Israel approves the largest Palestinian West Bank land grab in three decades

Israel, escalating its campaign to seize territory in the West Bank and accommodate 500,000 new settlers, is pushing forward with the largest single appropriation of Palestinian land since 1993, according to major news outlets.

The impending seizure and conversion of these areas into state land, approved by the Israeli government last month and publicized by Peace Now on Wednesday, encompasses five square miles and, like other seizures that were approved and implemented earlier this year, threatens the mass eviction of Palestinians already living there. Israeli policy dictates that state land is effectively off-limits to Palestinians and can only be leased to Jewish settlers.

This year's land seizures, spearheaded by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and aimed at connecting two existing Israeli settlements along the border with Jordan, further dismember Palestinian territory and, according to critics of Israeli settlement, undermine efforts to create a Palestinian nation-state.

In an audio recording from a National Religious Party–Religious Zionism convention, Smotrich appears to confirm that undermining such efforts is precisely the point. “We will establish sovereignty . . .  first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalize the young settlements,” Smotrich said in comments reported by Haaretz. “My life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Smotrich also admitted that Israel is preparing to annex the whole West Bank “without the government being accused of annexing it." Israel has already built 100 settlements across the territory, housing around 500,000 Israeli Jews and providing them with a springboard to extend further control into the surrounding areas. Three million Palestinians also living in the West Bank are mostly crowded into the 40% of territory still administered by the Palestinian Authority.

Groups of Israeli settlers, often armed by the Israeli government, have carried out violent attacks on nearby Palestinian villages, whose inhabitants sometimes respond in kind. Those clashes, and an Israeli security crackdown that has imprisoned thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank, have escalated since the eruption of war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023.

Most of the international community regards Israeli settlement in the West Bank as an illegal violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention. U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric called the most recent land grab “a step in the wrong direction,” adding that “the direction we want to be heading is to find a negotiated two-state solution.”