With a high-profile conflict between IDF soldiers and a CNN crew, the establishment of five new Israeli settler outposts on territory meant to be under Palestinian Authority control in a single night, and skyrocketing settler violence aimed at erasing Palestinians from their land, the situation in the West Bank has “definitely worsened” during the Iran war, Haaretz West Bank correspondent Matan Golan told the Haaretz Podcast.

Golan joined her colleague, Yarden Michaeli, for a podcast conversation focused on what is unfolding in the West Bank and Gaza while the world’s attention is diverted to the major regional conflict between Iran, Israel and the United States.

“It’s hard to count how many incidents of cars set on fire, and raids of settlers on Palestinian villages” have occurred over the past month, Golan said.

What the West Bank and Gaza have in common, Michaeli noted, is a situation in which steps designed to be interim measures – such as the Yellow Line separating Gaza – don’t appear to be temporary.

Since last autumn’s cease-fire, the IDF has maintained control of more than half of the Gaza Strip, and, as Michaeli explained, a Haaretz investigation has revealed the construction of military outposts and infrastructure that point to plans for an entrenched long-term presence.

“All of this is happening in the context of the government pushing in a certain direction,” he explained, “and what makes us so concerned about it is the experience we have from the West Bank.”

In the rest of the Strip, which remains under Hamas’ control, he said, the humanitarian crisis continues.

“We have 2.1 million people now in Gaza that are crammed to less than half the size of the land that they had prior to the war” with hundreds of thousands living in tents or makeshift shelters amid destroyed buildings with no access to power, fuel or running water – and over 18,000 severely ill people who have been denied entry to the West Bank and Jerusalem to receive medical care by Israeli authorities, Michaeli explained.

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