Ali al-Hirsh sits on the rocky terrain of Jabal al-Baba, which overlooks the West Bank Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. Jabal al-Baba is one of 22 Palestinian communities whose people may be displaced by new Israeli settlements. Photo / Heidi Levine, for The Washington Post
Israel has taken a raft of dramatic steps this year to ensure it retains permanent control over much, if not all, of the occupied West Bank, including measures that the Government had previously deferred because they were deemed too sensitive.
While much global attention has focused on Israel’s war in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Government and Israeli settlers on the ground have been remaking reality in the much larger West Bank, which is seen by many Israelis as part of the Jewish people’s historic homeland and by most of the world as the heart of a future Palestinian state.
With several major Western countries recognising a Palestinian state last week, the Israeli Government has been weighing whether to respond by formally annexing part or all of the West Bank, a move that would be viewed widely as a violation of international law.
The Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, overwhelmingly approved a non-binding motion this year to annex the territory.
The subject of annexation could arise today when Netanyahu meets in Washington with United States President Donald Trump, who has made clear his opposition.
Netanyahu’s Government and its settler allies are already laying the groundwork to eventually extend Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.
Within the past year, Israel has:
- Approved new Jewish settlements at a record rate, while settlers have established an unprecedented number of informal outposts, often endorsed by the Government after the fact.
- Advanced projects put on hold for decades, including a plan to develop a significant tract of land east of Jerusalem that could thwart Palestinian aspirations for statehood by dividing the West Bank in two.
- Approved a plan to resume land registration in the West Bank, suspended six decades ago, that could force Palestinians to produce property documents from before Israel’s establishment to prove ownership or face potential confiscation.
- Ordered the extended deployment of the Israeli Army for the first time into Palestinian refugee camps, which under the 1993 Oslo accords are to be solely under Palestinian control, and displaced tens of thousands of their inhabitants.
- Lent support to radical settlers whose rapidly escalating attacks on Palestinians and their property are designed, residents and human rights activists say, to drive Palestinians off their land.
Taken together, these developments represent the most significant transformation of the West Bank since Israel captured it from Jordan in the 1967 war and Jewish settlements began to take root in the occupied land soon after.
A confluence of events has led to this point, including: Israel’s sharp political turn to the right; the election of a US Administration firmly behind Netanyahu and sympathetic to settlement activity; and the world’s demonstrated inability to curb Israeli actions, particularly in the Gaza war.
Netanyahu has said that Israeli actions are designed to obstruct the Palestinians’ national aspirations and ensure that the territory, which he calls by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria, will remain in Israel’s hands.
“A Palestinian state will not be established. This place is ours. We will also take care of our heritage, our country and our security,” he said in mid-September at a signing ceremony for a new settlement project.
Palestinians and rights groups agree that Israel’s expanding presence in the West Bank, coupled with policies to intimidate Palestinian residents and force them to relocate, are cementing Israel’s long-term control over the territory.
“They want to make it a point of no return. That’s their goal,” said Allegra Pacheco, an American human rights lawyer who runs the West Bank Protection Consortium, a coalition of NGOs and donor states supporting Palestinians.
“And it’s not only building anymore. Now they’ve seized upon emptying out these areas and population transfers.”
While Jewish settlements in the West Bank have long been considered illegal by much of the world and, until recent years, as an impediment to peace by the US government, their growth has rapidly accelerated since Netanyahu’s far-right Government came to power in 2022 – and especially after the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Last year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the settler movement’s most influential political strategist, transferred control of civilian affairs in parts of the West Bank from the military to a handpicked civilian director in the Defence Ministry under his oversight.
That overhaul significantly eased the bureaucracy required for Israeli construction projects in the West Bank and “solved many, many problems”, said Yisrael Ganz, head of the Yesha Council, a governing body for Israeli settlers.
In an interview, Ganz pointed to a list of major projects that have got under way: an industrial zone that had been blocked for 30 years; a new solar power facility; and the widening of Route 60, the main artery running through the West Bank.
In May, the Government also decided to establish 22 new settlements across the West Bank – the largest number approved at one time since the Oslo accords, according to Yonatan Mizrachi of the Israeli peace organisation Peace Now.
The 24,000 housing units advanced this year are double the previous annual record, he added. Even before these actions, about half a million Israelis were estimated to live in nearly 150 West Bank settlements.
Informal outposts – erected in violation even of Israeli law and which may at first be little more than rudimentary structures or mobile homes – have been proliferating rapidly.
Often, they ultimately secure government approval and grow into formal settlements.
With 60 already set up this year, the rate is about eight times the annual average until two years ago, according to Mizrachi.
To further consolidate Israeli control, the Government in May decided to restart land registration processes for the majority of West Bank territory that under the Oslo accords is totally under Israeli control, known as Area C.
Smotrich described this as an initial step toward taking “full responsibility” for the territory.
The policy change has not yet taken effect, but if it does, Israel-based rights group Adalah warned it “may result in the massive confiscation of Palestinian land”.
After a 30-year delay, Israel moved ahead this northern summer with a project seen widely as a game changer in the West Bank.
It is the development of a 1215ha expanse of hilly land known as E1 that will connect Jerusalem to the huge settlement of Ma’ale Adumim to the east.
First proposed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the plan was put on hold by successive Israeli governments amid international opposition.
The US and other countries feared it would cleave the West Bank in two by isolating major Palestinian population centres from each other and thus prevent the territorial contiguity of any future Palestinian state.
For Netanyahu and his allies, that’s precisely the point.
Absent any objection from the Trump Administration, the Israeli Government gave final approval to E1 in late August, after a fast-tracked review process.
Under the plan, the Government will invest close to US$1 billion to build 3400 new housing units in E1 with another 4200 units to expand Ma’ale Adumim eastward, essentially doubling its current population of about 42,000, with supporting infrastructure.
Right-wing politicians and settler allies say it has huge symbolic and strategic significance.
“E1 is dead centre. It’s a hinge joining the north, south, east and west of Judea and Samaria,” said Naomi Kahn, director of the international division at Regavim, a settler advocacy organisation. “You control this, you control the territory.”
Palestinians living in the area say the project will be a disaster for their communities, partly because it will hem in the town of Eizariya, home to 55,000 Palestinians, making their travel difficult and costing it vital business. This commercial hub will become a “dead area,” Mayor Khalil Abu al-Rish warned.
Already, the first of 18 Bedouin communities that the United Nations warns could be evicted for the development of E1 have received Israeli demolition orders.
“I really don’t know where we will go,” said Fayez al-Hirsh, whose family lives in a cluster of ramshackle huts sloping down a hill next to Eizariya.
European countries condemned the approval of the E1 plan. The Trump Administration struck a different note.
“We will not tell Israel what to do. We will not interfere,” said US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an ardent supporter of Jewish settlement in the West Bank, in an interview with Galatz radio in August.
The mountains of rubble and eerie quiet in the Palestinian refugee camps of Tulkarm, a city in the northern West Bank, are testaments to another significant shift.
Israeli forces invaded the two camps – Tulkarm and Nur Shams – and a third in the northern city of Jenin over the winter, displacing about 40,000 residents.
Eight months later, the Army hasn’t left. It’s the first time the military has held on for so long to urban areas put under the control of the Palestinian Authority three decades ago.
Under the Oslo accords, heavily populated areas of the West Bank are considered Area A, administered by the authority, while Area B is administered jointly by Israel and the authority, and Area C solely by Israel.
The military campaign sought to root out Palestinian militancy and defuse explosive devices that fighters had planted under the narrow roads, said an Israel Defence Forces official, speaking on the condition of anonymity according to IDF ground rules.
The IDF has stayed in the camps to prevent militants elsewhere in the West Bank from regrouping there, the official added, saying that attacks emanating from the West Bank are down by two-thirds since the operation began.
During that time, the military has demolished hundreds of residential buildings to pave wide avenues through the three camps for military vehicles to traverse, according to Palestinian officials, the UN and the IDF. That has left thousands of people without homes to return to, if and when the military withdraws. The IDF official declined to specify a timeline for doing so.
“Everything that is happening now, from the attacks on the camps and on some areas of the West Bank, comes from the Israeli plan to take control of the West Bank completely,” said General Abdullah Kamil, governor of Tulkarm.
By levelling these neighbourhoods, the Israeli military is making yet another fundamental change in the landscape of the northern West Bank, removing generations-old refugee camps that have long served as a reminder of the many thousands of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes inside what is now Israel during its creation in 1948.
Mohammad Alariyeh, 36, was displaced in March with his family from their house just outside the Tulkarm camp.
On a recent afternoon, he ventured on to a street inside the camp, surveying piles of twisted rebar and broken concrete. The remains of disrupted lives – flower-patterned mattresses, a pink tablecloth – languished in front of empty, damaged apartment buildings.
Over the past two years, settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank have surged.
Israeli and international rights groups say these assaults often aim to expel villagers from their land and expand the Jewish presence. During that time, attacks have driven 3000 people from their homes just in Israeli-administered Area C, said Pacheco, the human rights lawyer.
The UN verified 927 settler attacks that resulted in casualties or property damage during the first seven months of this year. That’s probably an undercount; several monitoring groups said there are so many incidents each day that they can’t keep up.
These settler attacks – at times deadly – often occur with the knowledge and even support of Israeli officials and security forces, said rights groups and Palestinian witnesses.
“We do see a huge increase in the number of incidents, in the brutality of incidents, in the number of settlers who participate in those incidents – and, which is very important, in the way the Army is actually taking part in these incidents,” said Yair Dvir of the Israeli rights group B’Tselem.
He added, “You can see soldiers in uniforms with guns, participating in the stealing … or not participating but just standing aside, watching everything, seeing all the violence and not doing anything”.
The IDF official said soldiers are supposed to intervene to stop “any type of violence” in the West Bank and that when they don’t, “commanders deal with it”.
After firearms restrictions were loosened nearly two years ago by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a far-right patron of the settlement movement, settlers have further armed themselves, at times entering Palestinian villages and fields to threaten or attack residents.
Ben Gvir has been sanctioned by several Western governments for inciting violence against Palestinians.
He has said the “sanctions do not scare me” and defended measures to increase civilian gun ownership as essential for Israelis’ self-defence against terrorist attacks.
In Ein al-Hilweh, in the West Bank’s Jordan Valley, the Daraghmeh family isn’t sure how much longer they can hold on.
Kadri and Sara said they stayed with their adult sons in the rocky valley after settlers stole 70 of their cows and blocked them from accessing the hamlet’s freshwater spring.
They stayed put after a security guard from a nearby settlement severely beat their son-in-law.
And they stayed even after settlers descended on a Palestinian community just up the road, slaughtering more than 100 of the villagers’ sheep.
Nearly all the residents there fled in fear, leaving a ghost village in their wake.
Last month soldiers smashed their house and destroyed their rudimentary dairy operation.
The IDF said it was carrying out “enforcement activity against several illegal construction elements” for “security reasons”. The family is now camping out under a torn tarp. Young settlers have staked Israeli flags around Ein al-Hilweh.
“Now it’s our turn,” said their son, Ihab Daraghmeh, 21. “Now they are coming to us. We are the last community here.”
- Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv and Heidi Levine in Tulkarm, West Bank, contributed to this report.
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