Following a deadly Friday gun skirmish in the illegally occupied West Bank that left two Palestinians dead and at least five Israeli soldiers wounded, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued immediate directives to the Israel Defense Forces to enforce a full lockdown on the city of Hebron, and to mobilize forces in preparation for a territory-wide full lockdown across the occupied West Bank. The announcement came shortly after Netanyahu convened an emergency security cabinet session alongside his senior military advisory team, after which he released a public social media statement blaming the Palestinian political and military faction Hamas for orchestrating the deadly exchange, claiming the group was plotting a large-scale offensive targeting innocent civilian populations. While Netanyahu asserted that security forces had uncovered substantial caches of weapons and ammunition in the aftermath of the clash, he declined to share specific details corroborating the alleged planned major attack. Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who arrived at the scene of the shooting shortly after the violence unfolded, issued even more aggressive public remarks, stating that a sweeping full-scale military operation modeled after past campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon would soon be launched across the occupied West Bank, which he referred to by the settler-facing nomenclature “Judea and Samaria” to target individuals he labeled as terrorists. Smotrich went further to publicly call for the full dismantling of the Palestinian Authority, the semi-autonomous governing body for parts of the occupied territories, and announced that orders to demolish Palestinian residential structures in the vicinity of Friday’s clash would be executed within one hour, with additional demolition operations set to continue through the rest of the day. In response to the Israeli government’s sweeping new punitive measures, Mustafa Barghouti, leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, condemned the planned territory-wide West Bank closure as a blatant act of collective punishment that violates longstanding international humanitarian law. Barghouti warned that Netanyahu’s administration was laying the groundwork for ethnic cleansing of entire residential neighborhoods in Hebron, framing the policy shift as a dangerous, unprecedented escalation of Israel’s long-running forced displacement campaigns against Palestinian communities, and urged the global community to intervene immediately to hold Israeli officials accountable and prevent mass displacement. Yariv Oppenheimer, a former director of the anti-settlement group Peace Now and current project director at the Geneva Institute, echoed these concerns in an interview with Al-Jazeera, noting that the already volatile occupied West Bank, which has seen surging settler violence and near-daily Israeli Defense Force incursions into Palestinian communities for months, was on the brink of far greater unrest. Oppenheimer argued that Israeli political leaders were exploiting the fatal gun battle as a public justification to ramp up military control over Palestinian population centers, predicting a wave of punitive actions including widespread home demolitions, extended curfews, mass arbitrary arrests by IDF troops, and revenge attacks by extremist Israeli settler factions that would push the region into far deeper crisis.