Is Israel's use of drones changing its relationship with the West Bank?

When the Israeli military killed three Palestinians in a drone strike near Jenin earlier this month it marked the first aerial attack in the occupied West Bank in nearly 20 years.

Its continued use of drones in the West Bank during the latest assault by Israel marks a "perceptual change" in its relationship with the occupied territory, says Yonatan Touval, an analyst at the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies (Mitvim). 

In a series of tweets, the Israeli analyst said that the use of drones is "widely associated with combat on fronts that are either geographically distant or fronts on which you have no territorial claim to".

Consecutive Israeli governments have framed the West Bank as the "heart of its ancestral homeland", and the use of drones, says Touval is increasingly "cognitively dissonant" with that idea. 

Israel's raids in Jenin "continue upending this guiding principle, in that it recasts the West Bank, or at least parts of the West Bank as a territory that, in marked contrast to the past, should be treated at arm's length".