Palestinians are losing a war they haven’t fought: ‘There is no future for a Palestinian state, but we will never leave our land’

“She has to get out of there. She’s pregnant.” Dr. Mustafa Barghouti speaks on his cell phone to a Palestinian healthcare worker being held by the Israeli army in the southern West Bank. “We’re surrounded by 1,100 checkpoints and 200 security gates that isolate communities and turn them into cages,” he explains at the Ramallah headquarters of the Palestinian National Initiative, the party he founded more than two decades ago with the intellectual Edward Said. A former minister and member of parliament, Barghouti, 71, remains one of the most respected independent voices among Palestinians. “Things like this happen every day,” he says, “and during the war with Iran, everything got worse: we weren’t involved, but we were victims.”

Israel has exploited the conflict with Tehran to extend its control over large areas allocated to the Palestinian Authority in the 1993 Oslo Accords, while settler attacks have intensified. Palestinians have suffered the consequences of a war in which four young women were killed by an Iranian projectile, and more than a dozen civilians have died in attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers.

“Israel is only pursuing a plan of occupation, not a peace plan,” argues Barghouti, who is forbidden from setting foot in his native Jerusalem, located a half-hour drive from Ramallah. “It has already killed the two-state solution; there is no future for a Palestinian state, but we will never leave our land.”

The Israeli NGO B’Tselem has confirmed that a Palestinian man was shot in the back and killed a week ago by a settler mobilized by the army as a reservist in the village of Deir Yarir, north of Ramallah. They drove their flocks into the pastures surrounding the village before opening fire.

The West Bank has not recovered since the pandemic in 2020. The Gaza war, which began in October 2023, and the latest conflict with Iran have only aggravated a crisis that has plunged the daily lives of Palestinians “into survival mode,” warns Yusef Mohamad, 38, an economist at the Bank of Palestine.

Forgotten by the world, nearly 250,000 Palestinian workers have been unable to go to their jobs in Israel for more than two years. Many other civil servants and public employees, such as teachers and healthcare workers, have seen their salaries cut by 50%. “Only Palestinian doctors are authorized to go to Israeli hospitals, sometimes to save the lives of soldiers who have killed civilians in Gaza or the West Bank,” he explains.

“The latest conflict has been devastating; the Palestinian Authority is on the verge of collapse. It’s hard to understand how it’s still standing,” says Mohamad. Last week, nearly 70 Palestinian workers were discovered by Israeli security forces crammed inside a garbage truck as they attempted to cross clandestinely into Israel through a border crossing in the central West Bank.

Khaled, 49, worked in construction in Israel before the outbreak of the Gaza war in 2023. “I had a good salary, but since then my financial situation has collapsed,” he reveals in Ramallah. “I can no longer support my family like I used to, and give my five children what they need. One of my daughters is studying medicine at university. I can no longer help her with expenses, and it’s devastating,” he confesses. “When the war in Gaza ended, I was confident that things would change. But they’ve imposed another war on us, which has crushed all hope.”

“As long as the Israeli attacks in Gaza continue, which happen daily, there’s no point in thinking about reconstruction. For the Palestinians, it’s an endless war,” concludes the economist from the Bank of Palestine. The trickle of deaths continues unabated in the Strip. Five people died on April 13 in incursions by the Israeli army. Two days earlier, bombings caused at least seven deaths. Last Thursday, four more were reported. A day later, there were two fatalities. On Saturday, two truck drivers transporting drinking water for a UN agency were shot dead. More than 770 Palestinians have lost their lives in Gaza in Israeli attacks since the start of the ceasefire in the enclave on October 10.

The Board of Peace established by U.S. President Donald Trump after the cessation of hostilities intends to take steps this month to force the disarmament of the Islamist militia Hamas, without guaranteeing in return the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Strip. Meanwhile, the reconstruction process remains stalled, and basic supplies continue to be withheld from the enclave’s two million inhabitants, while the risk of renewed war in Gaza grows.

Doctors Without Borders describes daily life in Gaza as “catastrophic” after six months of a nominal ceasefire. “There is a continuous and deliberate pattern of aid blockade, with shortages of drinking water and food, and no access to healthcare, while Israel prevents the entry of medical supplies and the evacuation of the seriously ill,” the international NGO reports. Ninety percent of the population has been forcibly displaced, concentrated in the 42% of the territory within the so-called “yellow line” drawn by the Israeli army to the west of the Gaza Strip, which has become a lethal barrier for anyone who approaches it.

“We don’t know what a ceasefire is in Gaza. But without regional peace, there can be no peace in Palestine either,” says Abdelfatah Doleh, 47, spokesman for the Fatah party, headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah. “We hope the world will now turn its attention to us and that the Palestinian question will once again be on the international agenda,” Doleh adds. “The almost complete silence of the international community during more than two years of war has shown that punishing Israel’s crimes is not on the global agenda.”

New settlements

The de facto annexation of the West Bank is progressing while the Israeli Finance Minister, the ultranationalist Bezalel Smotrich, boasts that his government is “killing the idea of ​​a Palestinian state.” Israel has just approved the construction or expansion of 34 settlements in the West Bank, despite the fact that the international community considers them illegal. The UN Security Council last ratified this in December 2016, in Resolution 2334, adopted under the presidency of Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S. During Republican Donald Trump’s two terms, more than a hundred settlements have sprung up.

“We Palestinians have been abandoned by the world,” says Nedaa, 28, an employee of the Palestinian administration in Ramallah. “So many wars in succession exacerbate our vulnerability. We have been under double pressure: the Israeli occupation and Iranian missiles, and we have no refuge here.” In the midst of the war, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has approved the imposition of the death penalty for Palestinians by military courts that try them in the West Bank. For Israelis living in the same territory, tried in civilian courts, capital punishment is not an option.

“The conflict with Iran has been an Israeli war, not a Palestinian one, but everything that happens in the Middle East affects us,” states political analyst Fares Sarafandi. “The war is effectively continuing in Gaza, and Israel has turned the West Bank into a vast open-air prison.” This commentator on a Palestinian television channel, who has spent three of his 42 years in Israeli prisons, agrees that the Jewish state “will never allow a Palestinian state.” “Ethnic cleansing is underway. There is no future for the Palestinians,” he concludes. “We are alone. No one has stopped the genocide in Gaza.”

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