from mondoweiss.net
Tammoun, a busy town that is considered a services and trade hub for the northern Jordan Valley, has been turned into “a ghost town” by the Israeli offensive, according to Tammoun’s mayor, Sameer Bisharat.
“The occupation has imposed a strict curfew on all of Tammoun, even using airstrikes to warn people against leaving their homes. Today alone, there were six warning strikes,” Bisharat told Mondoweiss on Tuesday. “One of them hit a location only 50 meters away from where two children were walking, but fortunately none of them were hurt.”
“The people of Tammoun are mostly farmers, and their lands are to the east of the town on the slopes of the Jordan Valley. They’re now being prevented from reaching their lands, and the marketplace in Tammoun is paralyzed, so the surrounding towns and villages are lacking a vital market for their necessities, including food,” Bisharat explained.
“I am going around the town with an ambulance team, and the only voices we can hear are our own,” he pointed out. “Ambulance crews are forced to ask permission from the occupation army to reach any place in the town, and the permit takes hours to be granted.”
“We are also facing difficulty in delivering food and other basic needs to homes due to the occupation’s restrictions on movement in the town,” Bisharat added.
Israeli forces have also engaged in demolitions and the displacement of several cities throughout the town, replicating the tactics the Israeli army has employed in Jenin over the past several weeks. “The occupation forces have destroyed the outside wall of a school and forced 20 families to leave their homes,” Bisharat explained. “We have accommodated them in other houses in the town, but we fear that more families will be displaced in the coming days.”
Bisharat expressed concern for the future of Tammoun, a once-vibrant town overlooking the Jordan Valley that has now been thrown into uncertainty. “I witnessed many raids carried out by the occupation army in my life, but none like this one,” he explained. “This time, the occupation seems determined to destroy life in the town and displace its population, just like in the rest of the West Bank. I am very worried about the near future.”
Israeli occupation bulldozers destroyed trees in Tammoun town in Tubas in the occupied West Bank. pic.twitter.com/VoAPGCWP7f
— Chris Hutchinson (@ChrisHu34451470) February 5, 2025
The attacks on the West Bank come as Israel and Hamas began the second round of talks over the ceasefire deal in Gaza on Tuesday, while Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with U.S. president Donald Trump in Washington. Analysts have speculated the U.S. might give a green-light to Israel to intensify its war on Palestinians in the West Bank, in preparation for its full annexation, in exchange for Israel holding the ceasefire deal in Gaza.
On Monday, Trump responded to a journalist’s question during a briefing in Washington about whether he would support the annexation of the West Bank by Israel, saying that he “won’t comment” on the topic, although adding that Israel was “very small in terms of land” compared to the rest of the Middle East, comparing it to a pen’s size on the surface of a desk. “That’s not good,” he said.
As noted in the Green Planet Monitor, in the West Bank, there is “no ecosystem richer than the Jordan Valley, rich in wetlands where wildlife and unusual plants flourish.
“But, those wetlands are under increasing threat from relentless Israeli water exploitation, and apartheid water theft.”
The state of Israel, and its funders (including the USA and Britain) are fully responsible for crimes and violations of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, including the 16-month genocide against the Gaza Strip, and the ongoing bombings in residential neighborhoods that aim to uproot the Palestinian people from their land and displace them from the West Bank.
The West Bank and Gaza Strip are two non-contiguous territories that constitute what remains of historic Palestine (23% of the original land of Palestine). Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in what is now Israel for the creation of the state of Israel on their land in 1948, and further displaced with the expansion of the state of Israel and its military occupation over all of historic Palestine, which began in 1967 and continues until today.
The Oslo Agreement of 1993, which was supposed to bring about a ‘two state solution’ with two separate states along the 1967 borders (with freedom to travel between the two non-contiguous parts of the state of Palestine: the West Bank and Gaza) was never implemented by the Israeli military that rules over the West Bank and Gaza, and was instead used by Israel to transfer over 500,000 Israeli civilians into colonial settlements on stolen Palestinian land throughout the West Bank in direct violation of international law and the Oslo Agreement.
In this way, Israel has continuously expanded its territory onto Palestinian land, shrinking the land left to the indigenous Palestinian population into smaller and smaller isolated reservations or bantustans (much like those experienced by Native Americans in the US and those experienced by Black South Africans under the apartheid regime which segregated people by race in South Africa up until the end of that system in 1994).
