Since Israel launched its genocidal assault on Gaza, it has also murdered 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Israel has intensified its violence in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023, and has murdered 1,000 Palestinians.
As the world was distracted by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has killed more than 56,331 people and uprooted nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, Israel ramped up its violent raids on the West Bank, as well as its silence as Israeli settlers attack and kill Palestinian villagers.
The most recent casualty was Samer Bassam al-Zagharneh, a young man who was shot by Israeli soldiers on July 1. Al-Zagharneh was reportedly killed in the vicinity of the separation barrier, which Israel started constructing in 2002 to separate Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, passing through Palestinian villages and farming land.
By Israeli occupation forces and Israeli settlers from illegal settlements, strangling the West Bank. Colonists make surprise, ferocious attacks upon villages, setting buildings on fire, assaulting residents, and attempting to push them out of their homes.
Parallel to this, security forces have encircled refugee camps and stormed them relentlessly, forcing still more people from their homes and refusing to let them return. Numerous settlers have also been given semi-automatic guns and “integrating” into Israeli security forces in the West Bank, as a way of offsetting all the personnel sent to conduct the war in Gaza.
This has made the distinction between security forces and settlers uncertain, giving the latter the authority to increase violence against Palestinians. In 2024, Israel stole more Palestinian land in the West Bank than it had in the last 20 years total, reports Peace Now, a non-Israeli non-profit following land theft in Palestine.
Israel’s hard-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has spearheaded the effort since taking over the newly formed “Settlements Administration” in February 2023. The role enables Smotrich to further Israel’s de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank by seeking to apply Israeli civil law to the territory, in explicit violation of international law.
Smotrich has authorised new outposts – illegal not just under international law but also under Israeli law – expropriation of land, and the imposition of “settlement and construction regulations. In reality, Smotrich is counting on occupation and settler violence to displace Palestinians so that he may approve and expand new illegal Israeli settlements, Al Jazeera previously reported.
