Israel to step up West Bank operations after bus explosions

Paul Wallace and Alisa Odenheimer, Bloomberg News on Feb 21, 2025

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Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military to intensify security operations in the West Bank following non-fatal bus bombings on Thursday night.

Three buses exploded near Tel Aviv, without harming anyone. Devices in two other buses failed to detonate, Israeli police said.

Netanyahu said it was an attempt at “a chain of mass bus bombings” and said the Israel Defense Forces must “carry out an intensive operation against centers of terrorism” in the West Bank.

Netanyahu also said Hamas would pay “the full price” after a body it released on Thursday from Gaza was not that of Shiri Bibas, a mother taken hostage in October 2023, as the militant group said it would be.

The incidents come with Israel and Hamas in the early stages of negotiating the extension of a truce in Gaza, which expires in early March. The U.S. hopes the sides turn the six-week pause into a permanent end to fighting, though it’s said Israel has the right to return to war.

Israel said the body purported to be Bibas was that of a Gazan woman and not any of the roughly 80 hostages remaining in Gaza.

Three other corpses released on Thursday — those of Bibas’s four-year-old and infant sons and a man in his 80s — were identified by Israel. Their remains showed they had been murdered in the first weeks of the war, Netanyahu said.

Hamas has insisted for more than a year that they were all the victims of Israeli bombings. Israeli officials have in the past acknowledged the accidental killing of some hostages as a result of army actions. But in other cases, they said, recovered bodies bore signs of small-arms fire that pointed to execution by Hamas.

Israel will “work resolutely” to bring Shiri Bibas’s body home, Netanyahu said.

Hamas is meant to release six living hostages on Saturday.

The West Bank has seen a sharp increase in violence and deaths since October 2023, when Israel’s war against Hamas started in Gaza, the smaller of the two territories the Palestinians hope will eventually form a state of theirs.

Israel started a major security operation in the West Bank about a month ago, saying it was trying to counter militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S.