Click to expand Image Israeli tanks are deployed during an ongoing army operation in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, February 24, 2025. © 2025 Majdi Mohammed/AP Photo This week, Israeli tanks rolled into the occupied West Bank for the first time in two decades as Israeli forces intensify their operations there. Focused on the northern West Bank, the campaign is already the longest and most intense there since the Second Intifada in the early 2000s.The Israeli military has for weeks conducted air strikes and raids in the northern West Bank that have killed more than 50 Palestinians, many who were “unarmed and posed no imminent threat,” according to the United Nations human rights office. Israeli forces have destroyed scores of homes and critical infrastructure, including multiple kilometers of sewage networks and water pipelines in Jenin. The Jenin, Nur Shams, and Tulkarem refugee camps have become “near-unhabitable,” according to the UN.About 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced, according to the UN: a scale not seen in the West Bank since the 1967 war. Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz said the operations will continue for a year and that displaced Palestinians will not be allowed to return.We have seen this playbook before. In August, then Foreign Minister, Katz said that Israel “must deal with the threat [in the West Bank] just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents.” Bezalel Smotrich, a minister within the Defense Ministry, has also repeatedly warned that West Bank communities could meet the same fate as those in Gaza.In Gaza, Human Rights Watch found no plausible legal justification for Israel’s massive, deliberate displacement of Palestinian civilians, including through deliberate destruction that made much of the territory unlivable. These actions amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and in at least parts of Gaza, ethnic cleansing. We also determined Israel’s destruction of water infrastructure was part of a policy calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the Palestinian population, amounting to the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide.Israeli forces had already killed more than 800 people in the West Bank since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks, an unprecedented rate, and held record numbers in administrative detention without trial or charge. Their actions coincide with increased settlement construction, Palestinian home demolitions, movement restrictions, settler violence, and reports of ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian detainees. The escalating repression is part of Israel’s ongoing crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.States should act to prevent further atrocities across the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including by imposing targeted sanctions on those implicated in ongoing grave abuses, suspending arms transfers to Israel, banning trade with illegal settlements, and supporting the International Criminal Court.