Israeli attacks on the West Bank and Gaza are escalating, with the clear aim of erasing Palestinian identity altogether, reports Shabbir Lakha

On Sunday evening, Israeli forces raided two sites of the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem and arrested its owners Mahmoud Muna and Ahmad Muna. According to a Haaretz journalist, the officers used Google Translate to look through the titles of books and confiscated any book they didn’t like or which had a Palestine flag.

Among the books they confiscated and later returned were Gaza in Crisis by Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, and Springtime: The New Student Rebellions by Clare Solomon and Tania Palmieri.

Specialising in books on Israel/Palestine and on the Palestinian identity, the Educational Bookshop is the most well-known Palestinian bookshop and a cultural institution for Palestinians in Jerusalem. Mahmoud Muna, co-author of  the recently published Daybreak in Gaza, and his nephew Ahmad Muna who has written for Counterfire, are well-known in Jerusalem as booksellers and specialists on Palestinian history.

The shop has faced harassment from Israeli forces previously, especially after 7 October 2023, but this is a marked escalation on not just the bookshop but Palestinians in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank more generally.

The raid on the bookshop is part of the intensification of Israeli attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank since the ceasefire in Gaza came into effect and Trump was inaugurated. The north of the West Bank and Jenin in particular have been under arial bombardment and Israeli tanks and bulldozers are ripping through the town destroying its roads and infrastructure.

In the last month alone, Israel has killed over seventy Palestinians in the West Bank, 38 of them in Jenin. This includes the shooting of an eight-month pregnant woman, Sundus Shalabi in the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem on Sunday.

On Monday morning, Israeli settlers broke into the Al Aqsa compound under Israeli military protection, an extreme provocation that is becoming increasingly common. Encouraged by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, there were 22 settler raids on the Al Aqsa compound.

Donald Trump’s unveiled plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, with potentially direct involvement of US troops, has given the Israeli state the confidence to ramp up its attacks on the Palestinians. Israel is daily violating the ceasefire in Gaza and the likelihood of it holding beyond the initial six weeks gets slimmer by the day.

And in the meantime, the Israeli military and settler groups are on a rampage in the West Bank – to confiscate land, drive out Palestinians and crush their spirit. The attack on the Educational Bookshop can only be seen as part of an attempt to criminalise the Palestinian identity altogether.

There has rightly been international outrage and calls for the release of Mahmoud and Ahmad Muna from Israeli human-rights organisation B’Tselem, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Alabene, UK MP John McDonnell and others. We must add to the pressure on Israel to release the Munas and end their attacks on Palestinians.

Join the national demonstration in London this Saturday 15 February, assembling 12pm on Whitehall.