A week of Israel’s lockdown in Hebron: What’s happened, when will it end?

The Israeli army is continuing its military lockdown of Hebron for the seventh consecutive day, carrying out raids and tightening restrictions in the occupied West Bank’s largest city.

Two Palestinians were injured and seven detained by Israeli forces on Thursday, according to the Wafa news agency, as Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians and their vehicles in the Ras al-Joura area, near the city’s northern entrance.

Israel has imposed a tight siege of Hebron since Friday last week, closing all entrances and exits and restricting residents’ freedom of movement and their ability to access critical services. More than 3,000 people have been forced out of the city as a number of Palestinian homes have been converted into military posts and barracks.

Meanwhile, Israeli settlers carried out attacks on Palestinian communities around Hebron. In the latest incident on Wednesday, settlers assaulted three foreign journalists, Andrey Ilyich Khrzhanovskiy, also known as Andrey X, Adele Shoko and Jasper Nathaniel. Andrey X reportedly lost consciousness, was taken to a police station and remained detained without receiving medical care.

What has happened over the past week in Hebron?

Israel’s campaign follows the killing of two Israeli soldiers by Palestinian gunmen at a checkpoint near the illegal Israeli settlement of Telem last week. The gunmen were later killed by Israeli forces in Hebron.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on social media that he had ordered security forces to immediately close Hebron and “prepare for a full lockdown across all of Judea and Samaria [the Israeli term for the occupied West Bank].

“We will act to destroy this place, to change it completely,” he proclaimed.

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for “a comprehensive military campaign in [the West Bank]… exactly as we did in Gaza”. A United Nations inquiry last year found Israel’s war on Gaza constituted a genocide.

As the siege began, Israeli forces launched a large demolition operation on dozens of Palestinian buildings. Troops also stormed the Ein Deir Bahha neighbourhood, forcing dozens of families to flee their homes at night without any belongings.

Footage showed Israeli soldiers beating and injuring Hijazi Shawer, a 70-year-old Palestinian shopkeeper and community leader.

Israeli forces also fired tear gas canisters at Al-Ahli Hospital in Hebron, causing panic among patients and staff. Hospitals are strictly protected under international humanitarian law, but the Israeli military has been known to attack hospitals throughout its genocidal war on Gaza, as well.

On Wednesday, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society reported that at least 110 people had been detained in the Hebron governorate since the raids began, including three women and seven children.

As Israeli forces besieged Hebron, they also isolated 12 villages and hamlets in the Masafer Yatta region in the south, leaving residents and farmers cut off from urban centres and markets, and dozens of patients who require daily medical care unable to reach hospitals.

Israeli settlers uprooted more than 200 fruit trees, destroyed water wells and agricultural facilities east of Hebron, and prevented farmers from harvesting olives, Wafa reported. Hebron accounts for about 40 percent of Palestinian industrial output and 30 percent of exports.

Israeli forces on Wednesday detained a Palestinian victim of a settler assault in the Khirbet Quwaweis area of Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron. A young man and a woman were also detained in the al-Kassara area, south of Hebron, following an Israeli raid on Monday.

What have the responses to this been?

Palestinian officials have accused Netanyahu and his hard-right government of exploiting the operation to secure settler votes before Tuesday’s elections in Israel this week.

Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq said the siege of Hebron violates international law and amounts to an international crime. “Given the illegality of Israel’s military occupation and the illegal settler colonial apartheid regime, the entire military operation in Hebron constitutes a prohibited act of aggression,” it stated.

The Israeli NGO B’Tselem said the Israeli military’s “operation in Hebron has nothing to do with security. It is an act of collective punishment.”

UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said: “Collective punishment is a grave violation of international law. Threats to empty and erase entire neighbourhoods also raise serious concerns of ethnic cleansing.”

Roland Friedrich, the director of UNRWA Affairs for the occupied West Bank, said the developments brought “alarming echoes of the massive displacement witnessed in the northern occupied West Bank in early 2025, where more than 34,000 Palestine refugees from Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps remain forcibly displaced over a year later”.

Muhammed Shehada, at the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli government’s use of collective punishment as a tool of deterrence against Palestinians has reached unprecedented levels.

“It’s not just about punishing the family [of an attacker], but it’s about punishing the entire community, the whole neighbourhood, the whole town and even the whole city,” he said.

Shehada argued that the genocide in Gaza had turned previously “unthinkable” policies into “core tactics”. “The Israeli government’s goal is to advance de facto annexation, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank by making life impossible,” he said.

In this context, Shehada added, collective punishment should be seen as “a terror tactic” to prevent any reaction to the unprecedented pace of ethnic cleansing and displacement of the Palestinian population.