With Gaza population already displaced, opponents fear Israel has similar plans for West Bank

As Israeli tanks and troops stormed into Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank this week — one of the largest such military operations in years — a comment by the country's foreign minister reverberated loudly across the region.

Israel should resort to the "temporary evacuation" of Palestinian residents from the West Bank, if need be, to facilitate the fight against terrorism, Israel Katz wrote on social media, as Israeli bulldozers dug up roads, destroyed buildings and left a trail of destruction behind them.

For many, it raised the spectre that Israel might be adapting the kind of scorched-earth tactics it has employed for almost a year in Gaza to the more populous and politically sensitive West Bank.

And that forcing West Bank Palestinians out of their homes might be the first stage in pushing them out permanently.

"The Israeli major military operation in the occupied West Bank must not constitute the premises of a war extension from Gaza, including full-scale destruction," Josep Borrell, the European Union's foreign policy chief, responded.

Other veteran observers of the decades-long conflict concurred.

"It looks very much like Israel is not only not ending the war in Gaza, but they're expanding it to the West Bank," Khalid Elgindy, a fellow with the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., told CBC News.

Most of the 2.3 million people in Gaza have been driven from their homes by Israel's military and forced to live in tents in filthy conditions, creating a public health disaster that has allowed diseases such as polio to fester.

Gaza health authorities say more than 40,000 people have been killed since Israel's assault began last October, with tens of thousands more wounded.

As of Thursday, at least 17 Palestinian civilians and combatants have been reportedly killed in the recent West Bank raids, including a leader of Islamic Jihad in Tulkarem.

Israel claims the assaults on West Bank cities such as Tulkarem, Jenin and Nablus were aimed at preventing imminent attacks on Israelis, and that the militants purportedly responsible are being funded and supported by Iran.  

This week's raids came roughly 10 days after a man with a bomb blew himself up in Tel Aviv, in what the Palestinian militant group Hamas later acknowledged was a failed attack by a suicide bomber.

Katz, the Israeli foreign minister, accused Iran's leaders of supporting a "terror front" against Israel.

While Israel's military thrust into the West Bank has been on a much smaller scale than the one in Gaza, there are more than 270 Jewish settlements in the West Bank.