Jared Hillel
The Electronic Intifada / July 17, 2026
In late May in Umm al-Khair, one of the villages that make up Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank, activist Tariq Hathaleen pointed to a new Jewish settlement outpost.
“Those five new caravans, they arrived yesterday.”
Located between the north and south part of the village, this outpost is one of the litany of threats his community faces on a daily basis.
From a vantage point overlooking the small homes and farms, Hathaleen recounted how his village, once 300,000 square meters of land purchased by his grandfather and his grandfather’s cousin, has been reduced to 100,000 square meters after years of settler expansion and land theft.
Located in the South Hebron Hills – in the Oslo-designated Area C of the occupied West Bank and under full Israeli security and civil control – Umm al-Khair originally consisted of Palestinians expelled from the Arad desert during the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba.
Villagers were eventually able to rebuild their livelihoods through shepherding, but as is the case for many in the region, decades of physical and legal attacks have residents fearing another displacement.
Breaking down the long history of pressures facing his village, Hathaleen explained that the violence began in 1980, motioning towards the Carmel settlement which was founded that year on part of their land.
“When they first appeared as an outpost, they tried to steal my grandfather’s baby goats,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
Throughout the 1990s, episodic violence ranging from harassment to night raids became frequent. And in the past few years, such attacks have escalated drastically, at times turning deadly.
“Settlers work to scare Palestinians through their attacks,” said Hathaleen, adding that “when they kill people, when they burn their houses, it is like a smaller version of what happened during the Nakba.”
At the same time, the Israeli state has furthered its efforts to push residents off the land through various annexation policies. Today, every home except two has been issued a demolition order, something the community is in the process of fighting in Israeli courts.
Large swaths of territory have been declared state land, and settlers continue to expand via outposts, newly planted olive trees, fences and roads.
Early settler movement
After the current governing coalition took power in late 2022, land grabs accelerated drastically, turning steady encroachment into a coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing and de facto annexation. And while the laundry list of horrors may sound striking, what is happening in Umm al-Khair is neither unique nor new.
Indeed, and in blatant violation of international law, land appropriation in the West Bank has been Israeli policy since Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine in June 1967.
By July 1967, a first draft of the Allon Plan was presented to the Israeli cabinet, laying out a vision of what to do with the occupied territories. Settlements and land annexation were identified as a method to retain strategically important territory, often beginning with the confiscation of land to use as military outposts that were later populated with nominally civilian settlers.
From the outset, the push to establish settlements also held a religious-nationalist bent. Three weeks before the 1967 war broke out, ultranationalist Orthodox rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook delivered what came to be seen as a prophetic speech.
Speaking at a yeshiva in Jerusalem, Kook pined for the biblical sites outside of Israeli control, crying out: “Where is our Chevron [Hebron] – did we forget it? And where is our Shechem [Nablus] – did we forget it? And where is our Jericho – are we forgetting it? And where is our Jordan? Where is each single piece? Every part and part of the four cubits of the land of God? Did we want to give up a millimeter of them? God forbid! God forbid!”
Three months after the occupation began, another soon-to-be influential rabbi, Hanan Porat, successfully petitioned the government to establish Kfar Etzion, the first Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Unlike the Allon Plan, which sought to justify settlements on military grounds, Porat’s campaign was driven by personal and religious conviction.
Jewish settlers, including Porat’s parents, had made several failed attempts to establish a community on that land before the creation of the state of Israel. Porat himself, along with several of Kook’s students, would go on to found Gush Emunim, which translates as the bloc of faithful.
The political movement – premised on the belief that taking land mentioned in the Bible was not only a right but a religious obligation – helped establish numerous settlements throughout the West Bank.
As the security and religious wings of the movement coalesced to secure control over the land a decade after the occupation began, some 55,000 Jewish settlers had moved into occupied territory, 50,000 in East Jerusalem and a further 5,000 mostly in the rest of the West Bank. Life for Palestinians under military occupation brought newfound restrictions on political activity and widespread arrests, but settlers were yet to be the violent presence they are today.
It wasn’t until 1977, when Menachem Begin became Israel’s prime minister, that the religious-nationalist drive to settle the heart of the West Bank past East Jerusalem gained more open and concerted government backing.
While both the national and municipal governments had worked in tandem to de facto annex East Jerusalem immediately after the occupation began, prior to Begin, political leadership post-1967 had been reluctant to legitimize demands made by Gush Emunim and its followers.
In 1979, Begin openly boasted that Israel would never allow a Palestinian state. By 1982, the state had accelerated infrastructure construction and funding, to such an extent that, outside Jerusalem, there were now 30,000 settlers in over 100 settlements in the wider West Bank and Gaza Strip.
One member of his cabinet was Ariel Sharon, then the agriculture minister, who already in 1977 announced his own plan to settle two million Jews in the West Bank by the year 2000.
Under Begin’s administration, the state also began to use Ottoman law to try and justify massive seizures, arguing that land not actively cultivated could be deemed “state land.”
By the time Begin left office, what had begun as a relatively fringe religious ideology had morphed into state policy.
Proliferating settlements
After state support was expanded, no Israeli leader would reverse settlement progression in the West Bank. Even during the Oslo era, while lip service was paid to the idea of a Palestinian state, the settler population in the West Bank grew significantly.
Throughout that peace process, Israel retained security and civilian control of the over 60 percent of the West Bank known as Area C. It is in this area that the vast majority of land grabs occur today.
When the current government came to power, 700,000 settlers were already living in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Just before assuming office in December 2022, Netanyahu’s new government published a list of policy guidelines, vowing to expand settlements in Syria’s Golan Heights as well as the West Bank.
“The Jewish people has an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” reads the document, a nod to the ideological belief of “Greater Israel,” which stipulates that the country extends far beyond the 1949 armistice line, or Green Line.
In February 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, was granted sweeping control over the West Bank, a condition he insisted on before joining the coalition.
Powers to oversee planning and construction of settlements – normally reserved for the defense ministry – were transferred to the far-right minister. This left Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party, able to fast-track the settlement housing approval processes, making it nearly as easy to build in the West Bank as in Israel within the 1949 armistice line.
In rapid succession, several outposts – deemed illegal under both Israeli and international law – were legalized.
Plans were also greenlit to build 7,000 new homes in a bid to revive the E-1 project, which if completed would cut the West Bank in two, further collapsing hopes of a contiguous Palestinian state.
While all this occurred in the first months of 2023, Israel used the political climate after 7 October that year as a carte blanche to operate even more aggressively. Sensing an opportunity, the governing coalition and ideologically motivated settlers coalesced to advance annexation plans while pushing out as many Palestinians as possible.
Citing so-called security concerns, and despite Palestinian attacks making up a small percentage of the violence in the West Bank, Israel armed its settlers. Gun restrictions were loosened and private ownership was encouraged. The Israeli army also handed out weapons to newly-formed settler military units across the West Bank.
With settlers better armed and operating with even more impunity, violence has become systemic as roving militias set out to bully Palestinians off their land. Night raids, beatings and death threats have become commonplace, and attacks have turned increasingly lethal.
On 28 July 2025, one such incident occurred in Umm al-Khair. Activist Awdah Hathaleen was shot and killed by Carmel settler Yinon Levi, after residents attempted to block an excavator from driving through their olive grove.
Speaking on the death of Awdah, as well as Suleiman al-Hathaleen (75) who was run over by an Israeli police tow truck – which carried on driving – in 2022, Tariq Hathaleen, Suleiman’s nephew, described those days as the hardest faced by the community.
“Believe me when I say, since 2022 we haven’t lived a single day without troubles,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
No accountability
Despite a prosecutor expressing intent to charge Yinon Levi with reckless manslaughter, no indictment has been filed and he was released into house arrest.
This story is a familiar one. Since 2020, over 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank – a quarter of them children – have been killed by soldiers and settlers.
Not a single person has been charged in connection with any of these deaths. The impact of this relentless campaign has begun to materialize.
In 2026 alone, over 2,200 Palestinians were displaced due to settler violence.
On top of forcing entire communities to flee, settlers have also played an instrumental role in Israel’s expansionist ambitions. According to the human rights organization Peace Now, by April 2026, 212 outposts had been created under this current government.
In March, an Israeli cabinet meeting retroactively “legalized” 10 of these outposts, paving the way for them to receive permanent infrastructure and state funding. Yonatan Mizrachi, co-director of the Settlement Watch program at Peace Now, said such a shift is “unprecedented.”
Mizrachi told The Electronic Intifada that “from the 1990s until 2023 the government only legalized five or six.”
Beyond facilitating state backing of settler violence, Smotrich has leveraged his newfound powers to maximize Jewish control over the territory. Over the past three years, legal mechanisms in place for decades have been deployed on a scale not seen since the occupation began.
Alongside the continued misuse of Ottoman law to declare vast swaths of Palestinian land as state property, Israeli authorities in February resumed land registration in Area C. Palestinians are now required to meet near impossible evidentiary standards to prove ownership of unregistered land, or else it too could be forfeited to the state.
All in all, between 2023 and 2025, some 26 million square meters in Area C were declared state land, accounting for nearly half of such designations since the 1993 Oslo accords.
Nature reserves, archaeological sites and military firing zones were also expanded, restricting Palestinian construction, farming and often serving as a justification for home demolition orders.
In parallel, government funding for settlements increased, triggering an all-time surge in construction. Including retroactively legalized outposts, Israel’s security cabinet has now approved the establishment of 103 settlements.
The combined impact of land theft, settlement expansion and unprecedented violence has been so brutal, that Amnesty International concluded the Israeli government had embarked on a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing and that settler violence “is not an aberration but an integral part of an organized state policy.”
Tariq Hathaleen, like the rest of the residents of Umm al-Khair, is amongst those bearing the brunt of such brutal policies. “The price of this project is the blood of Awdah,” he said, lighting a cigarette and looking into the distance.
Rhetoric reflects reality
Amidst such rampant conquest, Israeli rhetoric has come to mirror reality on the ground. While past leaders paid lip service to a two-state solution, Benjamin Netanyahu has been direct in his assertions that there will never be a Palestinian state.
Smotrich has been even more explicit. In September, after unveiling a plan to annex 82 percent of the West Bank, the leader proudly proclaimed that the objective was “maximum territory and minimum Arab [sic] population.”
For settlers, recent gains have led to celebrations of colonial conquest so brazen that they have, at times, felt almost cartoonishly evil. Marking this year’s Israeli Independence Day, 22 April, hundreds of settlers gathered on the still-warm remnants of Ras Ein al-Auja, a village in the Jordan Valley, the residents of which had been forced to flee only months earlier.
There the settlers grilled meat, played guitar and swam in a nearby stream against the backdrop of scattered remains of homes, oblivious or indifferent to the fate of the 130 displaced families.
And yet, while rhetoric, celebrations and violence have escalated, the international community’s response has been, unsurprisingly, muted.
In June 2026, a coalition of six western countries, not including the US, issued further sanctions against networks that finance, enable and carry out settler violence. Smotrich himself has been disciplined multiple times, most recently by France which banned him from entering the country.
Such sanctions merely present countries with a veneer of concern, however. By failing to address the state-backed nature of the settler crimes, such condemnations create a false distinction between settlers and the government, which just enables more attacks.
Given the international community’s refusal to take meaningful action, and opposition from within Israel reserved to an ever dwindling left, Palestinians in the West Bank have found themselves increasingly isolated.
In Umm al-Khair, Tariq Hathaleen and his community have applied for a masterplan from the Israeli authorities, in hopes that these authorities will retroactively designate their homes as legally built, staving off the demolition order for now.
And with the fate of his community in the balance, Hathaleen admitted that he dreams of a day where the settlers will either leave, or be prevented from further harming his community.
“I would be enjoying my day with a cup of tea without any thoughts of home demolitions, violence or God forbid, losing a family member,” he said. “We don’t really see any light at the end of this very dark tunnel that we now live in.”
Jared Hillel is a journalist based in Jerusalem
