Palestinians are losing more and more land to settlers in the West Bank

• Eliane Lamper

  Foreign editor

The Israeli government and settlers are taking more and more land from Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. In the first months of the year, the government committed large areas of land for illegal settlements and military use.

Last month, a ten square kilometer area of ​​land was designated for settlements, which are illegal under international law. It is the largest area of ​​land taken since the Oslo Accords in 1993, according to figures from Peace Now, an Israeli organization that documents land theft in the West Bank.

The number of outposts in the Palestinian territory is also increasing. These are illegal residential areas adjacent to existing settlements. According to Israeli media, Minister Smotrich now plans to legalize 68 outposts. His first step is to connect these neighborhoods to public facilities.

In total there are now about 150 outposts on the West Bank. Last year, fifteen outposts were legalized as settlements so that they no longer conflict with Israeli law, but still with international law. There is also a lot of construction going on: the government recently gave the green light for the construction of 3,500 new housing blocks in three settlements.

The ultra-right minister Smotrich, who has finance and civil administration in occupied territory in his portfolio and is himself a settler, published a plan years ago to annex the West Bank. He said last month that the government wants to “strategically” promote settlements. He targeted critics “who want to undermine our right to Judea and Samaria.” In doing so he used the biblical names for the area.

The government is actually taking steps towards annexation, says Mauricio Lapchik of Peace Now. “The idea is that more and more settlers will live in the area, so that the dividing line with the Palestinian territory disappears.” About 700,000 settlers now live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and that number continues to increase. It is one of the major obstacles to a two-state solution.

Prime Minister Netanyahu stated in December that he was proud that he had prevented the creation of a Palestinian state during his political career. “More settlements have been built and legalized under his Likud party in recent decades than under any other party,” says Mateo Cohen, a researcher into right-wing thought at Leiden University, who specializes in Israel.

Netanyahu and his allies have repeatedly emphasized that Jews have exclusive rights to all areas. “It’s moving further towards a caste system, where Palestinians in occupied territory have no human rights,” says Cohen. “Their ideology is that they reject a sovereign Palestinian state anywhere.”

With the support of the government and the war in Gaza, Jewish settlers see their opportunity to take over more land, say human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and B’tselem. There has been a huge increase in settler activity since October, Peace Now recorded. In addition to the outposts, settlers have taken over at least eighteen roads that Palestinians are no longer allowed to use.

Settlers now use violence against Palestinians on a daily basis, often in collaboration with the army. The UN has registered more than 700 attacks since October. Life on the West Bank was already dominated by the occupation with the presence of soldiers and the many checkpoints and roadblocks. Now Palestinians are being pushed back even further into their habitat.

In this video, correspondent Nasrah Habiballah takes you along the many checkpoints in the area:

What the occupation of the West Bank means for its residents

Western leaders have repeatedly condemned the violence and settlement expansions. For example, US Secretary of State Blinken called on Netanyahu’s government several times to stop this, without drawing any consequences. The criticism does not seem to make much of an impression on Israel.

No serious steps have been taken towards lasting peace in the past fifteen years. With the war in Gaza, a political solution seems further away than ever and support for a Palestinian state has fallen to a low point, Cohen sees. “The expansion of settlements is a way to make it impossible to ever resolve the conflict together.”