QUICK TAKE: Netanyahu promises the biggest operation since 1967, four days before the vote

The morning

It was 7:15 a.m. A junction north of Hebron. Two armed men open fire. On an army checkpoint.

Two soldiers die. Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, from Ashkelon. Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, from Hod Hasharon. Three others are lightly wounded.

Both attackers are shot dead. Palestinians from Hebron. One M16. One handgun. A car with Israeli plates. The firefight lasts twenty minutes.

At 7:15 a.m., it is an attack. By noon, it is an election campaign.

The evening

Benjamin Netanyahu arrives on site. Bulletproof vest. Cameras everywhere.

He announces an operation “the likes of which has not been seen since the Six-Day War.” In 1967.

Hebron has more than 200,000 residents. They are sealed in. Nobody enters. Nobody leaves. The bulldozers arrive before nightfall.

The vote is Tuesday. In four days. The polls give nobody a majority. Not him. Not Gadi Eisenkot.

Two soldiers dead at a junction in the morning, and by evening a prime minister in a bulletproof vest promises the biggest operation in decades.

I mourn the two soldiers. The calendar, for its part, deserves no tears.

Sixty years of history summoned for four days of campaigning.

The Yehuda Junction

Magen David Adom gets the call at 7:15 a.m. Multiple casualties. Yehuda Junction. Hebron’s northern checkpoint. Near the settlement of Telem.

The gunmen targeted a reserve battalion. Reserve soldiers. Men called up. Not career soldiers. Some fathers. Some sons.

The firefight lasts twenty minutes, witnesses say. Twenty minutes of shooting.

Evacuating the wounded suffers for it. Medics wait for a lull. It is slow to come.

Tzuriel Edri, a medic, recounts. “We arrived at a difficult scene while shooting was still taking place in the area.” His sentence. His morning.

The first numbers

First tally: five wounded. Two in critical condition. Two men in their twenties. Hit in the legs. One unconscious.

Then the army corrects. Two dead. Three lightly wounded. The two critical cases became the two dead. Roytman and Svilem.

The attackers, for their part, are not identified before late morning.

Two Palestinians from Hebron. That is all we know. That is all we will know. For now.

Twenty minutes of gunfire at a junction, two reservists dead and three wounded, that is the exact attack, before the words make it grow.

The fact fits in four lines. The response will take a hundred.

The attack and its authors

Start in the right order. Two men fired on soldiers. They came from Hebron. They had weapons of war. They aimed.

Hamas hails a “heroic operation.” It calls for “total mobilization.”

It asks for more attacks. It does not claim responsibility. It encourages. That is worse. That is signed.

Two other armed groups applaud too. The PFLP is one of them. Three groups. One message. Fire again.

The one responsible for two dead soldiers is the one who fired. And the one who applauds. No other reading. No excuse.

What the army says it found

The army speaks of a “large quantity of weapons and ammunition.” In the car. It infers a major attack. Against civilians. Thwarted, it says.

Netanyahu picks it up. Hamas was “planning a major attack.” He gives no details. No target. No plan shown. We are still waiting.

The same day, the army announces dozens of operations. Dozens of arrests. Hamas and its allies. M16s. Submachine guns. Seventy wanted men in one week.

An M16, a handgun and ammunition prove an attack, not yet a major attack, and the word has been let loose.

The fact is serious. The word is bigger. Bigger than the fact.

What was ordered

First announcement. Immediate closure of Hebron. And preparation for a “full lockdown” of the entire West Bank. Starting Friday. The prime minister’s office writes it.

Second announcement, a few hours later. A cordon around Hebron and Halhul.

And the idea of “extending this model to other cities as well.” The word full has vanished. In six hours.

Third announcement, on site. “We will evacuate the residents, we will go house to house.” Seize the weapons.

Destroy the “infrastructure.” All of it, he says.

Three announcements in one day. Each more precise. Each broader. Or the reverse. Nobody knows anymore.

What was done

A Reuters reporter saw the bulldozers. They were demolishing homes near the site. That same Friday.

Residents say those homes have no connection to the gunmen. The army has not answered. Not yet. Not tonight.

Bezalel Smotrich ordered more demolitions. Of “illegal” structures. Near the junction. Right away.

When bulldozers arrive the same day at neighbors with no link to the gunmen, you no longer punish an attack, you punish a neighborhood.

The house falls before the investigation.

H1 and H2

Hebron is divided. One sector under the Palestinian Authority. Another under the army.

In the latter live settlers. In the heart of the city. Between Palestinian homes.

It is the only West Bank city split this way. Closed streets. Metal gates. Soldiers on every corner. For decades. Street by street.

A closure of Hebron is therefore a closure of 200,000 Palestinians. Not of settlers. They still drive. With delays.

Two cities in one. Only one is shut.

What Netanyahu promises to build there

He speaks of destroying. Then he speaks of building. “Infrastructure for settlement,” he tells NBC. In Hebron. After the evacuation.

Destroy a Palestinian neighborhood. Build there for settlers. The sequence is spoken. On camera. In front of everyone.

Seventy wanted men arrested in one week, the army says. And now a neighborhood to empty. Then to fill. With others.

A prime minister who promises to evacuate residents and build infrastructure for settlement is not announcing a response, he is announcing a relocation.

The response has an urban plan.

Jenin, Tulkarm, 2025

Netanyahu names his method. “The offensive and successful model” of the refugee camps. Jenin and Tulkarm. In 2025.

There, the army displaced more than 30,000 people. With armor. With an airstrike in late August. The camps have been empty since. Still empty.

Human Rights Watch speaks of war crimes. Israel rejects the word. The camps stay empty. The word stays on the table. It weighs.

This model, Netanyahu wants to apply “inside cities.” Not in a camp. In Hebron. Two hundred thousand residents. Families. Shops.

What Katz adds

Israel Katz, the defense minister, goes further. “Every clan neighborhood” the gunmen came from will be evacuated. Then dealt with.

He compares. “Just like in Gaza, just like in Lebanon.” His sentence. The only language these groups understand, he says.

Gaza is a territory in ruins. Lebanon was struck for months. Hebron would be the third name on the list.

A minister who promises Hebron the treatment of Gaza and Lebanon before a vote is not talking security, he is talking to the ballot box.

The model has a record. It has no end.

What they demand

Bezalel Smotrich wants a “comprehensive military campaign.” To “dismantle the Palestinian Authority.” Collect the weapons. “Just as in Gaza.” That word again. Gaza again.

Itamar Ben-Gvir says the same. The Authority “must be dismantled and demilitarised.” He adds: “We have to act before it’s too late.”

Then the hierarchy of lives. Those of settlers, soldiers, police officers are “a million times more important than freedom of movement.”

Two ministers. One program. The end of the Palestinian Authority. Four days before the vote. Not one more.

What it would do

The Palestinian Authority cooperates with the Israeli army. For decades now. It is weak. It is corrupt. It is the only interlocutor left.

Dismantling it means leaving Hamas alone across the table. That is what Hamas wants. It said so Friday. “Total mobilization.” Its words.

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir serve here the same goal as Hamas. There is no pleasure in writing it. The facts write it first.

When two Israeli ministers and Hamas wish for the same disappearance on the same day, one of the two camps has mistaken its camp.

Hamas wants the end of the Authority, and so do two ministers.

On each side

Since October 2023, more than 1,110 Palestinians have died in the West Bank.

Most under soldiers’ bullets. The count is AFP’s, based on the Palestinian health ministry.

On the Israeli side, at least 51 dead over the same period. Most in Palestinian attacks. Some during military operations. Israeli figures.

Two more soldiers on Friday. Two more attackers. The count goes on. It never stops. It grows.

Fifty-one on one side. Eleven hundred and ten on the other. Neither number excuses the other. Neither one.

The olive harvest

For weeks, settlers have been attacking the olive harvest. At least three Palestinians have died.

Dozens wounded. Some journalists. European diplomats. A French mayor.

On Thursday, 17 documented attacks. In one day. In six governorates. Farmers beaten. Trees burned. Harvests stolen. Live fire. In one day.

Brad Lander, a Democratic congressional candidate in New York, was briefly detained. He was picking olives. With Palestinians. Last Wednesday.

Netanyahu, on Friday, called the settlers “heroic.” An example “to the people of Israel.” The same day as the 17 attacks.

Calling heroic the settlers whose attacks have cost three lives during the harvest means not having read the reports, or having read them.

The word heroic changed owners. On Friday.

The daily life of the gates

It is the fourth time in a month. Gates shut. Checkpoints shut. Villages cut off from the main roads. The AP keeps count.

The roads stay open to Israelis. Settlers included. They drive. With delays. Palestinians, for their part, wait behind a metal gate.

By Friday afternoon, most checkpoints in the south were closed. Palestinians follow it on Telegram. Gate by gate. Hour by hour.

Four closures in a month is no longer an emergency measure. It is a regime. It has a rhythm. An electoral rhythm.

Thirty-six arrests on Thursday

The day before the attack, 36 Palestinians had been arrested. Ten in Jenin.

Fourteen in Khirbet Jawaya. Three in Burin, Awarta and Qalandiya. The rest in Hebron.

That did not stop two men from firing Friday morning. Arrests are not prevention. They are a volume. An evening figure.

The volume rises before the vote. So do the attacks. The two curves feed each other. Nobody separates them.

Thirty-six arrests the day before, two soldiers dead the next day and 200,000 residents sealed in by evening form no strategy, they form a spiral.

The spiral has a calendar. It stops Tuesday.

The rival salutes the soldiers

Gadi Eisenkot is the former chief of staff. He is the main rival. He did not attack Netanyahu on Friday.

He praised “the courage of the soldiers” who “prevented a major attack.”

That is all. Not a word on the closure. Not a word on 1967.

Eisenkot’s silence is a calculation. Criticizing an operation on the day two soldiers die costs votes. He knows it. He waits for Tuesday. With care.

A rival who stays silent on the day of an attack leaves the prime minister alone with the cameras.

And he knows what to do with them.

Likud cancels, then occupies

Likud canceled all its events on Friday. In official terms. Out of respect.

In practice, Netanyahu spent the day in Hebron. In a bulletproof vest. On live television.

It is the best campaign event possible. It costs nothing. It is not spoken. It is filmed. All by itself.

The attack is not fake. It is real. Two families are burying it. The response, for its part, is calibrated for Tuesday.

A leader who cancels his rallies and spends the day on camera in a bulletproof vest has not canceled his campaign, he has moved it.

The rally is called Hebron.

What the numbers say

Reuters sums it up. Netanyahu and Eisenkot both fall short of a majority. No bloc wins. The right-wing coalition may lose its majority Tuesday.

An attack changes the polls. Every time. In the same direction. Toward security. Toward the incumbent. Netanyahu knows it. For thirty years.

He had even announced it. “Several weeks ago,” he says, he warned that enemies would strike before the vote.

“That is what they tried to here.”

Predicting an attack before a vote is not hard. Drawing a sixty-year operation from it is harder.

The referendum on October 7

This vote is a referendum. On Netanyahu. On October 7, 2023. On three years of war. NBC says it in one sentence.

The prime minister made security his only theme. His government warned of attacks “without providing evidence.” Until Friday. Until 7:15 a.m.

On Friday, the evidence arrived. Two armed men supplied it. Hamas signed it. Likud framed it.

A prime minister who predicts an attack before the vote and receives one four days early is not right for that, he has an attack.

The prediction came true. It validates nothing.

Hebron is not Jenin

I support Israel against Hamas. Without reservation. Hamas fired on Friday.

Hamas applauds. Hamas wants more deaths. It must be said first. And said again.

But Hebron is not a camp. It is a city of 200,000 people.

Divided in two. With settlers in the center. With the army in the middle. For decades.

Evacuating an entire neighborhood, house by house, for two gunmen means punishing thousands of people for two.

The law has a word for that. Collective punishment.

The two camps are not to be confused. I refuse to confuse a response with a campaign.

What remains

Hamas is responsible for two deaths. Netanyahu is responsible for the response. Each carries his act. Each at its size. No more. No less.

The response already weighs on homes with no link to the gunmen. Reuters saw it. Residents said it. The army did not deny it.

It will weigh on Tuesday at the ballot box. That is its purpose. No other intention is needed. That one is enough.

Two responsible parties for one day, one who fires and one who films, and the second does not erase the first but uses him.

One fired. The other counted the days.

What happens Monday

The closure will hold at least until the vote. It is written between the lines.

Hebron and Halhul stay shut. The other cities await the “model.” They await it anxiously.

The Roytman and Svilem families bury their sons. In Ashkelon. In Hod Hasharon. They asked for nothing. They receive an operation.

The families of Hebron await the bulldozers. They asked for nothing either. They receive the camps model.

Two griefs. One city shut. One vote. On Tuesday.

What to watch

Look at the order of events. The attack first. The bulldozers next. The vote last. Then ask who had an interest at each step.

Hamas wanted the attack. It got it. Netanyahu wanted security at the center of the vote.

He got it. The residents of Hebron wanted nothing. They got everything. All at once.

Two soldiers died, and a campaign woke up.

Netanyahu promises the biggest operation since 1967, four days before the vote.

And you, is an operation announced in a bulletproof vest four days before a vote aimed first at Hebron or first at the ballot box?

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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