East of Israeli territory and west of the Jordan River lies the West Bank, home to 3.3 million Palestinians. It is a landscape that appears idyllic at first glance: olive groves, parts of the Dead Sea, towns, villages, and valleys stretching across an area of 5,660 square kilometres. But the groves are scarred by arson, and access to the Dead Sea is restricted. Villages and towns alike are repeatedly ravaged by destruction and violence. In the West Bank, state repression and Israeli settler violence work hand in hand towards the declared aim of displacing Palestinians and annexing their land.
Sherin Kulitz is a political scientist and journalist. Her work focuses on Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and the North African states.
On 23 July 2025, the Israeli Knesset passed a symbolic resolution entitled “Application of Israeli sovereignty in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley”. By a vote of 71 to 13, the parliament declared the West Bank an “inseparable part of Eretz Israel — the historical, cultural and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people”, invoking the Jewish people’s alleged “natural, historical and legal right” to all territories. Although this resolution lacks any legal legitimacy, it reflects what has long been a reality: for many decades, successive Israeli governments have pursued a policy of gradual, systematic annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories. The West Bank is no exception.
Israel’s Policy of Annexation, 1967–Present
On 5 June 1967, Israel attacked Egypt. The result was the Six-Day War, in which Israel brought several territories under its control: Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula; Syria’s Golan Heights; the Gaza Strip, which had previously been under Egyptian administration; as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which had until then been under Jordanian sovereignty. Israel established a military administration in the West Bank, which did not include East Jerusalem. The latter was de facto annexed in June 1967; in 1980 the Knesset formalized the annexation in violation of international law. Around 70 square kilometres of the West Bank were incorporated into the administrative boundaries of Jerusalem — and thus into Israeli state territory. This step marked the beginning of the process of gradual annexation.
Since then, each successive Israeli government has poured resources into expanding settlements in the occupied territories and subsidizing the continuous influx of Jewish settlers. Today, around 750,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem — and the number is rising.
New settlements are built using two distinct methods. The first is a “bottom-up” strategy: without any permits, supporters of the national-religious Israeli settler movement erect temporary structures they call “outposts”. This movement is led by the internationally sanctioned Daniella Weiss and backed by Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich. Settlers are protected and accompanied by the Israeli army while carrying out attacks on the local population in order to drive them out. Once the Palestinians have been expelled, the outposts grow into full-fledged settlements and are later legalized by the state.
The second is a “top-down” strategy: settlement projects are approved and implemented by the government from the outset, and even subsidized by the state. While in the first case settlers take the initiative, in the second the state acts according to a strategic plan; in practice, the two methods are closely intertwined.
A clear example of the first method is the village of Khirbet Khilet al-Dabe’ in the Masafer Yatta region in the south of the West Bank. On 5 May 2025, two Israeli settlers from the nearby illegal settlement of Havat Ma’on arrived with excavators. Without authorization, but under the protection of the Israeli military, they destroyed nine of the village’s ten houses, four stables, and ten water tanks. They cut off the internet connection and dismantled the only solar power system. Forty-nine people, including 27 children and youth, were left homeless. The residents set up makeshift tents; shortly afterwards, settlers and soldiers returned and destroyed these as well.
Meanwhile, the number of new outposts around Khilet al-Dabe’ is rising. One resident, who asked to remain anonymous, said that there are now ten illegal outposts encircling the village. Settlers are already bargaining over which plot of village land each will take.
Although most residents remain determined not to give up their land, constant confrontations with illegal settlers are taking their toll. On 5 September, settlers from the outposts attacked the village again. Ten residents were hospitalized with serious injuries; the youngest was just four months old. In many villages, such attacks have already displaced the population.
The second method of settlement-building follows a strategic plan: the Israeli government selects sites for new settlements that cut off Palestinian towns and villages from one another and subsequently ban Palestinians from passing through these settlements. In this way, contiguous areas are fragmented and isolated.
On 14 August 2025, Israeli finance minister Smotrich announced the latest settlement project of this kind. The plan to connect the Ma’ale Adumim settlement in northeast Jerusalem with East Jerusalem dates back to the 1990s, but its implementation had long been considered a red line. Smotrich declared that US president Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to revive the plan to build more than 3,400 housing units on an area of 12 square kilometres in the E1 Zone between northeast Jerusalem and the illegal settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.
The new units are intended to link settlements in annexed East Jerusalem with the expanding Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc in the occupied West Bank. If implemented, East Jerusalem — which Palestinians claim as the capital of their future state — would be completely cut off from the rest of the West Bank, splitting the remainder of the territory in two. Palestinians from northern Ramallah wanting to reach southern al-Khalil, for example, would need permits from the Israeli authorities to pass through. Such permits are already required for East Jerusalem, but are rarely granted.
In his speech of 14 August, Smotrich said that the project had a clear goal: he wanted to “bury” the idea of a Palestinian state. On 11 September, Prime Minister Netanyahu signed the plan at a symbolic ceremony in Ma’ale Adumim. “We are going to fulfil our promise that there will be no Palestinian state, this place belongs to us”, he said.
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reports that the establishment of settlements in the West Bank violates international humanitarian law. The UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice concur, and even the German federal government has endorsed this view. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own citizens into occupied territory.
Settler Violence in the West Bank
With its settlement and annexation policy, Israel violates not only international law but also human rights. Palestinians in the West Bank face violence every day; since 7 October, there have been an average of four documented incidents of settler attacks per day. In most cases, the perpetrators face no consequences.
This surge is linked to far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s policy of arming the Israeli population: since October 2023, 230,000 new gun licenses have been issued to Israelis. In October 2024 the ministry confirmed that more than 120,000 weapons had been distributed to “civilians”, most of them settlers in the West Bank, around Gaza, and along the Lebanese border. This militarization of the Jewish Israeli population, combined with the lack of prosecution for attacks on Palestinians, sends a dire message: those who attack Palestinians are protected by the state.
The case of Zakaria Al-Adra makes this clear. The 30-year-old father of four is one of many to have experienced the brutality of settler violence first hand. On 13 October 2023, after Friday prayers, he left the mosque in his village of At-Tuwani in the southern Hebron hills and was met with screaming. An armed illegal settler, accompanied by Israeli soldiers, had entered the village with an assault rifle, shouting at residents to leave. Zakaria tried to intervene. After a brief scuffle, the settler stepped back, aimed at Zakaria, and fired. “Everything went black before my eyes,” says Zakaria, who has no memory of the hours that followed.
The Israeli military, which at that time controlled access to the village, blocked the ambulance. Neighbours carried the gravely wounded man to hospital on side roads. Only there did the extent of his injuries become clear. The bullet was a so-called “dumdum” round. Because these expanding bullets fragment inside the body to maximize damage, they are banned under international law; their use is considered a war crime.
In this case it was not the shooter who was prosecuted, but Zakaria. Israeli police claimed that he was rioting and throwing stones alongside others before he was shot. Although video footage proves the opposite, showing Zakaria to have posed no threat to the settler, the police responded, “We don’t care what you say. We go by what the settler demands.” The demand was Zakaria’s arrest. He was released only after paying 1,000 shekels (around 260 euros).
Since then, he has undergone 14 operations. 20 centimetres of intestine, half his pancreas, and his entire spleen have been removed. He has also been treated for an injured coronary artery and several broken ribs. Doctors consider Zakaria’s survival to be a miracle — but his life remains a struggle. He requires ongoing surgery, is unable to work, and faces financial ruin. The settler who shot him walks free.
Although At-Tuwani lies in the Palestinian West Bank, Zakaria has no way of appealing to Palestinian authorities due to the Oslo II Accord of 1995. Intended to pave the way for a two-state solution, the agreement has become primarily an instrument for consolidating Israeli control over the West Bank.
The Oslo II Accord divided the West Bank into three administrative zones. Zone A is under Palestinian self-rule and forms the stronghold of the Palestinian Authority, based in Ramallah; 18 percent of the West Bank falls in Zone A. Zone B, nominally under joint control but dominated in practice by the Israeli army, represents 22 percent of the territory. Zone C accounts for almost 60 percent of the West Bank, including At-Tuwani. In Zone C, Israel, citing its security interests, exercises unrestricted military, civil, and legal control. For Palestinians, this means that those seeking protection must turn to Israeli institutions — where such protection is usually denied.
The only remaining option for Palestinians is to turn to Israeli human rights groups such as Yesh Din, which provides legal aid in the occupied territories. Success rates are minimal: in a December 2024 report, Yesh Din found that 93.8 percent of cases of “settler violence” investigated in the past twenty years ended without indictment. Although international law and Israel’s own legal code require the state to protect Palestinians in the occupied territories from violence and unlawful acts, the organization concluded “that Israel is unwilling to prevent or stop ideologically motivated crimes committed by Israelis”. The state also fails to fulfil its duty to prosecute them.
The attack on Zakaria shows how settler violence and state repression interlock in the West Bank. At the same time, Israel’s blockading of ambulances illustrates the state’s tight control over Palestinian movement — one of the key instruments of its occupation regime.
(No) Freedom of Movement for Palestinians
In the West Bank, whether roads connect or divide is decided by one’s license plate. Vehicles with yellow Israeli plates can move freely. Vehicles with white-and-green Palestinian plates are barred from many roads; short journeys that should last just a few minutes become detours that take hours. A report by B’Tselem calls this system a “regime of forbidden roads”. Its premise is that all Palestinians pose a security risk and that their freedom of movement must therefore be curtailed. This indiscriminate logic affects the entire population and violates Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees every person the right to freedom of movement within a state.
Even on roads Palestinians are permitted to use, checkpoints and barriers are ubiquitous. In early 2023, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recorded 565 obstacles to movement in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem): 49 checkpoints permanently staffed by Israeli military or private security companies; 139 occasionally staffed checkpoints; and 377 roadblocks, earth mounds, gates, and trenches. The army continuously adds new obstacles; the Palestinian-Israeli magazine +972 now reports roughly 900 such checkpoints and blockades. These open and close arbitrarily, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. Soldiers at checkpoints decide, quite literally, over life and death — as in the case of Mundal Jubran.
A 40-year-old father of five, Mundal Jubran went to work every day at his father’s spice shop in Azzariyeh, a few kilometres from East Jerusalem. On 1 August 2023 he felt unwell. A vague discomfort quickly turned into a twitching mouth, facial pain, and slurred speech. While his family waited for an ambulance, his condition deteriorated rapidly. He began foaming at the mouth.
The ambulance took five minutes to arrive and brought him to the outpatient clinic of Makassed Hospital in nearby Abu Dis, where a doctor ordered his immediate transfer to Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem. The clinic physician rode along and tried en route to coordinate with Israeli police at the checkpoint to ensure swift passage — but in vain.
With blue lights flashing and siren blaring, the ambulance reached the checkpoint. Border personnel ordered the driver into the security screening area. As the driver stepped out to speak with an officer, Mundal’s condition worsened. The clinic doctor decided to remove him from the ambulance, set the stretcher on the ground to create space, and began resuscitation.
The border officer still refused passage to the Palestinian ambulance, saying they would have to wait for a vehicle with Israeli plates. Meanwhile, Mundal’s brother, Madhat, had rushed from Nablus and watched from near the checkpoint as Mundal was transferred to a second ambulance. Border guards would not let him closer to see his brother.
All the while, the medical staff fought to keep Mundal alive. Two minutes after arrival at the East Jerusalem hospital, he was pronounced dead.
According to border police regulations, any ambulance with white-and-green (Palestinian) plates whose journey has not been pre-coordinated may not pass the checkpoint. The rule applies without exception and nothing can change it — in this case, neither the medical staff nor the patient’s brother, who begged the officers to let the vehicle through, nor the patient, who appeared to be facing death. Nineteen minutes passed before an ambulance with yellow plates arrived to transfer him to hospital, where he died.
Mundal leaves behind a family without a father. With timely care, his death might have been prevented. His is not an isolated case but emblematic of everyday, institutionalized discrimination.
The systematic restriction of freedom of movement intensified in 2002, when Ariel Sharon’s government moved to turn the Green Line (the 1949 armistice line separating the West Bank from Israel and dividing Jerusalem into a western, Jewish section and an eastern, Arab section) into a separation barrier. About 70 percent of the planned 759-kilometre, eight-metre-high barrier has been completed thus far.
Only 15 percent of the barrier actually runs along the Green Line. The remaining 85 percent cuts deep into the West Bank, dividing villages, fields, and transport routes. It separates farmers from their land, children from their schools, and families from their relatives. According to B’Tselem, the route of the barrier is largely determined by the location of settlements, aiming to integrate them into Israeli state territory. The wall cements de facto annexation and expansion. In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) published an advisory opinion deeming the barrier unlawful. Construction nevertheless continues to this day.
Ongoing Annexation
The land-annexation project in the Palestinian territories cannot be attributed to a single government or specific ideological current in Israeli politics. It is instead the result of decades of policies of destruction, expulsion, and land seizure that many describe as colonization.
The Israeli government’s decision of 23 July 2025 to fully annex the occupied West Bank shows that this is not an idea for the future, but rather a present reality. It should be understood as an official affirmation of messianic aspirations tied to the biblical vision of Eretz Israel, an expansionist variant of Zionism dating to the state-building era of the 1940s. Interpretations of this vision vary depending on religious and political outlook.
Unlike ultra-Orthodox Jews, adherents of the religious-Zionist movement believe that settling the land of Israel (in the biblical sense) hastens redemption associated with the emergence of a Jewish kingdom. Final redemption, however, presupposes Israel’s complete military victory and the establishment of a “Greater Israel”, which is to be exclusively Jewish. Nearly 60 years after the 1967 war, this idea has become dominant within the religious-Zionist community, which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the settler population. This is also the logic of the religious-Zionist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a driving force behind the annexation of the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza.
“Maximum territory and minimum (Palestinian) population” is the stated goal of Smotrich’s annexation policy, which he announced at a press conference in Jerusalem on 3 September 2025. Eighty-two percent of the West Bank is now slated for formal annexation. According to OCHA, since 7 October 2023 the number of Palestinians killed by soldiers and settlers in the West Bank has risen to over 1,000 (as of 31 July 2025).
These annexation plans and the increase in attacks in the West Bank do not occur in a vacuum; they are directly linked to the mass murder, starvation, destruction, and plans for ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.
According to OCHA, 86 percent of the Gaza Strip lies either within an Israeli militarized zone or under evacuation orders. More than 90 percent of residential buildings, cultural and educational institutions, and all core infrastructure in Gaza have been destroyed. Amid UN- and NGO-declared famine and the ongoing destruction of the living environment, the death toll continues to rise. At the end of August 2025, nearly 65,000 people had been killed by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip since 7 October; the actual number is significantly higher. A renewed Israeli offensive in Gaza City will drive the toll higher still.
Translated by Hunter Bolin and Anna Dinwoodie for Gegensatz Translation Collective.