Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem [9] issued a comprehensive report last month charging that Israel is carrying out an "elimination project" on the occupied West Bank, seeking to dismantle Palestinian "collective existence" there to establish a permanent, contiguous Jewish presence and Israeli sovereignty. A campaign of "ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover" is effected through violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, eonomic strangulation and criminalization of Palestinian political organizing.
These steps toward annexation [10] are taken jointly by the Israeli military and armed settlers. Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissing [12] the soaring settler attacks on Palestinian villages as the work "juvenile delinquents," the attacks have increased along with his government's approval [13] of expansive new settlement construction.
Israeli settlers shot and killed [14] a 51-year-old Palestinian man Oct. 1 in the West Bank town of Yasuf. The settlers attacked Palestinian homes under the protection of the Israeli military, the head of the town's municipal council said. That same day in the village of Janta, masked settlers armed with stones and clubs attacked Israeli activists [15] who had come to assist local Palestinians with the olive harvest, which is annually disrupted [16] by settler harassment. The activists were from the groups Standing Together, Rabbis for Human Rights and Bnei Avraham. (ToI [17])
On Sept. 29, over 100 settlers attacked [18] a Palestinian family trying to return to its home in the village of Julud, from which they had been forced to flee by settler violence in July. Following a rare order by Israel's Supreme Court for the safe return of the Toubassi family to their usurped property, the family was being escorted to their home by Israeli soliders and police—who failed to repel the attack. Two houses belonging to the Toubassi familiy were set on fire during the settler attack, effectively preventing the family's return. (TNH [19], BBC News [20], NYT [21])
Dispossession of the Palestinians is also escalating in occupied East Jerusalem, already long declared as annexed. On Sept. 28, hundreds of Israelis led by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir [22] stormed al-Aqsa Mosque compound under police protection. The intrusion came as Israeli authorities forced nearby Palestinian shopkeepers to close their businesses and residents to remain inside their homes to allow Jewish prayers during the Sukkot holiday. (Al Jazeera [23])
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Oct. 6 condemned [24] new building demolitions in East Jerusalem that have displaced 69 Palestinians, calling it the largest single-demolition displacement in the city since the agency began tracking the figures in 2009. According to OCHA, Israeli authorities demolished a residential building in At Tur district, noting that over half of the displaced persons were children. According to the report, families were denied access to the area by Israeli authorities, and were unable to retrieve their belongings from the rubble.
According to the UN, many of the homes were demolished because they lacked Israeli-issued building permits, which are rarely granted to Palestinians. Official OCHA statistics [25] indicate that 15,095 Palestinian-owned structures have been demolished on the West Bank since 2009, resulting in 23,683 displaced persons.
The global Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) states that 2.8 million Palestinians were displaced in 2025, including in Gaza. But the figure includes more than 33,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced [26] by Israeli security forces early last year from the Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarm refugee camps on the West Bank. (Jurist [27])
A group of UN experts warned [28] in March 6 that as a wider war engulfs the Middle East region, "the genocide...in Gaza...spills into the West Bank." The experts argued that Israeli policy is designed to coerce Palestinians to leave in both territories. The statement warned of a "de-Palestinisation" of Jerusalem.
