an evacuation of about 2,000 by Saturday, a defence minister saying they will not return until Hamas is dealt with, and an election on Tuesday. The Eastern lens cares less for legal vocabulary than for trajectory; an operation of a scale Netanyahu himself compared to 1967, launched days before a vote, in a West Bank where Asian governments have citizens, investments and a dread of another regional war.
The Southern lens: the families behind the figures Read from Doha, Ramallah and the Global South, this is a story told in household detail: the loudspeaker at night, the belongings left behind, the infants and pregnant women among the displaced, the black X on the door, the classroom suspended and the lecture moved online. Al Jazeera, Wafa and TRT World foreground the Palestinian Authority's plea for international pressure beyond condemnation, and the charge, voiced by municipal officials and rights researchers, that the campaign amounts to collective punishment and, in one researcher's words, a form of ethnic cleansing. The Southern lens also watches the operation's edges; settlers pitching tents and bringing bulldozers to open two new outposts near Yatta, south of Hebron, on Palestinian-owned land, according to Wafa.
The operation followed a shooting on Friday morning, 23 October 2026, at a checkpoint near Hebron in which two Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded three others. The gunmen were shot dead. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then announced a large-scale operation, and the army sealed Hebron and Halhul to search for militants and weapons and carry out demolitions.
The count has risen through the weekend. Reuters reported about 1,200 displaced on Saturday, with about 1,300 more at risk. By Sunday morning, Hebron's deputy mayor put the figure at 2,231 people from 373 families, and the Palestinian Prisoner's Society counted 293 families, about 2,200 people. The figures differ by source and hour, but all point upward.
The Palestinian Authority and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel argue that displacing hundreds of families, demolishing homes and sealing a whole city punishes residents with no connection to the attackers. The rights group said no security incident grants an army permission to punish an entire city, and called for the removals, demolitions and closure to stop immediately.
No date has been given. Defence Minister Israel Katz said residents will not be allowed back until what he called Hamas infrastructure in Hebron is dismantled, a condition with no deadline. The army has projected an operation lasting several days, and the return of families, including those whose homes were seized as barracks or marked for demolition, remains uncertain.
