As Israel carries out a devastating war on Gaza, settlers are exploiting the lack of global attention on the occupied West Bank to expel Palestinians from their land there.
The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, will rule on Friday on whether Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory is illegal – a move that could outrage Israeli settlers and the broader settlement movement.
Settlers have been particularly emboldened by far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, both of whom have pushed to expand settlements in the West Bank – which violate international law – since entering government in 2022.
The Hamas-led attacks against Israeli communities and military outposts in southern Israel on October 7, in which 1,139 people were killed and more than 250 people were taken as captives back to Gaza, offered a conducive political environment to steal large swaths of Palestinian land with little international pushback or outcry, experts told Al Jazeera.
According to Peace Now, a nonprofit organisation that monitors land confiscation in the West Bank, Israel has seized 23.7sq km (9.15sq miles) of Palestinian land this year while Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, in which at least 38,848 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed and 89,459 wounded, goes on.
That makes 2024 the peak year for Israeli land seizures over the past three decades.
How many Palestinians in the West Bank have been uprooted since October 7?
The Israeli army and settlers have displaced 1,285 Palestinians and destroyed 641 structures, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
At least 15 Palestinian farming communities have been completely cleared while civilians from several other communities have been displaced by settler attacks. Many of these farmers have been forced to take temporary refuge in nearby West Bank towns.
Since the 1993 Oslo Accord, which then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat signed with then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the lawn of the White House, the West Bank has been carved up into three zones.
Area C was placed under Israeli control, Area B is under joint Palestinian-Israeli control while Area A is under the governance of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was established in 1994.
Settlers are primarily targeting farming communities in Area C, said Abbas Milhem, the executive director of the Palestinian Farmers Union.
“Most of the ethnic cleansing is happening in the Jordan Valley against livestock farmers,” he told Al Jazeera. “Many were kicked out [of their villages] without being allowed to carry anything with them – not even mattresses or blankets for their children to sleep on.”
Shortly after October 7, Ben-Gvir played a significant role in encouraging these attacks by distributing thousands of semiautomatic rifles and other weapons to settlers and far-right Israelis.
Palestinian farmers are often unarmed and have no means of defending themselves.
“Farmers have nothing to protect them, just their naked chests,” Abbas told Al Jazeera.
How many Israeli settlers were in the West Bank before October 7?
As many as 700,000 settlers were already living in the West Bank before the Hamas-led attacks. They live in 150 settlements and 128 outposts, which are makeshift encampments ranging from a single caravan to a few structures built on Palestinian land.
The numbers of settlements and outposts have risen sharply since the early 1990s, when there were approximately 250,000 settlers in the West Bank according to Peace Now, and are considered illegal under international law. The number of Israeli settlers residing in Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem has risen from 800 in 1993 to about 3,000 in 2023.
Is there anywhere safe for Palestinians in the West Bank now?
No. Palestinians have been facing harassment and violence across large parts of the West Bank.
In February, for example, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian shepherds near Hebron, expelling them from their pastures and using drones to scare their livestock – causing miscarriages and stillbirths during lambing season. This was just one of 561 incidents of Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians recorded by OCHA between October 7 and February 20.
In another incident in April, mobs of settlers attacked Bukra, Deir Dibwan and Kfar Malik – villages that are under the PA’s control in Areas A and B – by tearing down tents where displaced people were sheltering, stealing goats and beating up civilians.
Furthermore, Israeli forces have carried out numerous raids in the West Bank since the start of the war on Gaza. In November, hospitals were surrounded and several people were killed in a major raid on Jenin. This was followed by more raids later in the month in Jenin and elsewhere in the West Bank.
At the end of December, Israeli troops launched a coordinated overnight assault on 10 West Bank cities including Hebron, Halhul, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, el-Bireh, Jericho and Ramallah, the administrative headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. Those raids continued for several days.
In January, a raid by undercover operatives on a hospital in Jenin killed three people and raids across the West Bank have continued at regular intervals since then. In June, nearly 100 people were rounded up after the Israeli military used helicopter gunships during a large-scale incursion into the Jenin refugee camp, killing five people.
“There is no place in the West Bank that is safe [for people to go],” Abbas said. “Whether it is Area A or Area B, it doesn’t matter. The settlers and the army are attacking everywhere.”
How many Palestinians has Israel killed in the West Bank since the war on Gaza began?
Since October 7, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 513 people in the West Bank, according to OCHA. The vast majority have been civilians.
In comparison, Israeli forces killed 199 Palestinians in the first nine months of 2023.
The uptick in Palestinian casualties is tied to Israel’s attempt to accelerate the annexation of the West Bank, according to Mairav Zonszein, an expert on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group.
Zonszein said settlers believe Israel’s security depends on building and expanding illegal settlements despite evidence to the contrary.
“Since October 7, the government is more emboldened to carry out attacks in the West Bank, and they are engaged in collective punishment,” she told Al Jazeera.
“They are driven by the idea that they need to keep building [settlements].”
How has the international community responded?
By imposing sanctions on settlers.
In February, United States President Joe Biden’s administration froze US-based assets belonging to four Israeli settlers for their role in attacking Palestinians and Israeli activists.
On July 11, the US imposed additional sanctions on three more Israeli settlers as well as four Israeli outposts.
The sanctions freeze all assets held by those targeted in areas under US jurisdiction.
Later the same week, the European Union announced similar sanctions on several settlers and settler “entities”. The sanctions froze their assets and blocked them from receiving any transactions, directly or indirectly.
The sanctions on individuals and illegal outposts set an important precedent, according to Israel-Palestine expert Omar Rahman from the Middle East Council for Global Affairs think tank in Doha, Qatar.
However, Rahman said the sanctions are not enough to thwart Israel’s settlement expansions.
He advocated for sanctions against Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, echoing the view of Israeli and global human rights groups.
“[Confiscating Palestinian land] is a process that has been in motion for over 100 years whereby Palestinians have been steadily pushed off their land by the Zionist movement,” he told Al Jazeera.
“But these guys [Smotrich and Ben-Gvir] are specifically dedicated to that goal. Their position is to dispossess Palestinians entirely.”
How many more illegal settlements are being built in the West Bank?
On May 29, the Israeli army’s Civil Administration, which was established in 1981 to oversee all civil matters for Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents in Area C of the West Bank, handed over control of building regulations and the management of farmland, parks and forests, among other things, to the Settlements Administration, led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
The move gave Smoltrich the authority to accelerate and approve settlement construction while ramping up demolitions of Palestinian homes.
In addition, Smotrich warned that he would pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex the West Bank if the International Court of Justice rules that Israel’s occupation is illegal.
In late June, Smotrich approved five Israeli outposts after a decision by Norway, Ireland and Spain to symbolically recognise a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
“The response to the recognition of statehood … was a show of defiance and a message [that the global community] can make all the rulings they want, but Israel is the one in control,” Rahman told Al Jazeera.
Smotrich has also threatened to annex the West Bank in retaliation for the PA’s “unilateral efforts” to gain recognition for a Palestinian state as well as for seeking arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court against Israeli leaders implicated in war crimes in Gaza.
Rahman added that Israel won’t stop removing Palestinians in the West Bank or carrying out “genocide” in Gaza unless the global community mobilises against Israel.
“There needs to be massive mobilisation of punitive measures against Israel. That is the only way for there to be any movement towards a political resolution,” he said.
