While world attention has focused on the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip for the past year and a half, significant events in the occupied West Bank have gone less noticed on the international stage. Israeli anger and desire for revenge following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, has prompted an unprecedented assault on Palestinians there. The lack of restraint and the loosening of all normal controls is evident in Israeli practices. Immediately after October 7, Israel suspended some 150,000 work permits for West Bank Palestinians. A year and a half later, Israel has re-issued only a trickle of such permits; the mass loss of income is only one of the factors negatively affecting West Bankers today. In general, Israel’s sense of impunity for its genocidal war in Gaza is providing an impetus to speed up existing plans to increase the Jewish and Zionist character of the West Bank.
No Excuse for Israel
The West Bank differs significantly from Gaza in terms of Israel’s justification for its massive onslaught. Unlike the situation in Gaza, no Israeli hostages are held in the West Bank; there are no tunnels feared to house weapons; and militants are not firing rockets at Israeli targets. Nor is Hamas in control of any government functions in the West Bank. To the contrary, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has long cooperated with Israel in cracking down on any Palestinian resistance activities or political functions, particularly by Hamas. Despite Palestinians’ repeated calls, in solidarity with Gaza, for the suspension of security cooperation between the PA and Israel, such cooperation has continued. The PA police forces have even fought pitched battles with small armed factions unassociated with Hamas who have been carrying out resistance activities against Israel and its settlers, primarily in Jenin and Nablus.
As a result of this crackdown, there has been a marked decrease in anti-Israeli resistance activities in the West Bank. Israeli sources have reported an 80 percent drop in “terrorism” there, with the explanation that the population is genuinely concerned about Israeli retaliation and wants to avoid giving Israel the excuse to unleash the devastating destruction that it is wreaking on Gaza onto the West Bank. Almost all anti-Israeli activity currently consists of attempts to defend against ongoing settler attacks and landgrabs. Israeli forces regularly enter Palestinian towns and villages unopposed, sometimes not even encountering stone-throwing. The unrestrained behavior of the Israeli army in dealing with Palestinian protests has contributed to this situation. Israel routinely uses administrative detention to round up potential activists and to not simply detain them but to subject them to severe beatings, torture, and starvation to try to break their spirits.
Weapons and Freedom of Action for Settlers
This relative calm and the absence of any “security” justification has not resulted in any reduction in the level of Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. To the contrary, there has been a marked increase in the number of Palestinians killed both by the Israeli army and by Jewish settlers. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OCHA) has verified 924 Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank since the events of October 7, 2023, a substantial increase over the number of fatalities in previous periods.
Several factors are feeding into this Israeli violence. Since October 2023, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir announced the distribution of more than 120,000 firearms to settlers, and made it clear that he would defend any settler charged with or accused of killing Palestinians. In April 2025, Reuters reported that the US administration of President Donald Trump was sending 20,000 rifles to Israel intended for settlers—the same weapons that President Joe Biden’s administration had suspended. Trump’s reported delivery is significant because while the Israeli military is charged with protection of settlers under all circumstances, only the police (not army soldiers) have authority to stop, search, or arrest Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Thus, settlers have been emboldened to attack Palestinians in cooperation with and with the participation of Israeli military forces. Settlers also have organized themselves into Civilian Security Coordinators and granted themselves broad policing powers. The line between settlers and army units, which has always been fuzzy, seems to have disappeared altogether. Settlers can don military uniforms at will and exercise “official” authority over Palestinians.
Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir made it clear that he would defend any settler charged with or accused of killing Palestinians.
Following open incitement by their leaders, Jewish settlers apparently feel that this is their opportunity to take over more and more land and to drive Palestinian farmers, shepherds, and villagers from their lands in Area C, as well as from parts of Area B. Under the existing regime, the West Bank is divided among Areas A, B and C. Area A (the most densely populated by Palestinians) is under PA control; Area B (mostly villages) is under joint control by the PA and Israel; and Area C (constituting some 62 percent of the West Bank) falls under total Israeli control and contains all the settlements and 400,000 settlers. Some 300,000 Palestinians live in Area C; settlers are now attempting to clear them all from their land and push them toward the cities and towns in Area A. Entire communities of Palestinians facing harassment and violence from settlers and army units have been forced to leave their communities altogether. From October 7, 2023 through December 31, 2024, OCHA recorded at least 1,860 incidents of settler violence in the occupied West Bank—an average of four a day.
Settler attacks were common before October 7, such as the horrific February 2023 attack on Huwara village. That attack saw settlers rampage through a Palestinian town after two Israelis were killed, burning cars and attacking homes, with the Israeli army playing a passive role. After October 7, such attacks became common, and openly aimed at exacting revenge for October 7, and causing the evacuation of smaller vulnerable communities. The use of “shepherding settlement outposts” has increased, in which one or more settlers sets up a caravan, brings in a flock of sheep or cattle, claim wide areas around it as their own grazing property, and then physically drive out its Palestinian owners. According to one report, as many as 28 Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley have been evacuated as a result of such settler tactics, as the men of the villages felt that they could no longer defend their people against the settler onslaught.
Such “ad hoc” attacks led and instigated by settlers have been followed by actions of the Israeli Army. Soon after the first ceasefire in Gaza in January 2025, the army turned its full attention to the West Bank. Starting in Tulkarem and Jenin, in the northern West Bank, the Israeli army initiated an open campaign with military precision. Israel attacked whole neighborhoods with tanks, militarized bulldozers, and armed drones, first destroying the streets and infrastructure, and then ordering the evacuation of entire neighborhoods, which Israeli forces systematically demolished. About 40,000 Palestinians in these communities were forcibly evacuated, not to return, and were told that Israeli forces would remain deployed in their area. This has been the largest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967. While Israel’s specific objective was unclear, rumors, supported by statements from the army, indicated that the goal was to demolish refugee camps across the entire West Bank. Military units started mapping out other refugee camps, including ones in Area B and even in Area A. Military units have entered buildings in the Aida and Dheisheh refugee camps in Bethlehem marking homes for demolition, despite the fact that these camps are in Area A that is under the control of the PA.
Unjustified Justifications
One possible explanation for the assault on refugee camps lies in the Israeli contention that the existence of refugee camps, and even of UNRWA itself, was a deliberate attempt by the Arab world to embarrass Israel and to manufacture and maintain Palestinian belief in their right of return to their homes in Palestine. Many Israelis fantasize that if only these refugee camps could be eliminated, Palestinians would abandon their supposedly unrealistic desire to return to their homes and land, forget about their identity, and find solutions elsewhere— leaving Zionists in sole control of Palestine.
The Israeli Right has always argued for annexing all the occupied territories and has claimed that by some miracle doing so would not create the demographic disaster in Israel that the Israeli Left fears. The assessment was that Israelis who opposed annexation did so out of fear that it would change Israel’s demographics and dilute the Jewish character of the state. Now they apparently believe that the day for that miracle has arrived. With the silence of the international community, and the complicity of the US administration, particularly under Trump, these Israelis see this as the moment to rid the land of millions of Palestinians, both from Gaza, which they have rendered uninhabitable, and from the West Bank—and even (why not?) Israeli Palestinian citizens. Such ideas, once considered extreme, marginal, and indeed unrealistic, are now openly discussed as real possibilities. The goal of “voluntary transfer” is now all but the official policy of the state.
Israelis see this as the moment to rid the land of millions of Palestinians, both from Gaza and the West Bank.
Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab countries have strongly rejected the idea of resettling Palestinians on their territories. Yet it seems the Israeli effort to convince the United States (or to proceed against its wishes) has not been abandoned and remains an Israeli objective. Since Trump met with Prime Minister Netanyahu in February 2025 and openly supported the vision of transferring Gazans into Egypt and Jordan, the idea of forced displacement has become common in Israel, based on the expectation that Trump would not object to the transfer of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Trump almost surprised Netanyahu by publicly sharing his vision of transferring Gazans elsewhere and turning Gaza into a Riviera resort area. A bizarre YouTube video showing such a vision, complete with a golden statute of Trump and a Trump hotel in Gaza, was even circulated on his social media platform.
While few people considered Trump’s Gaza plan viable, and while shortly after his February 2025 meeting with Netanyahu Trump seemed to backtrack about forcing Palestinians out and not allowing them to return, the idea has now become part of the public discourse in Israel. Merely adding the word “voluntary” to the proposed transfer did little to reduce the fears of Palestinians who saw the pressure to force them out as an actual step in the direction of their forcible transfer. There were reports in the Israeli media of a “Generals’ Plan” under which retired General Giora Eiland and others had proposed precisely such a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Under this plan, Israel will make Gazan life unbearable by denying food and water, and other essentials to live, forcing Gazans to be evacuated for “humanitarian reasons.”
Such fears were not only present in Gaza, where Ben-Gvir, Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, and others backing the Generals Plan have openly discussed cutting off food and water to force Palestinians to leave. They are also present in the West Bank, where Palestinians now believe they will be targeted by such ethnic cleansing too. The failure of the international community to stop the genocide in Gaza is being translated as a green light for Israel to conduct ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. The failure to stop the ethnic cleansing in Gaza is feeding the appetite of West Bank settlers and the fears of Palestinians in equal measure.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: WAFA
