A Palestinian just returned from the West Bank explains how Israel is speeding up its efforts to expel the population and steal the land
I have been going back and forth from Palestine for some time now. Maybe that is why I notice things differently.
When you live somewhere every day, deterioration happens around you gradually. New gates appear. Another road becomes impossible to use. A settlement expands over another hill. A journey that used to take 20 minutes takes four hours. Another family leaves a village.
But when you leave for several months and come back, you see the difference all at once.
And every time I return to the West Bank, it feels smaller.
The space in which Palestinians can actually live is shrinking at an extraordinary speed.
I have never seen the deterioration happen as fast as I saw it this time.
What is happening in the West Bank cannot be understood as a collection of separate problems. The checkpoint, the settlement, the empty petrol station, the unpaid salary, the demolished house, the missing medicine, lack of water, IOF soldiers driving around the city and the settler carrying a rifle are different parts of the same system.
And the objective of that system is to make Palestinian life smaller, poorer, more fragmented and eventually impossible, while taking more of the land.
As of December 2025 the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs counted 925 physical obstacles restricting the movement of 3.4 million Palestinians across the West Bank, 43 per cent more than the average of the previous 20 years. Eighty-nine checkpoints are staffed around the clock, alongside 218 partial checkpoints and 232 road gates, of which 159 are frequently closed.
But the number matters less than the change in kind.
Twenty years ago, checkpoints and gates made up around 15 per cent of the obstacles in the West Bank, while improvised piles of earth and rubble made up nearly three-quarters. Today checkpoints and gates account for almost 60 per cent of them.
A pile of earth blocking a road is crude. A steel gate that can be opened at nine, closed at quarter past, reopened at noon and closed again without explanation is something more sophisticated.
It makes uncertainty itself the instrument of control. Every journey becomes a gamble. You do not know whether you will reach the university or get to work. Whether an ambulance will pass.
In late July a woman from Qaryut, pregnant and haemorrhaging, was being driven to hospital in Nablus. Her ambulance was stopped at the Awarta checkpoint. According to the crew, soldiers closed the gate, detained them, and ordered them to switch off the engine, which shut down the medical equipment inside the vehicle. They were held for more than half an hour.
The mother survived. Her unborn child did not.
Even money has become trapped
During this trip another crisis appeared in an almost absurd form. The West Bank started running out of fuel partly because Palestinian banks had too much money.
Physical shekels have been piling up inside Palestinian banks because Israel limits how much cash those banks may send back into the Israeli system. The Associated Press reported in July that the ceiling is around 18 billion shekels a year, against an estimated 30 billion flowing in. So the vaults fill.
Banks start refusing large deposits. Businesses that take cash cannot bank it.
A petrol station can have money in its till and be unable to move it into the banking system to pay its supplier. Then the petrol station runs dry.
Mohammad Manasra, deputy governor of the Palestinian Monetary Authority, called it economic warfare.And a larger danger is still approaching. Israel Discount Bank has notified Palestinian banks that it will end correspondent banking services, with Bank Hapoalim expected to follow.
Roughly 90 per cent of Palestinian exports are routed through Israel, and the overwhelming majority of imports arrive through Israeli-controlled channels.
These relationships are how Palestinians pay for fuel, food, electricity, water and medicine. Remove them and the economy cannot function.
Israeli banks provide these services under an indemnity letter from the Israeli Finance Ministry that shields them from liability under Israel’s counter-terrorism financing law. Since taking office, Bezalel Smotrich has progressively shortened that indemnity from an annual instrument to renewals lasting as little as a fortnight. Under pressure from Washington he eventually extended it through the end of 2026.
Smotrich did not have to abolish the protection. He only had to make it unreliable enough that commercial institutions concluded the risk was no longer worth carrying. The Israeli state can say accurately, and dishonestly, that it did not cut anything off.
But what kind of economy has to negotiate through foreign mediators for permission to bank its own cash?
The Palestinian economy was built under Oslo into structural dependency: Israel collects the customs and GST, Palestinians use the Israeli currency, imports arrive through Israeli-controlled channels, movement depends on Israeli permits, work depends on Israeli labour markets.
Then each dependency can be squeezed separately. That is what economic domination looks like under colonialism.
The workers who are no longer allowed to work
Israel froze the permits of around 115,000 Palestinian workers after 7 October 2023. By the first quarter of 2026, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, just 48,000 were still working there.
Israel did not simply lose that labour. It replaced it. In 2025 alone Israel issued almost 61,000 new work permits to foreign migrant workers, bringing the total foreign workforce to more than 227,000.
The consequences are severe. Unemployment in the West Bank stood at 29.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2026. Among young graduates aged 19 to 29 it reaches 41.3 per cent and among young women graduates, 49.2 per cent. Around 90 per cent of Palestinian workers have no social protection of any kind.
Some men still try to reach work by climbing the apartheid wall. The Palestinian Workers’ Union counts 44 workers who have died attempting that crossing since October 2023.
Poverty is becoming another weapon of displacement
The Palestinian Authority has meanwhile spent more than a year unable to pay full salaries. Israel’s Finance Ministry has transferred none of the Palestinian revenues it collects in customs and GST that make up roughly two-thirds of the Authority’s income. Public sector employees have been living on half or 60 per cent of their wages since late 2025.
The health system is suffocating in step with the budget. More than a third of essential medicines are out of stock and over 11,000 operations have been postponed since January. The Ministry of Health says more than 4000 cancer patients and thousands of dialysis patients are at risk for want of chemotherapy drugs and dialysis filters. Three-quarters of its 590 service branches now open one or two days a week.
Follow each of those threads backwards and they arrive at the same place: an economy stripped of political sovereignty and even of the limited financial mechanisms that allowed it to function.
At my own home we are used to water arriving only on certain days of the week. This time we went a full week without any.
Palestinians in the West Bank receive around 70 litres of water per person per day; Israeli settlers receive more than 300.
The land grab is accelerating
While Palestinian life is being economically strangled, the physical seizure of the West Bank is accelerating.
One of the most alarming developments happened almost quietly. Major General Avi Bluth, head of Israel’s Central Command, issued 15 seizure orders covering land inside Area A, between the planned settlements of Noa and Emek Dotan south of Jenin. The seizure provides ground for a road connecting the two.
Area A is supposedly the part of the West Bank under full Palestinian civil and security control.
Israel has of course invaded Area A countless times. But this is different. According to the Israeli settlement-monitoring group Kerem Navot, it appears to be the first time military seizure orders have been used inside Area A in order to connect settlements, rather than being justified however cynically by military necessity.
That distinction carries legal weight. Under the law of occupation, private property may be requisitioned only for imperative military needs, never for the benefit of the occupier’s own civilian population. Here the stated purpose is a settler road.
Oslo’s geography is simply being discarded.
The fiction was always that Areas A, B and C were temporary, a stage on the way to sovereignty. Instead Area C has been colonised steadily, Israeli forces move through A and B at will, and now even land under full Palestinian authority is treated as available ground for settlement.
Noa and Emek Dotan are themselves new. They were among 34 settlements approved by Israel’s security cabinet on 1 April 2026, while attention was on the war with Iran. Peace Now describes it as the largest number of settlements ever approved at one time by any Israeli government: 20 entirely new settlements, nine outposts retroactively legalised, and five expansions or split-offs. Since 2022 this government has approved 103 new settlements. Before 2022 there were 127 in total.
Around Jerusalem the map is being closed: 2300 units approved at Gilo in late July on land partly confiscated under the Absentees’ Property Law, the 3412-unit E1 project moving into construction between Ma’ale Adumim and the city, another 627 units tendered at Kochav Ya’akov on 6 August.
But the most effective instrument has not been the housing tender. It has been the outpost, and above all the so-called agricultural farm.
A caravan appears.
Then sheep.
Then armed settlers.
Then a road.
And then Palestinians discover that land their families have used for generations has become dangerous to reach.
Peace Now recorded 86 new outposts in 2025, 60 of them agricultural farms, one or two a week. They fully displaced 15 Palestinian communities in a single year and partially displaced seven more. Amnesty counted 363 outposts across the West Bank by the end of April 2026, of which 212 had been created since 2023.
The settlement does not need to cover every dunam.
It only needs to make Palestinians afraid to enter it.
That is how territory is emptied.
Amnesty documented 117 predominantly Bedouin and herding communities that experienced full or partial displacement between January 2023 and April 2026, with at least 5910 Palestinians forced from their homes. It calls what is taking place a state-led campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Israeli military vehicles now drive through places where, when I was younger, their presence would have been remarkable. Sometimes they come for arrests. Sometimes they simply drive through. Slowly. Visibly. In the middle of the day. It reads as a message. Get used to us. We are going to be here.
There is no meaningful line between the settler and the soldier
For years international reporting described “settler violence” as though settlers were an extremist fringe occasionally escaping the control of an otherwise neutral state.
That distinction has become impossible to defend.
Settlers attack villages while soldiers stand nearby. Settlers establish outposts that the state later connects to roads, electricity and water. Ministers encourage them. The army protects them. State institutions legalise what was supposedly illegal. Armed settlers increasingly function as an auxiliary force of colonisation.
The scale is on the record. OCHA counted more than 1000 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage by 11 June 2026—six a day, the highest rate ever recorded. The trend is unambiguous: 1291 attacks in 2023, 1449 in 2024, 1835 in 2025, and around 190 a month in 2026, across more than 230 communities.
We saw where this leads in Tal, near Nablus, on 24 July. Between ten past six and quarter to seven in the morning, some 40 to 50 settlers including children came into the village from the east, threw stones at houses and tried to force their way in. Four Palestinians from the same family were killed: Farouk, Ibrahim, Jawad and Imran Ramadan. Three more were critically wounded. A settler and an Israeli security officer were also killed after a young man from the village seized a weapon from one of the attackers.
And then came what Palestinians already understand very well. The village that was attacked became the security problem.
Settler reprisal raids swept the surrounding villages. The Israeli government announced a major counter-terrorism operation. Officials called publicly for the destruction of Palestinian homes and villages.
The victim was converted into the threat.
Human Rights Watch, which reconstructed the morning in Tal hour by hour, warned in July that the escalation of settler violence combined with state support and impunity now threatens mass atrocities across the West Bank. By 19 July, 68 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank in 2026, at least 13 of them by settlers. Ten more were killed in the five days that followed.
This is why I do not think we should keep speaking about settler violence and Israeli military violence as two separate phenomena.
They are two arms of one colonial system.
Qalandiya and the war on the refugee camp
Then there are the camps.
What has happened in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams should have received far more attention than it did. Since the operation launched in January 2025, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced from the northern camps. Entire neighbourhoods have been bulldozed. UNRWA says the camps have been left uninhabitable. Human Rights Watch concluded in November 2025 that this amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity, and named Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz among those who should be investigated. More than 33,000 of those displaced still cannot go home.
And the model is now moving. On 28 July, Katz instructed the military to take control of another West Bank refugee camp without naming which one, saying the operation should follow “the Tulkarem, Nur Shams and Jenin model”. Human Rights Watch published an assessment three days later stating that the plan itself indicates potential war crimes.
This is why Qalandiya camp matters.
The raid began overnight on 4 August and ran for days. At least 20 people were arrested. Soldiers occupied the roofs of homes as firing positions. Shops beside the checkpoint were demolished and the main road closed to traffic, bringing movement to a standstill. By 7 August the Jerusalem Governorate reported 51 Palestinians injured, and said openly that the assault targets the refugee camps and the refugee question itself.
Qalandiya camp was established in 1949 for people expelled during the Nakba. Its residents are not refugees from a distant foreign country. They are Palestinians displaced inside their own homeland, living only kilometres from the villages they were driven out of.
That identity is precisely what is under attack. The camp embodies what Israel has spent 77 years trying to erase: Palestinians did not become stateless by accident, they were made refugees by expulsion.
And the geography is not incidental. Qalandiya sits beside the largest checkpoint between Ramallah and occupied East Jerusalem, against the wall, ringed by settlements and settler roads. Beside it is the old Jerusalem airport at Atarot, where the government has advanced plans for a settlement of 9000 units. Residents connect the raids to that plan. Israel has confirmed nothing.
But we have seen this sequence before, and we know how it ends.
And behind all of it, the prisons
No account of the West Bank is honest without the prisoners, because almost every family has one.
As of August 2026 Israel was holding 7965 Palestinians as security inmates. Of those, only 1474 had been convicted of anything. Some 3198 were in administrative detention—imprisoned without charge, without trial, on secret evidence, on renewable orders. Palestinian prisoner organisations put the overall figure above 9000, including around 84 women and roughly 350 children.
Nearly half of the people in those cells have not even been charged with a crime.
The conditions are no longer contested even inside Israel. Auditors from Israel’s own Ministry of Justice have documented beatings during transfers and searches, and starvation. In March the UN Special Rapporteur on torture said torture has become “state doctrine”. At least 94 deaths in custody since October 2023 have gone uninvestigated. Of 1680 complaints filed against Israeli intelligence services, not one has produced an indictment. Women held at Damon prison have described forced strip searches, sexual harassment by interrogators, threats against their families, and repeated violent raids by prison units.
“There is no future in Palestine”
Perhaps nothing captures this moment more clearly than the billboards.
Across parts of the West Bank, settlers have put up signs in Arabic telling Palestinians that there is no future in Palestine. The message is printed beside an image of Palestinians standing in the ruins of Gaza.
You do not need political analysis to understand the threat.
Look what happened there. Leave before it happens here.
The campaign is run by a settler group that openly promotes Jewish settlement of the whole West Bank, and the boards have gone up over months along public roads without any intervention from Israeli security forces. Soldiers have handed out leaflets at checkpoints warning that resistance will be answered with live fire and demolition.
Transfer is no longer whispered at the margins of Israeli politics. It is argued by ministers, financed by settler organisations, and advertised on the roadside.
The propaganda and the policy are saying the same thing in two registers.
One says: there is no future for you here. The other is working to make that true.
In Gaza the mechanism has been destruction and blockade. In the West Bank it is annexation, fragmentation and economic strangulation.
Occupation is a political system that attempts to determine every material condition of your life. Where you live. Whether you build. Which road you take. When you travel. Whether water reaches your house. Whether your salary comes. Whether your money works.
And ultimately, whether staying on your land remains possible at all.
What frightened me most on this visit was not a single dramatic incident. It was the direction. And the speed.
Six months was enough to see the difference.
