How Israel Used the War in Gaza to Accelerate Settlements in the West Bank
In the past several years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has entrenched Israeli control of the West Bank, vastly increasing the number of “authorized” settlements and unauthorized outposts there. Violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has also increased, and more than a thousand people have been killed since October 7th, per the United Nations. President Donald Trump has half-heartedly warned the Netanyahu government against formally annexing the territory, but Netanyahu appears to believe that he can continue his expansionist policies without American sanction. Indeed, just over two weeks ago, the Trump Administration announced—via its Embassy in Jerusalem—that it would offer temporary passport services at two Israeli settlements in the West Bank to any U.S. citizens there.
To understand what is happening in the West Bank, I recently spoke by phone with Yehuda Shaul, a co-founder of Ofek: the Israeli Center for Public Affairs, an independent think tank based in Jerusalem; Shaul also co-founded Breaking the Silence, an organization of former Israeli soldiers which aims to spotlight life in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the Israeli government exerts control over the West Bank, the merging of the settler movement and the military, and how October 7th and the war in Gaza accelerated settlement expansion in the West Bank.
Do you think that what’s been happening in the West Bank in the past several months is noticeably different from the past several decades?
I think a lot of what we see now is a continuation and an evolution of what we’ve seen for decades. But there are also parts of what we see now that are more revolutionary than evolutionary. The bottom line is that what we’ve been seeing is an acceleration of annexation at a significant pace, in a context where it is openly stated that the purpose is to bury the possibility of a future Palestinian state beside Israel.
We see the massive acceleration of the policy of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank that goes beyond the forcible transfer of Palestinian communities to Israeli settlers. The goal in the West Bank is to create a homogenous ethnicity in a space that is being cleansed of Palestinians, and to expand the Israeli footprint there. That’s why I call it ethnic cleansing, and I don’t use this term lightly.
We see an attempt at confining the Palestinian population to smaller and smaller patches of land. About fifteen years ago, Israelis launched this campaign called the Battle for Area C. They’re trying to take over the roughly sixty per cent of the West Bank that is designated Area C under the Oslo Accords, and squeeze Palestinians into a hundred and sixty-five enclaves of Area A and B. I think, at this point, we have gone way beyond that. And it’s not just about cleansing Area C; it’s about taking over the entire open space and squeezing Palestinians not just to A and B but to the built-up areas of A and B, to the urban centers. So we’re kind of undoing Oslo.
Can you talk about what the Oslo Accords envisioned for the West Bank and why the different areas are important?
The idea of Oslo was that we don’t jump from zero to a hundred, but we have an interim agreement, over five years, where parts of the West Bank would become Area A, where the Palestinian Authority, which was created by Oslo, would manage internal security and civic affairs. Area A mainly included the big population centers. Parts would become Area B, where the Palestinian Authority would manage civilian affairs, while sharing internal security with Israeli forces. And then parts would become Area C, which would remain under the complete control of Israel until a final status agreement. The accords intended that the majority of the West Bank would become A and B. The way things turned out is that about sixty per cent of the West Bank remained Area C. So most of the open space in the West Bank, the main highways and corridors, and, of course, many of the settlements, have remained under complete Israeli administration. And it’s estimated that more than three hundred thousand Palestinians live there.
For many years, the Israeli government has been attempting to cleanse Area C of Palestinians. One way of doing this is to not give them building permits. About ninety-eight per cent of building requests by Palestinians in the area are denied. So Palestinians build “illegally.” Since 1988, the Israeli government has issued more than twenty-two thousand demolition orders, according to its own data, with around a thousand issued annually in recent years. But it is really the sharp escalation in settler violence in the past five or so years that has ultimately led to the displacement of a large number of Palestinian communities. We’re talking about more than sixty Palestinian herding-and-farming communities across the West Bank being forcibly displaced by settlers, according to Peace Now and Kerem Navot, because of settler violence in the past several years, mainly after October 7th.
So you see a continuity of the policy of the past thirty years, but you also have a break with the policy. This is where it’s important to understand that these settlements are a government-led program. From the mid-nineteen-nineties, more or less, Israel had formally approved and established only a handful of settlements through 2022. This government came to power in December of 2022. From 2023 to 2025, the Israeli government approved nearly seventy settlements.
Then, from the early nineties through 2022 the Israeli government largely supported the establishment of a hundred and eighty-seven unauthorized outposts. These are settlements which are built even in violation of Israeli planning regulations, but, again, the vast majority of them are fully supported by the government. Under the current government, since 2022, we had about a hundred and eighty of them being built, according to Peace Now. We’re talking about a peak in the advancement of housing units in the West Bank. We’re talking about a peak of demolitions of Palestinian communities, Palestinian housing structures. We’re talking about a peak in so-called declarations of state land by Israel since Oslo. When the U.N. started tabulating settler violence in 2006, it recorded a hundred and seventeen incidents of settler violence against Palestinians that caused casualties and/or damaged property. In 2018, there were more than three hundred. In 2022, there was a new peak of more than eight hundred. In 2025 alone, we’re talking about 1,828 incidents. That is more than a tenfold increase. So, is settler violence new? No, but we are at a peak, and at a certain point quantity becomes quality.
Putting aside morality and international law for a second, how much of what is being done by the Israeli government is in line with Israeli domestic law? And how much of this is done separately?
Even the majority of what is done “outside of the law” is orchestrated and supported by Israeli institutions and by the state. When we talk about a hundred and eighty outposts being built, most of them are herding farms, where you take over a hilltop. These are often one family, two families, max, with ten or fifteen youngsters. They are small numbers of people taking a huge amount of land. And you go over and basically beat Palestinian farmers and shepherds off their land. And, today, large parts of the West Bank are inaccessible to Palestinians because of violence from settlers living in these herding farms. The scale of this is like nothing else since the 1967 war.
Now, you can say these settlements are not officially sanctioned, but people show up on a hilltop and quickly acquire a paved road, running water, electricity in a house, and three hundred cows. Someone pays for this, someone builds the infrastructure. And that someone is often the settlement division of Israel’s World Zionist Organization, which is helping manage the so-called state land of Israel and the West Bank, and which was given responsibility by the state for the settlement enterprise that functions with a hundred per cent Israeli-government funding. So is this outside of the law?
Then, we just had the Cabinet decide to restart the so-called Settlement of Land Title registration process in the West Bank, which had been halted in 1968, and which raises the bar for Palestinians to establish ownership over land. This puts the burden of proof on Palestinians to show original documents from the Jordanian, British, and Ottoman times, and any parcel which is not proved private likely becomes public and goes to the state. We’re talking about sixty per cent of Area C that is now up for grabs because of this process. The Cabinet also gave an order to allow Israel to work against construction in areas A and B on the basis of environmental, archeological, or water-access concerns. Again, this is formal and official.
You mentioned how much of this is happening openly and being stated forthrightly by the government. How different is that from when settlements grew in the years after Oslo?
Well, there is another element that is revolutionary, which is the scale of the extension of Israeli civilian state authorities into the West Bank. This is an act of annexation, with certain powers over civilian affairs in the West Bank being taken away from the military and given to what is called the Settlements Administration, a civilian-led force within the Ministry of Defense, under the control of the Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich. So you basically have the civilian authority of Israel in direct control over the West Bank, expanding settlements. That is also a revolutionary element. And you have an Israeli government whose guidelines, from December, 2022, are basically saying that the Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all the land of Israel. So, yes, we have a government that is not only saying the quiet part out loud but is actually bragging about it. That’s also something that the political conditions didn’t allow to happen in the nineties and the early two-thousands but which is happening today.
How would you describe the violence against Palestinians that’s been happening, over the past year or so, from both Israeli soldiers and settlers, and how has their sense of impunity changed or not changed?
There is complete impunity for settlers committing violence against Palestinians, but we’ve seen a development here, which is the development inside the I.D.F. It used to be that, for many, many years, we would see clips of settlers attacking Palestinians while I.D.F. soldiers stood idly by, doing nothing to stop it. Now, it’s important for you to understand that doing nothing in that scenario is O.K. When I say “O.K.,” I don’t mean morally O.K. I mean “O.K.” according to the rules of the I.D.F. The orders I received as a soldier, and the orders many soldiers receive on the ground, define our job in the West Bank as protecting the settlers, not the Palestinians. When we saw settlers attacking Palestinians, it wasn’t our job to intervene. That was the job of the Israeli police. So standing idly by while Palestinians are being beaten up by settlers is actually soldiers following orders.
And, again, this is where it gets very difficult to say “the state is involved” or “the state is not involved.” If the official order of soldiers on the ground is that your job is not to protect Palestinians, how do you make that call? But we’re not there anymore.
Several years ago, we started moving into a phase where, every once in a while, we would see soldiers joining the settlers and attacking Palestinians. And that is partially because, sometimes, the settlers in the videos were also soldiers on a weekend leave. Let’s say you come back to your house in the outpost, on a Saturday afternoon, and your neighbors are going down to beat up the Palestinian community below you. So you take your gun and you join the crowd, while still half dressed in your I.D.F. uniform. This is one example of how it happens.
Then, after October 7th, things completely, fundamentally changed. In a full-scale war, which was Israel’s situation after October 7th, the military is structured to send the best-equipped, best-trained units, which are the conscripts, to the front lines. And, in this case, after October 7th, the front lines were Lebanon and Gaza. So who stays in the West Bank? Reservists. Some of them are regular reserve units, but some of them are specific reserve units called regional-defense battalions, and there are regional brigades in the West Bank that have regional-defense battalions under them, which are units made up mostly of settlers. So we had more than five and a half thousand settlers mobilized into reserve units.
So, if you are a Palestinian who was being beaten up by the settler who lives in an outpost above you, the same settler who has been trying to displace you for years, suddenly October 7th happened, and that settler is now part of the regional-defense battalion and has been issued a uniform and a gun. He is now the military. So when, in the middle of the night, he enters your house, puts you on the floor, beats you up, puts a gun to your head, and says, “You have forty-eight hours to leave. If not, we’re going to shoot you,” you leave. So, since October 7th, there has not been even a pretense of a buffer between the violent settlers and the Army. It’s the same people.
It’s interesting you say that, because my next question for you was going to be how you think October 7th and the war in Gaza changed the political context of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. And I thought you were going to talk about Israeli public opinion, or the evolving aims of the Israeli government, but the degree to which the facts on the ground have changed on a practical level is striking.
In this way, yes. But October 7th also contributed to this by raising the bar of what level of violence is considered acceptable in the West Bank. The West Bank has always been behind Gaza, but, when the Israeli government’s behavior in Gaza went as far as it did, things changed in the West Bank, too. You can see it with the forcible transfer and displacement of some thirty-two thousand Palestinian refugees in the refugee camps in the northern part of the West Bank after October 7th. You see it with the mass destruction of agricultural areas. Thousands of olive trees were uprooted last year, and the Central Command general Avi Bluth made clear that the intention was collective punishment, even though the military denies this. The Israeli government’s aim is for every Palestinian community to know that, if there is an attack by someone in their community, they’re all going to pay the price.
But did the openness of the Israeli government to talking about their aims in the West Bank change?
Some of that was already in the open before October 7th. It started when the current government was formed, in late 2022. But what October 7th did was create the political possibility that the most extreme version of settlements, which had been on the shelf for many years, could be accelerated and pushed past the finish line.
One example of this was targeting UNRWA, the U.N. Palestinian-relief agency created after 1948. Before October 7th, it had actually been the Israeli establishment that was defending UNRWA, not because they love it but because there was no alternative. But then October 7th happens, and the government can push its plan to dismantle UNRWA, at least partially, past the finish line. The same process happened with the government’s attempt to dismantle the Palestinian Authority in order to kill and bury the hope for Palestinian self-determination.
What plan do you think the current Israeli government wants to implement in the West Bank? It seems like, in the short to medium term, its plan is to force Palestinians to congregate in smaller and smaller, mostly urban areas of the West Bank.
Yeah, exactly. It’s about confining a growing demographic, pushing the Palestinian population into shrinking patches of land, and basically taking over all the open spaces, while, in parallel, expanding the Israeli-settler footprint. This tells me that we have learned nothing since October 7th, because these conditions are actually the conditions that cause instability, conflict, and violence. Smotrich recently said that they need to start encouraging “voluntary migration” from Gaza. I think that hints at where this is going.
For me, the issue is very simple. This idea of squeezing a growing demographic of people into a shrinking territory with the belief that technological superiority will allow you permanent domination is the bubble that exploded on October 7th. If anyone wants to prevent another October 7th, if anyone wants to protect and defend the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, then you must give Palestinians freedom. The security of Jewish self-determination is interlinked and intertwined with achieving Palestinian self-determination. And what’s happening in the West Bank on a daily basis is eroding this possibility. So we are basically heading toward escalation and increasing conflict. ♦