Katherine Hearst & Lubna Masarwa
Al-Jazeera / July 11, 2024
Campaigners say Israel is using the conflict in Gaza to distract from its accelerated drive for full annexation of the West Bank.
On 25 June, at 8.30 in the morning, around 20 masked settlers appeared at Tamir Abu Eisheh’s door, informing him that his home in the hills north of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron was about to be demolished.
The Israelis stripped the family of their phones and threw their furniture into the street. They did not even have the time to gather their belongings before bulldozers set to work, razing their home to the ground.
“His daughters came to me crying in the morning, barefoot in their pyjamas, and asked me to come because they are destroying their home,” Tamir’s brother, Nadir Abu Eisheh, told Middle East Eye. Nadir arrived to find his baby nephew’s mattress cast into the street.
“Usually they give families at least 20 days to evacuate,” Nadir told MEE. This time, Tamir Abu Eisheh’s family had no warning.
Israel has long wielded housing demolitions as a means to displace the occupied West Bank’s Palestinian population. Since the 7 October Hamas-led attack and Israel’s war on Gaza, however, the practice has been turbocharged, with Israeli bulldozers tearing down people’s homes on a near-daily basis.
According to UN figures, Israeli forces have destroyed over 1,000 structures across the West Bank, displacing around 2,250 people.
Overseeing the drive is Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, who also wields power over authorities in the West Bank – and is a settler himself.
When Nadir Abu Eisheh challenged the decision, a military officer told him: “Smotrich is now in charge, and this is what he wants. We are going to destroy another 20 houses in the area, and we are going to make it look like Gaza.”
Now everyone in the area expects their house to be next.
“You can see the shock in people’s faces,” Abu Eisheh said.
A veneer of legality
Prior to October, demolitions were concentrated in Area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank that is under full Israeli control, with mostly rural areas close to existing settlements in the Jordan Valley and south Hebron targeted.
However, 2023 and 2024 saw a surge in demolitions in Area A, which is under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction, and Area B, which is under joint security control between the PA and Israel – soaring from 29 structures to 265.
In occupied East Jerusalem, the average monthly rate of demolitions rose from 10 in the first nine months of 2023 to 17 since 7 October.
Israel has also long used home demolitions as a form of collective punishment, targeting houses of Palestinians “suspected of carrying out attacks” on Israelis.
Since October, Israeli authorities have punitively demolished or sealed off 38 structures, displacing 170 people. This is double the figure recorded in 2023.
Demolitions are often ordered on the grounds that buildings are constructed without permits, but these are impossible for most Palestinians to obtain.
“Demolishing the houses and not giving permission [for Palestinians to build] doesn’t allow the Palestinians the possibility to expand. So it’s part of the aim of minimizing the numbers of Palestinians,” Jamal Juma’a, chair of the Stop the Wall anti-occupation campaign, told MEE.
To maintain a veneer of legality, Israeli courts issue standing demolition orders to Palestinian homes, often on the pretext of a lack of building permits. The orders can hang over families for years before they’re executed.
“Demolitions that happen ‘normally’ are done through the Civil Administration, and Israel tries very much to have it look like a legal process,” Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), told MEE.
“They issue demolition orders, and then you can appeal. All the appeals are never accepted, and then they’re in place, and you don’t know when they’re going to come.”
Around 22,000 Palestinian homes have demolition orders pending in Area C, and another 20,000 in East Jerusalem.
Since October, Palestinians across the West Bank and East Jerusalem are waking up to find bulldozers flanked by soldiers preparing to tear down their homes, with no idea the demolition was imminent.
The Abu Eisheh family, for instance, received an eviction order last year, despite having all the correct documentation for their home. They hired a lawyer, thinking the process would take years. Instead, they were made homeless without warning.
In the firing zone
One of the area’s most under threat – even before the war on Gaza began – has been Masafer Yatta, a collection of Palestinian communities in the south Hebron hills.
The day after Israeli bulldozers pulverised the Abu Eisheh house, another 11 homes were razed in Masafer Yatta’s Umm al-Khair, as well as a third of the Bedouin hamlet’s infrastructure.
Fifty people were left homeless and are now sheltering from soaring summer temperatures in makeshift tents.
Umm al-Khair is among 19 villages in Masafer Yatta that have been facing demolition since the area was designated a “firing zone” for military practice in the 1980s.
In May 2022, despite multiple appeals from residents, the Israeli High Court ruled that Palestinians are not permanent residents, and in so doing, removed the last legal barriers to their forced transfer.
“No [military] training has taken place on this land, but settlers have become more prevalent there,” Lara Bird-Leakey of the Balfour Project, a British pro-Palestinian advocacy group, told MEE.
Israeli bulldozers have come and gone in Umm al-Khair ever since 2007, when an illegal settlement was established a few metres away. Its residents expected the worst as demolitions stepped up following the war on Gaza. On 26 June, the bulldozers finally arrived.
Awdeh Hathaleen, a local resident and activist, awoke to a barrage of messages from people in neighbouring villages, warning Israeli forces were on their way.
“In less than five minutes the border police, soldiers and Civil Administration entered the village with big bulldozers,” Hathaleen said.
They began by demolishing a tent that functioned as the village’s community centre. Soldiers then formed a ring around the village, barring residents from leaving.
“Once there’s a demolition in process, they close the village. No one can go out, no one can enter,” Hathaleen explained.
The Israelis then destroyed the village’s electricity generator and solar panels.
“We thought they were done, as they’d destroyed two of the village’s most important structures,” Hathaleen said. “But we were wrong.”
Eleven homes were demolished, with the inhabitants given minutes to evacuate and no time to gather their belongings.
Umm al-Khair’s homeless residents are still there. Some families sleep on the rubble of their homes. They have improvised shelters from tarp, and managed to reconnect their electricity supply.
The community tent was re-erected, only to be instantly flattened again by a bulldozer.
The homeless Palestinians are also plagued by settler attacks, which have wounded several people, including women and children.
‘De jure annexation’
When the Israeli military has previously attacked Gaza, the pace of demolitions slackened, with the military concentrating its forces on the Mediterranean coast, rather than the banks of the Jordan River.
This time, the situation is quite the opposite, igniting fears that Israel is preparing for full annexation of the West Bank.
In 2020, Israel came close to seizing 30 percent of the West Bank, following then US President Donald Trump’s unveiling of his “deal of a century”, which proposed that areas of the territory be recognized as Israeli.
It initially appeared as if Israel’s plans to annex the land had Washington’s backing, with the then-US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, saying that Israel “does not have to wait at all”.
But the plans were suspended under international pressure, with the UAE claiming it had averted annexation as part of a US-brokered normalization deal it signed with Israel.
Yet in practice, Israeli annexation has taken a different form. In 2023, large sections of the Israeli administration that runs the West Bank were transferred from the military to Smotrich, who in addition to being finance minister also holds office in the defence ministry.
Smotrich’s new Settlements Administration was handed sweeping powers over civil issues in the West Bank, in a move which legal experts have said amounts to “de jure annexation”.
The administration has the power to expropriate Palestinian land, expand settlements, ban Palestinian construction and authorize wildcat outposts.
On 29 May, the military transferred significant legal powers to civil servants reporting to Smotrich, further undermining regulation of settlement expansion.
In a recording of a speech at his Religious Zionism party conference in June, Smotrich admitted that Israel was advancing a plan to annex the West Bank “without the government being accused of annexing it”.
He cited the power shift from military to civilian rule in the West Bank as being instrumental in this process.
State-backed ethnic cleansing
The surge in demolitions is accompanied and enforced by a spike in settler attacks, which help to displace Palestinian herding communities in the south Hebron hills, Jordan Valley and East Jerusalem, and consolidate settler outposts.
The UN human rights office recently reported that shepherding communities are being targeted by a “new wave” of settler violence, with women and children attacked, property and infrastructure vandalized and livestock stolen.
In May, Haaretz reported that at least 18 Palestinian pastoral communities had been “erased” amid ratcheting settler attacks that barred Palestinians from accessing pastures for their livestock.
“Each of these villages seem little, but in fact, they have hundreds of acres of grazing land and farmland around them,” the ICAHD’s Halper said. “So it’s not like 18 points are being taken. It’s 18 huge areas of grazing land. It’s a significant part of Area C.”
The West Bank has seen a years-long increase in settler violence targeting Palestinians, with far-right groups armed by successive Israeli governments.
But according to Haaretz, since October, the attacks have intensified and received increasingly overt state backing.
In recent years, settler attacks have become increasingly formalized through the creation of the Israeli army’s Desert Frontier unit, which recruited members of the violent far-right settler group the Hill-Top Youth.
“[The government] is not just unleashing these violent settlers, it’s actually institutionalizing the ethnic cleansing… they’re actually acting as soldiers in the Israeli army under government orders,” Halper told MEE.
An effective tool
The surge in demolitions and displacement of Palestinians is consolidated by settlement expansion.
Israel doesn’t want Palestinians to simply return to the lands they have been forced from, Halper said. “So that’s where the settlements come in, to grab the land by building on it immediately. That then nails down the gains you’ve made.”
Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal under international law.
Despite this, more than 700,000 settlers live in over 200 settlements and outposts across the Palestinian territories.
According to Juma’a at Stop the Wall, one “effective tool” the Israelis are using is so-called pastoral settlements.
Israeli sheepfolds, which encircle Palestinian pastoral communities and deprive them of grazing land, have accelerated since 2017, flourishing after international pressure on Israel dialed down thanks in large part to the support of the Trump administration.
According to Juma’a, some 105 pastoral settlements have been established since 2018.
“They are seizing all Palestinian agricultural area in Area C,” Juma’a said.
“They want to limit the Palestinian movement and expansion just in the villages and the cities in Area A and B.”
In June, the Israeli government approved measures proposed by Smotrich to legalize five unregulated and newly established settlement outposts in the West Bank, and to transfer executive powers from the PA to Israel in large parts of Area B.
“Israel is now, for the first time… able to build settlements and to demolish homes and to expropriate lands inside Area B,” Halper said.
“Now, in a sense, Area B, which is half the Palestinian population, has been the next area C.”
According to Halper, the aim is to drive the entire Palestinian population to Area A alone.
“You’re setting up a situation where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are going to have to leave the country because B is taken and settled,” he warned.
Nailing apartheid under genocide
For Halper, Israel’s war on Gaza is providing cover for the acceleration of demolitions and settlement expansion in the West Bank, preparing the ground for a Saudi Arabian normalization deal with Israel that would effectively eliminate Palestinians as a political force.
“This is nailing apartheid under genocide,” he said.
Saudi Arabia and Israel appeared close to establishing formal ties before 7 October, but since the war, and outrage in the Arab world, Riyadh has insisted that the deal must lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
“Israel’s trying to get a million or two Palestinians out of Gaza by making it uninhabitable,” Halper said.
“In the West Bank, the same process has happened by demolishing homes, driving people off their lands,” he added.
“In six months, we have normalization with Saudi Arabia, and it’s over. The Israeli regime has consolidated itself on 90 percent of Palestine and the Palestinians are just gone.”
Katherine Hearst is a writer, film maker and organiseer
Lubna Masarwa is a journalist and Middle East Eye’s Palestine and Israel bureau chief, based in Jerusalem
