Israel’s right-wing government is intensifying its half-century-long campaign to take over the West Bank fully by unleashing bands of settler militias to harass Palestinian residents, destroy their homes and livelihoods and restrict their movement throughout the occupied territory.
The aim is to quickly erase conditions necessary for creating a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel, a proposed solution for ending a century of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Opposition to the so-called two-state solution has been central to the political career of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who heads the Likud Party that leads Israel’s present ultra-nationalist government. His 19 years in office, spread over seven scattered terms, is the longest in Israeli history.
Outside observers contend that attention paid to the concurrent wars in the Gaza Strip, Iran and Lebanon have sucked away almost all international attention and concern from Netanyahu’s West Bank ambitions.
“While much of the world’s attention is fixated on Israel’s ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip and its unprecedented direct confrontation with Iran, another front has been quietly boiling over,” wrote the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a conflict monitor organization affiliated with the University of Texas. “Violence is surging in the West Bank.”
Israel’s allies and sympathizers in the United States and Europe stand by idly, even as they all verbally promote the so-called two-state solution of providing Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to coexist alongside Israel. Netanyahu’s current multi-layered offensive make the possibility a prayer rather than policy.
Netanyahu visited Washington Tuesday for talks with US President Donald Trump. The meeting is meant to close gaps in strategy between the US and Israel over the war in Iran. The West Bank was not on the Washington agenda.
Instead, the talks were “first and foremost about Iran,” according to a White House official. Trump wants to call it off as soon as possible, while Netanyahu prefers a clear military victory over Iran and Lebanon, where Hezbollah, a militia fighting the Israelis on behalf of Iran, is based.
Netanyahu didn’t bring up the West Bank, either.
Iran seems disinterested. Expert observers point out that the West Bank does not fall within Iran’s list of top regional interests. It is not a member of Tehran’s designated Axis of Resistance against Israel, which includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas, the Islamic militia whose October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel ignited the interlocking Middle Eastern wars.
Iran has issued only cursory verbal support for the Palestinians. On July 15, its Foreign Ministry “denounced Israel’s escalating attacks against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, demanding international action to stop the killings and hold Israeli leaders accountable.”
A Western intelligence analyst observed that, “Iran operates within a strict strategic hierarchy. The Lebanese arena, for instance, is viewed as far more important than the Palestinians. Hamas is somewhat down the list of concerns and, anyway, was so battered by Israel that it is beyond use or help.”
Such indifference makes the West Bank a geopolitical orphan. On the ground, Netanyahu has taken advantage of it. “While the world is focused on the war in Iran, Israel is working at full speed to create a new reality on the ground,” said Abed Aboul Shhadeh, a commentator for The New Arab, a Qatar news outlet based in London.
Stepped-up assaults on Palestinian towns, villages, individuals and their farmland come in all shapes, sizes and curation. Many attacks are spearheaded by militantly anti-Arab Israeli settlers. Their activities are protected by army units available to control armed mayhem and especially to defend the marauding settlers if necessary.
Old and new settlements
The joint activities include the expansion of old settlements and creation of new ones. Initiated by Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977, this grew into a pet project of Netanyahu, Likud’s longest serving Prime Minister.
About 500,000 Israelis live in the West Bank, up from 140,000, the population when Netanyahu first took power in 1996. Since late 2023, over half of the West Bank’s 360 settler “outposts,” consisting of little more than shacks, have sprung up across the West Bank. There are 147 officially-recognized fully constructed settlements. About 3.4 million Palestinians live in the West Bank.
Assaults on Palestinian towns, villages, refugee camps, individual homes
In recent months, the Israeli army has demolished scores of homes in Palestinian towns and villages on the ground that they harbor terrorists. Some 30,000 refugees from past wars have been driven out by force from three United Nations refugee camps in Jenin and in and near the town of Tulkarem. Military officials have forbidden former inhabitants to return.
Demolitions of homes and evictions from property are increasing across the territory, Israeli and Palestinian human rights researchers say. Israeli armed forces demolished 740 houses in the first six months of 2026, affecting 1,923 residents, including 431 women and 546 children, the researchers say.
Recent demolition of four houses in the town of Nahallin, which lies near Bethlehem, typifies the actions. Before dawn on July 20, soldiers entered the town, which sits near Bethlehem, and began to level the houses with bulldozers. One of them belonged to the town mayor. Residents threw stones and three Palestinians were arrested during the melee.
A week later, police delivered orders for residents another 14 houses to evacuate. No reasons were provided, though often houses are torn down because they were constructed without Israeli permission. Permission is almost are never provided for Palestinian construction.
Israel plans to drain Nahallin’s population in order to empty the area, take it over and unite three settlements that are blocked by Nahallin’s presence, Israeli officials say. The expulsion plan is called the “Gush Etzion Continguity Project” named after a nearby, larger nearby settlement bloc.
Violence, intimidation and harassment
Settler vigilantes intimidate Palestinians by vandalizing property, stealing or kill livestock or cutting off Palestinian farmers and herders from their fields and pastures.
Amnesty International, the human rights research group, says at least 50 distinct Palestinian shepherd communities have been cut off from their lands and forced to flee. A prime target of a current campaign is the West Bank hamlet of Khan al-Ahmar. Israeli authorities want to remove Khan al-Ahmar’s community of shepherd families from the path of apartment blocks planned to be built between Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim, a large West Bank settlement.
This spring, the government ordered the evacuation “as soon as possible,” though no eviction action has begun. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights objected and demanded Israel “cease its measures to forcibly displace the Khan Al Ahmar community … and stop its settlement expansion plans there.”
In the meantime, settlers have set up a camp near the village. Their members have stoned shepherds, scattered their sheep and cut water pipes that supply water to the village.
Marauding settlers also carry out numerous acts of hatassment of civilians across the West Bank. In the weeks following Hamas’ 2023 attack from Gaza, the governmemnt distributed thousands of weapons to newly established civilian security squads in the West Bank.
The move unleashed waves of vigilante violence,. “Israeli settler violence is at an all-time high,” write the International Crisis Group, a conflict monitoring organization. “The aggressive acts, often perpetrated by gangs of armed young men, range from verbal intimidation and harassment to theft of livestock to assaults on Palestinians, in which the settlers uproot farmers’ olive trees and deny them access to land and water.”
Agricultural vandalism has altered swaths of West Bank landscape. Thousands of ancient olive trees have been cut down or uprooted systematically. Olive trees take decades to mature and bear the fruit that provides primary income for tens of thousands of Palestinians.
During the summer dry season, settlers set fire to wheat fields as well as olive groves. Settler gangs spray herbicides on crops to poison them and the soil. Herds of sheep have been poisoned. A video of a settler trying to beat an old sheep dog to death went viral, upsetting animal rights advocates who otherwise care or know little about West Bank cruelty.
Equally sinister is the dumping of poisons, animal carcasses or fuel into Palestinian wells, cisterns and springs and blocking wells with cement. Settlers erect fencing to keep shepherds from accessing communal pastureland. Thousands of acres of such land have been expropriated in the name of military necessity.
This violent reality has forced Palestinians to fear working their land. Some have been driven away by bullying armed settlers. In other cases, the military has sealed Palestinian land off from farmers.
The Neranyahu government condones these activities for a purpose: to force rural communities to abandon the lnd and gather into urban areas that are easier for the authorities to police, said B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization. “The regime fragments Palestinian space, dispossesses Palestinians of their land and relegates them to living in small, over-populated enclaves.”
In case anyone thought Netanyahu might pause his West Bank offensive in advance of his meeting with Trump, Israelis officials demonstrated it was to be business as usual in coming days: Officials announced that soldiers would soon force the evacuation of a refugee camp in a yet unnamed West Bank town, as they had done in Jenin and Tulkrem.
