Is there no armed resistance in the West Bank?

“Despite the absence of Palestinian soldiers, local militias to defend against settlers, or any real resistance group being active to fight for Palestinians in the West Bank, there are so many people on their side who want to help them.”

The claim is not a matter of interpretation, and it is not even a matter of Israeli sources. It is refuted by the Palestinian Authority’s own military communiqués, by the funeral notices the factions publish for their own fighters, and by the video that made the claim, which explains the factions in detail 28 minutes before announcing that they do not exist.

The video contains its own refutation

The line above is narrated at 36:17 of Channel 5’s “Occupied Palestine,” released in August 2026. At 8:02 of the same film, an interviewee is describing Jenin refugee camp:

“within the refugee camp, it’s noted for its radicalism … it’s been home to various factions that have tried to confront Israel directly and as I said those factions included Hamas and Islamic Jihad and various factions that are associated with the PLO, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and factions like that.”

Both sentences are in the same 41 minutes. The first is the one the film ends on, because “they are alone and unarmed” is the emotional close the material was cut for. The second is the fact.

The organisation with a name, a payroll and an obituary page

The Jenin Battalion, part of the wider Jenin Brigades, is a joint formation of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Hamas. It is not a description invented by the Israeli press. It issues its own statements, buries its own dead under its own flags, and its equivalents operate in Tulkarem, Nur Shams, Nablus and Tubas. The Lion’s Den, formed in Nablus’s old city in 2022, was covered admiringly across the same media ecosystem that now says no such groups exist.

In December 2024 the Palestinian Authority tried to break it. After PA security forces arrested two men in the camp accused of taking money to fund armed factions, the camp rose against them, and Abbas launched what the PA called Operation Protect the Homeland to “impose law and order” and take the camp back from “outlaws.” The fighting ran into January 2025 and killed roughly fifteen people, including six PA National Security Forces personnel, a commander of the local Islamic Jihad brigade, three children and a journalist.

That episode is the whole answer. A government does not lose six of its own soldiers fighting an organisation Israel invented for public relations.

What the factions did, with dates

Between 7 October 2023 and 6 October 2025, by UN OCHA’s count, Palestinians killed 41 Israelis in the West Bank, 22 of them members of the Israeli forces, and attacks by Palestinians from the West Bank killed a further 17 Israelis inside Israel. Among them:

6 January 2025, al-Funduq. Gunmen fired on a bus and two cars on Route 55, killing three people. Hamas’s Qassam Brigades claimed the attack two days later.
14 May 2025, near Bruchin. A gunman fired on a car carrying Tzeela Gez, 30, who was on her way to hospital to give birth. She was killed; her baby was delivered by emergency caesarean.
10 July 2025, Gush Etzion Junction. Two attackers stabbed a security guard, Shalev Zevuloni, 22, took his weapon and opened fire on shoppers.
18 November 2025, Gush Etzion Junction. A car-ramming and stabbing attack killed Aharon Cohen, 71, of Kiryat Arba.

The film names none of them. It names no Israeli killed in the West Bank at all.

The number that measures what did not happen

The completed attacks are the smaller half of the record. The Shin Bet reported 1,040 major attacks thwarted in the West Bank and Jerusalem during 2024, after 1,032 in 2023, and counted 231 significant attacks carried out in 2024 against 414 the year before. Significant here means shootings, bombings, car-rammings and stabbings, not stone-throwing.

Those two figures are the reason the West Bank looks quiet enough for a film crew to drive through it and conclude that nobody is fighting. A thousand attacks a year that do not happen leave no footage. They are the direct product of the raids, the checkpoints and the arrest operations the film presents as motiveless harassment, which is the closed loop this claim depends on: the counter-terrorism is filmed, the terrorism is not, and the absence of footage becomes evidence of the absence of a threat.

Why the erasure is deliberate, and who it is aimed at

Removing the armed factions from the picture does specific work. It converts every Israeli operation in Jenin or Tulkarem into an unprovoked land grab, since if there is nobody to fight, the only remaining explanation for entering a camp is the desire to empty it. It also removes the awkward part of the story for a Western audience, which is that the Palestinian Authority, the body the film goes to Ramallah to ask for help, spent December 2024 shooting at the same men in the same camp for the same reason.

The account the record supports is harder to narrate, which is why it was cut: armed factions with foreign funding operate from dense civilian camps, the Palestinian Authority cannot or will not disarm them and lost soldiers trying, Israel enters, and civilians in those camps pay for all of it. Every party in that sentence exists. The film deleted two of them.