Bulldozers reached Hebron the same day two soldiers were killed, four days before the vote

Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a military checkpoint near Hebron on Friday morning, killing Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, a squad commander, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, both of the Ari Battalion, and wounding three more soldiers lightly. The gunfight ran more than twenty minutes before troops killed both attackers, identified as Mohammad Jaaba and Firas Jaaba, both 27 and from Hebron, members of the same family. The IDF assesses they planned a larger attack. Netanyahu ordered Hebron cordoned off and a full West Bank lockdown; the IDF and Shin Bet issued a joint statement announcing a counter-terrorism operation in the Hebron area, described as an extension of operations begun earlier that day. Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir went to the scene and vowed to “pursue all those involved.”

Netanyahu said soldiers would go “house to house,” evacuate residents and destroy “terrorist infrastructure” while “infrastructure for settlement” will be built — the clause that makes the operation’s second purpose explicit. The Times of Israel reported, in its own write-through, that he called for destroying the shooters' entire neighbourhood and warned of an IDF operation in the West Bank unlike anything since the Six Day War; that comparison did not appear in NBC’s version. What was observed rather than announced is narrower and harder: the Times of Israel’s liveblog describes photographs and video of armed soldiers shoving Palestinian civilians out of premises after belongings were loaded onto trucks, and structures being bulldozed. AFP photographer Hazem Bader’s images of Israeli bulldozers demolishing a Palestinian building in Hebron ran on the paper’s front page the same day.

Assessment: Separate the two registers. The lockdown, the “Six Day War” scale and the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority demanded by Ben Gvir and Smotrich are declarations made by candidates four days from a ballot — the Times of Israel appended its own caveat of “no immediate link” to the ministers' demand, an editorial decision worth noting on its own. The demolitions are not a declaration. They happened within hours, before any judicial process, and the photographic record is the only part of Friday that cannot be withdrawn after Tuesday. Watch whether the operation’s tempo survives the count, or whether the settlement clause was the point.