With heavy wars in the Middle East going on in Lebanon and Iran, Israel’s continued low-intensity takeover of the West Bank hardly makes a ripple on the world geopolitical stage.
The Israeli government has launched numerous weapons to subdue the West Bank, a territory long coveted by Israeli expansionists as the key to creating a Greater Israel between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The Israeli public seems fine with the takeover as long as it doesn’t achieve formal annexation. Control is seen as fair game.
To tighten its grip on the West Bank, which is home to 3.3 million Palestinians, Israel is creating new settlements for its citizens, evicting Palestinians from their residences, letting vandals attack rural Arab communities and intensifying military attacks on cities across the territory.
Along with these activities, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is creating institutions to directly govern a third of the area – effectively annexing
Through military force, 80 percent of the entire West Bank will be under de facto Israeli control, Israeli and Palestinian observers say. The remaining 20 percent will be governed by the Palestinian National Authority, an institution established in 1994 before the creation of a Palestinian state.
The moves to tighten control followed the October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel by Hamas, the Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip. Israel’s counterattack has put about 60 percent of the territory in its hands. The low-intensity war in the West Bank ran parallel to the more intense conflict in Gaza.
With other wars going on in the Middle East – in Lebanon, in Iran – the West Bank situation seems a kind of geopolitical orphan on the world stage.
Dominance of the West Bank is consistent with Netanyahu’s long-standing desire to colonize and govern it. The West Bank is key to the creation of Greater Israel, a goal of his Likud Party since its founding half a century ago. The religious-nationalist parties that support Netanyahu’s ruling coalition share the objective.
Hamas’s 2023 offensive has provided unwavering support for Netanyahu’s moves in the West Bank. About 58 percent of Israelis support his settlement expansion there.
There is a caveat: the same percentage opposes full annexation. The combination provides Netanyahu with an opening of sorts: he has a free hand to tighten his grip on the West Bank, as long as he doesn’t formally annex it. Instead, it simply creates what Israeli officials call “facts on the ground” that simulate annexation in all but name.
Israel has created a landscape of the West Bank that constitutes a de facto annexation: walls and fences, barbed wire and watchtowers, the growing number of settlements and a road system for settler-only traffic. All create separate but unequal space between the 3.3 million Palestinian residents and the Israeli population of 540,000.
“Israel’s far-right government is restructuring its occupation of the West Bank, shifting governing powers from the military to civilian agencies in order to gradually establish permanent control,” wrote the International Crisis Group, which researches the war and offers advice on avoiding it.
“With the reduction of Israeli law on the territory and the space for Palestinian independence, most of the territory has, in effect, already been annexed,” the ICG concluded.
Israeli settler violence against Palestinians is also reinforcing their special but unequal status. Settlers often raid isolated farm houses and have set fire to some. The Israeli army stands idly by.
Last month, a settler was filmed trying to beat a shepherd dog to death with a pair of sticks. Mobs steal sheep from their pastures in the style of Wild West cattle rustlers.
“Settler attacks are by no means isolated,” wrote B’tselem, a leading Israeli human rights organization. “After October 7, 2023, the environment has seen an escalation of settler violence, which has gone from initial vandalism and destruction of property, to now being marked by kidnapping, prolonged abuse, and apparent military collaboration.”
In a March report, the United Nations Human Rights Office said: “Settler violence continued in a coordinated, strategic and largely unchallenged manner, with Israeli authorities playing a central role in directing, participating in or enabling this behavior, making it difficult to distinguish between state and settler violence.”
Prosecution of marauding settlers is rare. Among the few known cases occurred in June 2024, when two West Bank settlers were sentenced to up to three years in prison for attacking a Palestinian family with an ax in the city of Huwara.
In February of this year, Israeli prosecutors announced charges against settler Yinon Levi for the 2025 murder of Awdah Hathaleen, who was trying to stop settlers from bulldozing a Palestinian village. His assassination was captured on film and was the main event portrayed by the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land.
Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, reported that 90 percent of complaints filed by Palestinians about settler harassment between 2005 and 2025 were closed without charges being filed. “Israeli security forces routinely escorted settlers and acted as a shield for violence,” the report said.
At least seven Palestinians were killed and 832 wounded in 2025 in near-daily attacks that continued this year, according to the United Nations. “The increasing participation of Israeli security forces in settler attacks constitutes a de facto collapse of the distinction between settlers and soldiers,” the report said.
Israeli diplomats in Geneva dismissed the report and accused the UN body of relying on “baseless allegations”.
The many bureaucratic demands on the Palestinians are supporting Israel’s hold on the West Bank. His cabinet recently legalized 50 nominal renegade “posts” and declared them authorized settlements – meaning they will be given financial support from the government. There are currently 141 certified settlements in the West Bank and more than 300 “posts”.
This month, the government announced plans to require written evidence of land ownership from Palestinians dating back to the periods of Ottoman Empire or Jordanian rule. Most of the land was held communally, without documents, so such documents do not exist.
Israel is also expropriating vacant Palestinian property on the ground that is needed for military purposes or to make room for communications equipment.
Foreign governments friendly to Israel adhere to the “two-state solution”, although for many years they have made no effort to make it a reality. US President Donald Trump, Israel’s ally in all its wars, has mentioned the West Bank only to demand that Israel not formally annex it.
Tehran, a major sponsor of Hamas, despises the Palestinian National Authority as weak and ineffective. In recent years, Iran has funneled money to armed groups in the northern West Bank, which is the heart of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s presence in the West Bank.
However, that effort has been weakened by the ouster of Bashar al-Assad’s allied government and its replacement by a Sunni Islamist government that is trying to win Western support for economic aid.
The latest manifestation of the expansionist resettlement effort is underway east of Jerusalem within the West Bank. The Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar, with 300 inhabitants, is under threat of destruction.
It is located near a highway that runs from Jerusalem east to the West Bank, passing a large settlement called Maale Adumim, towards the Palestinian city of Jericho before arriving near the Israeli border settlements along the Jordan River.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a staunch expansionist, wants to remove Khan al-Ahmar in order to make way for construction along the road to Maale Adumim. The construction would create an unbroken line of Israeli settlements and cut short the north-south road connecting the southern West Bank with the north.
The goal, according to Smothrich, is to split the West Bank in half. In fact there could no longer be a contiguous Palestinian state.
“The Palestinian state is being removed from the table not with slogans but with actions.” Smotrich, who lives in a West Bank settlement, told reporters. “This reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state. There is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize.”
Although the east-west divide has been considered by a number of Israeli governments for many years, Smotrich had a personal reason to promote it now.
On March 19, he heard that the International Criminal Court in The Hague would soon issue an arrest warrant naming him for his role in expanding Israel’s grip on the West Bank.
During a press conference, Smotrich called the move an “act of war” and responded by ordering the evacuation of Khan al-Ahmar. “I promise all our enemies, this is just the beginning,” he added.
The ICC issued the arrest warrant on April 2. The bulldozers have not yet been sent to Khan al-Ahmar.
