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Israel’s Government is accelerating its plans for complete annexation of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank in the wake of a new, incoming sympathetic American administration under President Donald Trump.
Simultaneously Tel Aviv is providing military support for settler attacks on Palestinians, aimed at destroying Palestinian property and driving them off their land, as the world’s attention focuses on the exploding regional violence and the degradation and collapse of neighbouring militias and powers, including Hezbollah and former Syrian President Bashar Assad’s Government which are and were both supportive of Palestinian rights and statehood.
On Monday, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told a meeting of the Religious Zionist Party (RZP) that “The time is now” for seizing control of the Gaza Strip and for taking decisive action in the West Bank by strengthening Jewish settlements and creating facts on the ground to prevent a Palestinian State.
“2025: the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” wrote Smotrich on X.
Another Knesset member from the RZP also proposed a bill that all Israeli legislation officially replace the name of the West Bank to Judea and Samaria, the old biblical names for the occupied territory.
Smotrich has also ordered preparations for the annexation of the occupied West Bank ahead of Donald Trump taking office in January 2025. The finance minister, who lives in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank, is also a minister within Israel’s Defence Ministry where he oversees the Israeli Civil Administration of the West Bank and its settlements.
In a statement released on Monday he voiced hopes that the new administration in Washington would recognise Israel’s push for “sovereignty” over the occupied territory.
Trump was behind the 2018 move of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – despite Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem being illegal under international law – and also the 2019 recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
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Smotrich also announced the confiscation of 24,000 dunums (5930.5 acres) of the occupied West Bank, the largest confiscation of Palestinian land since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, classifying them as state land.
“More than 23,000 dunams of land for the benefit of the settlement in Yosh. We determine facts on the ground and thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state!” he said.
Israeli human rights organisation, Peace now, said the government in addition to completing the annexation moves, by transferring power from the army to an administration under Smotrich, was also legalising settlement outposts (which were previously illegal even under Israeli law) by providing them with financing, infrastructure and bypass roads.
Furthermore, the Israeli authorities are strengthening enforcement laws against Palestinian construction and promoting settlement growth and the building of new settlements, said Peace Now.
In an effort to ethnically cleanse the West Bank the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have also accompanied and protected Israeli settlers who carry out daily and nightly attacks on Palestinians, their property and their land. Should Palestinians retaliate with stones they are shot, sometimes killed, and arrested.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that during the period from late November to early December that Israeli settler attacks had escalated dramatically.
During the reporting period OCHA documented 45 incidents involving settlers and affecting Palestinians, including 21 attacks that resulted in casualties, property damage or both. In total, two Palestinians were injured by Israeli settlers and six others were injured by Israeli forces during these attacks.
“Settlers vandalised more than 700 Palestinian-owned trees and saplings, mostly olive, in three locations in the West Bank within three days,” read the OCHA report.
“Since 7 October 2023, some 300 Palestinian households comprising 1,757 people, including 855 children, have been displaced in Palestinian Bedouin and other herding communities,” said OCHA, primarily citing attacks by Israeli settlers and access restrictions.
Approximately 800 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the IDF and settlers since October last year.
Israeli rights group B’tselem said in a report that settler violence equalled state violence.
The organisation said Israeli settlements had taken over large swathes of Palestinian land to which Palestinians had “limited access or none at all.”
“Israel has taken over some of these areas using official means: issuing military orders, declaring the area ‘state land,’ a ‘firing zone’ or a ‘nature reserve,’ and expropriating land.
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“Other areas have been effectively taken over by settlers through daily acts of violence, including attacks on Palestinians and their property,” said B’Tselem.
Israel has created a discriminatory urban planning and zoning system. Within Area C (which comprises approximately 60% of the West Bank), where most settlement construction is based, Israel has allocated 70% of the land to settlements and only 1% to Palestinians.
In occupied East Jerusalem from 1 January to 30 November 2024, Palestinian owners were forced to destroy 64 per cent of structures demolished in East Jerusalem (121 out of 189 structures) for lacking Israeli-issued building permits, following the issuance of demolition orders by the Israeli authorities. These demolitions accounted for around 60 per cent of people displaced in East Jerusalem.
The Israeli authorities severely restrict issuing building permits to Palestinians while simultaneously actively encouraging the construction of illegal Israeli settlements with financial incentives.
In East Jerusalem Israel has expropriated 35% of the city for the construction of settlements, while restricting Palestinians to construct on only 13% of the land.
But plans for Israeli domination of East Jerusalem go back to when it illegally annexed the eastern sector of the city following the 1967 war, changing the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem to incorporate large swatches of the West Bank, and by limiting the rights of Palestinian residents while encouraging Jewish settlement in the eastern part of the city.
Additionally, Israel’s plans and moves to annex the West Bank are also not new.
Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard said in a piece reported in Foreign Policy that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had started pushing for annexation in 2017 despite him paying lip service to the two-state solution.
“The gap between Israel’s words and actions on the West Bank began changing in 2017, when officials in Netanyahu’s then-government began discussing plans for unilateral annexation of the territory,” said Sfard.
“That December, Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party passed a resolution instructing its legislators to ‘pursue’ full annexation of the West Bank. But it was clear to those who voted in favour of the resolution that it had only declaratory status and could not be implemented immediately due to international objections,” said Sfard.
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As Israel’s 2019 elections approached so did Trump’s “deal of the century” which advocated for a partial Israeli annexation of the West Bank with Netanyahu subsequently stating he discussed “annexation by US consent with the Trump administration”.
Amnesty International warns that Israel’s continued annexation of Palestinian land in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank not only further entrenches institutionalised discrimination but amounts to war crimes.
“Israel’s policy of settling its civilians in occupied Palestinian territory and displacing the local Palestinian population continues to contravene fundamental rules of international humanitarian law,” said the rights group.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
“Settlements are created with the sole purpose of permanently establishing Israeli civilians on occupied land; this is a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and “annexation” has no bearing on this legal determination,” said Amnesty.