The new phase of colonisation in the West Bank

Classes were in session on 6 January at Birzeit University, near Ramallah in the West Bank, when Israeli soldiers entered the campus firing tear gas, sound bombs and live rounds on students and staff. Al Jazeera reported that 41 people were injured, including hospitalisations for five who inhaled tear gas, three hit by shrapnel and three shot in the legs.

Ghaied Hijaz, an activist and Birzeit University graduate, told Red Flag that more than 150 soldiers stormed the university:

“This is not the first time [Israeli forces] break into the university campus. But this time was different. For the past ten years, they would break in during the night. But to come in during the day when the university is full of students, shooting live bullets and tear gas, is something that was surprising to all of us, because that didn’t happen since the Second Intifada [a period of Palestinian revolt against Israeli occupation from 2000 to 2005].”

In the north, the Israeli military’s Operation Iron Wall has been a campaign of total destruction in the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps. Middle East Eye reported that 40,000 refugees were expelled in early 2025 and that entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble. Israel has broken another boundary: these areas were supposed to be under Palestinian control, and now they have a permanent Israeli military presence.

Things have shifted decisively in the West Bank since October 2023. The violence and theft of Palestinian land have increased to levels that were perhaps untenable a few years ago. The support that Israel has received for its genocide in Gaza has been taken as a green light for stomping on the rest of Palestine.

Al Jazeera reports that, since October 2023, at least 1,102 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and about 11,000 injured, either by Israeli military forces or by settlers looking to steal more land; around 21,000 more are locked in Israeli prisons. More than 2,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented more than 1,800 attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank in 2025 alone.

The goal is to eradicate Palestine “between the Sea and the Jordan” river, as the original charter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party reads. For this, the West Bank is crucial, as it is where an imagined Palestinian state would be formed with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel is now taking the opportunity wipe Palestine off the map.

Armed settlers roam the hilly West Bank countryside, terrorising Palestinians trying to protect their homes. They are regularly backed by soldiers and have the full support of Netanyahu’s government. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, himself a settler, has been making it easier for settlers to obtain weapons: some 230,000 gun licences have been distributed in Israel in the two years to November 2025, as reported by Drop Site News.

The settlers are at the front line of stealing Palestinian land. Since October 2023, at least 152 new settler outposts have been set up, making up more than 42 percent of all outposts established since 1996, according to monitoring by Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now. The outposts are not officially sanctioned by the Israeli government, but many eventually become recognised as settlements.

On top of the new outposts, the Israeli government approved eleven new official settlements in December of 2025, adding to dozens of others in the past two years. By exploiting an Ottoman Empire-era law, Israel “declares” land owned by Palestinians “state land” as long as it hasn’t been cultivated. The “state lands” are then often used for further development of settlements. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem estimated in 2010 that about 16 percent of the West Bank has been stolen in this way. Peace Now recorded that at least another 40 square kilometres have been taken since then, with 2024 the largest year since they began recording in 1998.

The most significant ongoing land theft is the imminent development of the E1 zone, stretching east from the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was approved by the Israeli government in August 2025, but the plan had been in limbo for twenty years because it was considered too much for Western states to stomach. Now, it’s going ahead, and developers are bidding for the right to build 3,401 housing units to connect existing Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem to others deep in the West Bank.

The settling of E1 will plug the hole in the separation barrier, a concrete wall Israel has built through the West Bank stretching as high as nine metres. It will physically separate East Jerusalem from the West Bank and cut off the northern part of the West Bank from the south. The point is to establish “facts on the ground” that kill any possibility for a Palestinian state. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, also a settler, put it bluntly as he announced the approval:

“This reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise. Anyone in the world who tries today to recognise a Palestinian state will receive an answer from us on the ground.”

If the two-state solution was ever anything more than a fantasy, soon it will be a geographical impossibility.

All of this is an acceleration of a process that has always been part of the Zionist project. In 1948, Israel was established on top of most of historic Palestine. In 1967, Israel defeated Jordan in the Six-Day War and began its occupation of the West Bank. Since then, Israel has progressively encroached further and further, eating away at the area Palestinians have access to or control over. B’Tselem’s 2010 By Hook and By Crook report includes invaluable documentation of the mechanisms and policies Israel has used to this end.

Israel immediately began requisitioning land for settlements, claiming them as necessary for security and military functions. By 1981, 53 settlements had been established in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That year, the Israeli government adopted a policy known as the Drobles plan, named after its author Matityahu Drobles, then chairman of the World Zionist Organization settlement department. It spelled out in no uncertain terms the goal for the West Bank, which Israel calls “Judea and Samaria”. The policy pre-empted Smotrich’s above-quoted boast about the E1 zone by several decades:

“The state-owned lands and the uncultivated barren lands in Judea and Samaria ought to be seized right away, with the purpose of settling the areas between and around the centres occupied by the [Palestinians] so as to reduce to the minimum the danger of an additional Arab state being established in these territories. Being cut off by Jewish settlements, the [Palestinian] population will find it difficult to form a territorial and political continuity. There mustn’t be even the shadow of a doubt about our intention to keep the territories of Judea and Samaria for good.”

The Drobles plan makes gestures towards “the cohabitation of Jews and Arabs side by side”, but no such peaceful coexistence was meaningfully pursued. Insofar as the Jewish and Palestinian populations in the West Bank are “side by side”, it is on the two unequal sides of apartheid.

Israeli settlers are subject to civil law; Palestinians are under military law. Settlers get highways built for them and enjoy total freedom of movement; Palestinians are restricted to slower roads blocked with military checkpoints and require Israeli-issued permits to travel. Israelis have political rights; Palestinians in the West Bank have none.

After 1979, Israel slowed down (but didn’t stop) the military requisitions of West Bank land and switched to the “state land” declaration strategy. Most declarations were made between 1979 and 1992, and are where most settlements near built-up Palestinian areas were established.

The carve-up was codified in the signing of the second Oslo accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1995. This defined three areas in the West Bank: Area C, under total Israeli control, was the only geographically contiguous and the largest area, making up 60 percent of the land; Area B is jointly administered by Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), and was 22 percent of the area; Area A is the smallest—18 percent—and the only area ostensibly under Palestinian control through the PA.

It was a stitch-up heavily in favour of Israel, but it did not end there. Peace Now estimates that, from 1994 to 2006, the municipal areas of 92 settlements were expanded in defiance of Oslo. And settlers have continued establishing outposts.

During the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, construction began on the separation barrier, with a route designed to claim even more land for settlements and to make movement for Palestinians even more difficult. The barrier now spans almost the entire length of the West Bank. To build it, Israel routinely requisitioned land and demolished Palestinian homes.

In 2005, when Israel removed its settlements from the Gaza Strip, it also retreated from four of them in the north of the West Bank. In March 2023, Netanyahu’s government re-authorised those four settlements.

If these decades were death by a thousand cuts, then what Israel is doing now is hacking and slashing. While all eyes have been on Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank has accelerated. Israel’s aim is total control and ownership, from the river to the sea.