Settler terror and state policy are emptying the West Bank

The numbers point to a clear pattern, not a string of isolated incidents. As of late July 2026, OCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, recorded 68 Palestinians killed in the West Bank this year, at least 18 in settler attacks, with roughly 880 injured — already surpassing all of 2025. This is the visible outcome of a deliberate official policy, and it is accelerating.
On July 24, dozens of armed settlers attacked the village of Tell, near Nablus, assaulted residents, and triggered a firefight that left four Palestinians and two Israelis dead, with soldiers reportedly present throughout. Rather than arrests or a freeze on settlement activity, settler groups, encouraged by the government, launched a wave of reprisal raids within hours.
At the same time, Israeli officials announced a “counterterrorism operation” against Palestinians, and senior figures, including extremist ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, called for punitive measures against Palestinian villages and faster settlement growth at the site itself. When a government’s answer to settler bloodshed is to reward the perpetrators with more land, it is not failing to prevent violence but ratifying it.
The alarm is not coming only from outside observers. In the hours after the killings, a coalition of 20 Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups — led by B’Tselem and including Peace Now, Yesh Din, and Breaking the Silence — issued a joint statement describing settler militias “enabled and supported by the Israeli army,” warning that ministers and Knesset members were already calling for revenge attacks, and cautioning that “such moments can spiral into mass pogroms when met with silence.”
This pattern is not improvised. Since October 2023, Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, has built and armed “civil defense squads” inside the illegal settlements in the West Bank, granting civilians uniforms, weapons, and quasi-official policing powers — and some leaders of recent attacks on Palestinian villages are themselves leaders of these state-sanctioned squads. Rights groups have documented soldiers standing by, and sometimes participating, while settlers burn homes, mosques, and orchards, with arrests and prosecutions rarely following. This is a state that has absorbed extremists into its own machinery of control, not one struggling to contain them.
The arming program reinforces the point. Since late 2023, more than 240,000 Israelis have received gun permits under the licensing expansion Ben-Gvir oversees — up from roughly 8,000 a year before the war — with over 120,000 firearms already distributed. In January 2026, he extended eligibility to residents of 18 additional unauthorized outposts. This is a government mass-arming the very population whose members keep appearing at the scene of deadly raids.
The human cost shows up in Palestinian internal displacement. OCHA has recorded 45 Palestinian communities driven out entirely since January 2023 due to settler violence and access restrictions. Nearly 1,700 Palestinians were displaced by late March 2026 alone — already more than all of 2025 — including 694 in January due to settler violence and intimidation. Over a rolling twelve-month window, the UN puts the broader displacement toll at more than 36,000 Palestinians. 

Netanyahu’s far-right government is doubling down and accelerating the land grab and the terror campaign.

Osama Al-Sharif

Terror is only half the equation; the other half is bureaucratic. Since the start of 2026, Israeli authorities have issued 49 military “confiscation orders,” stripping access to more than 200 ha of Palestinian land, with monitoring groups counting over 430 ha seized by June — already exceeding all of 2025.
That land is not left empty. In April, Israel’s security Cabinet approved a record 34 new settlements — 10 of them illegal outposts retroactively legalized — and in July allocated roughly $434 million to build them.
Settler attacks empty the land; ministries then formalize the theft with a stamp. This deadly cycle continues unabated.
This policy is implemented without shame — announced in Cabinet meetings, budgeted in the treasury, defended on television. Washington continues shielding Israel diplomatically and militarily as settlement approvals hit record highs and the death toll climbs. Brussels issues statements of “grave concern” with no sanctions or conditioned trade attached, and no consequence proportionate to what UN officials now warn could risk mass atrocity.
Regional voices are sounding the alarm, too. On July 24, Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi warned that Israeli policy is “pushing the West Bank toward an explosion,” cautioning that it risks dragging the region into a new catastrophic conflict and urging the world to act before it is too late — a sign the danger is perceived as a regional fuse that Israel has deliberately set alight.
In the aftermath of the killing at Tell, ministers stated their intentions in even blunter terms. Smotrich said the villages of Tell, Iraq Burin, and Beit Furik “need to look exactly like the refugee camps in Nablus and Tulkarem” — an explicit reference to Operation Iron Wall, the 2025 campaign that Human Rights Watch found displaced tens of thousands, and amounted to war crimes and ethnic cleansing.
When Israeli ministers openly defend applying that model to West Bank villages within hours of a settler-triggered killing, they are implementing a government-sanctioned agenda. This annexationist agenda has a name and a paper trail. Since 2017, Smotrich has championed what he calls the “Decisive Plan,” a project formally adopted by his Religious Zionism party in 2022, which denies Palestinians any right to self-determination west of the Jordan River and offers them a stark choice: remain under Israeli rule with curtailed rights, emigrate, or face what the plan calls “security decisiveness” for those who resist.
Since entering government, Smotrich has moved the plan from platform to practice — expanding settlements and outposts, engineering road and infrastructure projects that sever the West Bank’s territorial contiguity, and freezing Palestinian customs revenues and labor permits in what analysts call economic strangulation meant to pressure emigration. This year, he has broadened the plan’s scope further, describing displacement, effectively a transfer, as an option for all Palestinians in the West Bank rather than only those who reject Israeli rule. He has spoken openly of scrapping the Oslo Accords altogether.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, now in election mode, is doubling down and accelerating the land grab and the terror campaign. The current coalition includes ministers who have said plainly, on the record, that they reject a Palestinian state and favor full annexation.
When the people calling for annexation are also arming settlers, seizing land, and approving outposts at the site of fatal attacks, the through line is a strategy, not a coincidence.
That strategy has three interlocking drivers: Settler terror empties villages; land confiscation and settlement expansion convert what is left behind into irreversible Israeli infrastructure; and movement restrictions and roadblocks strangle what remains of the West Bank economically.
All three drivers complement each other to produce the same outcome. Together they add up to one objective: a West Bank without the possibility of a Palestinian state, and perhaps without the presence of Palestinians, imposed through a thousand smaller acts that a government led by avowed annexationists has every incentive to let continue.
Every hectare confiscated, every outpost legalized, and every family made homeless while the world looks on rather than imposes sanctions creates another irreversible fact on the ground. A two-state solution, if that is still what the world demands, requires two viable and separate territories; what Israel is implementing right now is the physical impossibility of a Palestinian state ever seeing the light of day.

• Osama Al-Sharif is a journalist and a political commentator based in Amman.
X: @plato010