Since the start of Israel's genocidal war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, the Israeli occupation forces have conducted near-daily raids and expanded their military operations in the occupied West Bank.
In the last two years, Israeli occupation forces have killed hundreds of Palestinians, demolished hundreds of homes, and displaced tens of thousands in the deadliest aggression on the West Bank in 25 years.
Immediately after the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas went into effect on 19 January, the occupation army started a new deadly military operation against several refugee camps in the northern West Bank, demolishing homes and infrastructure and displacing more than 40,000 Palestinians.
Palestinian youths run to avoid tear gas fired by Israeli forces during a raid in Nablus city amid a weeks-long assault in the occupied West Bank on 26 February 2025. AFP
It is arguable that what Israel is doing in the West Bank transcends a crackdown and amounts to a campaign of ethnic cleansing with the intention of annexation to fulfil a long-held Zionist dream of expanding the Jewish state to more Arab land and killing any Palestinian dream of independent statehood.
To make these Zionist expansionist dreams come true, the new US administration of Donald Trump, surrounded by right-wing politicians and born-again evangelical leaders, has made it no secret that it could recognize an Israeli decision to annex the West Bank.
A possible Washington recognition of any annexation of all or parts of the West Bank would come as no surprise since Trump recognized Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the "Jewish state" and acknowledged the Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights.
Republican Congresswoman Claudia Tenney introduced a bill in the House of Representatives last March called the "Retiring the Egregious Confusion Over the Genuine Name of Israel's Zone of Influence by Necessitating Government-use of Judea and Samaria Act" or the "Recognizing Judea and Samaria Act."
The bill seeks to prohibit the use of the term "West Bank" to refer to the Palestinian territory and to officially recognize it as a territory rightfully belonging to Israel, starting with the use of the area's "biblical and historical name."
The bill was reintroduced in February after Trump assumed office. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and most Republican congressmen use the terms "Judea and Samaria" instead of the West Bank.
On 9 February, Israel's Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a Knesset bill to replace the term "West Bank" with "Judea and Samaria" in official Israeli government documents.
All Palestinian factions and Arab governments denounced the US-backed Israeli expansionist schemes.
In Egypt, Al-Azhar, the world's leading Islamic Sunni Institute, denounced the renaming of the West Bank as a continuation of Zionist colonial policies which aim to erase the just Palestinian cause.
The US and Israeli rhetoric belies genocidal intent, stemming from a desire to displace and dispossess the native Palestinian population from the West Bank and annex that territory.
People gather in front of an Israeli military vehicle in the Nur Shams camp for Palestinian refugees, where troops allowed residents to retrieve belongings after issuing reported demolition notifications for several houses in the occupied West Bank on March 5, 2025. AFP
Nakba
In the late 19th century, Jewish groups like Bilu and Hovavei Tsion promoted the establishment of so-called communities in Palestine.
Between 1882 and 1884, the First Aliyah, a Jewish-Zionist migration to Palestine, established six settlements funded by European Zionists like Baron Rothschild. By 1903, this grew to 28 settlements, laying the groundwork for Zionist control.
After the failed 1905 Russian Revolution, Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe created the first kibbutz (agricultural settlement), Degania, and the non-agricultural settlement of Tel Aviv in 1909.
Jewish immigration to Palestine and the construction of settlements were all part of a decades-old Zionist plan, championed by Theodore Herzl in the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Switzerland, to build a Jewish state in Palestine.
After the end of WWI and the infamous Balfour Declaration in 1917, Great Britain used its mandate over Historic Palestine to facilitate Jewish immigration to the country with an eye on creating a Jewish state despite the protestations of the native Arab population.
By 1947, there were 145 kibbutzim and a growing armed Zionist population in Palestine.
An armed Arab uprising in 1936-1939 against the expansion of Jewish immigration failed to reverse the course.
On 29 November 1947, amid growing tensions in the country, the United Nations passed the infamous Partition Plan as Resolution 181, which stipulated dividing Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state.
The Palestinian national movement and Arab countries rejected Resolution 181 as blatantly unjust to the native population who aspired to rid themselves of British colonialism, not replace it with a Zionist takeover.
Arabs outnumbered Jews in historic Palestine by a margin of 2 to 1 (1,300,000 vs 630,000). They owned 93 percent of the land compared to 7 percent by Jews. Still, in an affront to historical facts and the rights of an indigenous population, the UN awarded 54 percent of the country to Jews and only 42 percent to the Palestinians.
In the war that ensued, Zionist militias defeated Arab armies that came to rescue the native population and committed atrocious massacres against the Palestinians, forcibly displacing over 750,000 people - in what became known as the 1948 Nakba.
All of Palestine!
Following the Nakba, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were governed by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, while Gaza was under Egyptian administration for 19 years.
In the 1967 war, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula as it sought to expand the Zionist state in all directions.
Immediately afterwards, the Israeli government started demolishing 160 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, displacing thousands to build settlements in the West Bank.
In July 1967, a group of Zionist settlers built the Etzion Bloc kibbutz, the first settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Etzion Bloc now has 40,000 settlers, while Kfar Etzion, one of the oldest settlements, has around 1,000. The largest settlement, Modi'in Illit, has 82,000 settlers.
In the late 1970s, the World Zionist Organization released a document titled "Master Plan for the Development of Settlement in Judea and Samaria 1979-1983", where 46 new settlements in the northern West Bank would be added within those years and inhabited by 16,000 Israeli families.
By 1983, 27,000 Israeli families had settled in the occupied West Bank, with 22 additional settlements established.
The 1980s witnessed a rise in settlement outposts, which are settlements built without the occupation's authorization, and a surge in Israeli army/settler violence with impunity.
Settlements and outposts are illegal under international law as they violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bans an occupying power from allowing its population to settle in occupied territories.
As Zionist crimes against Palestinians in occupied territories compounded, so did Palestinian rage.
An Israeli settler murder of four Palestinians in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in December 1987 triggered the First intifada - nicknamed the intifada of the Stones.
During the six-year First intifada, the Israeli army killed at least 1,048 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, including 240 children, and broke the arm bones of hundreds of youths to prevent them from throwing stones at their tanks and armoured vehicles.
Oslo dream!
In 1993, amid US mediation, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed to a framework that would lead to the gradual transfer of authority to the Palestinians, beginning with limited self-governance in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, known as the Oslo Accords.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) was created in 1994 under the Oslo framework and was headed by the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat.
The agreement led to Israel's withdrawal from several Palestinian towns and cities, and Palestinian civil and security control was established in parts of the West Bank.
The accords divided the West Bank into three zones: 18 percent under the PA's administrative and security control (Area A), 22 percent under joint Israeli and PA control (Area B), and Israel's sole control over the remaining 60 percent (Area C).
The Oslo process was intended to usher in more talks to reach a final peace deal and an agreement on Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital—at least according to what the Palestinian side was told at the time.
Dream deferred!
However, ignoring Oslo, Israel built new settlements between 1992 and 1996, and the population of Gaza and West Bank settlements sored by 40,000 in four years.
Israel also expanded existing settlements and expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank.
In a prominent 1995 case, settlers tried to seize 125 acres from the village of al-Khader in Bethlehem.
Then, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin halted the seizure to avoid violating the Oslo Accords but allowed construction to continue nearby.
The Israeli government also built settlements in surrounding West Bank areas, aiming to link them to Jerusalem.
Housing Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer emphasized these settlements as part of Jerusalem as Israel eyed to encircle the city and prevent any hope it would become a capital for a Palestinian state.
By mid-1995, Israel built or approved 10,000 new units in the West Bank, ignoring Palestinian pleas for Tel Aviv to honour Oslo.
The same year, the occupation government allocated $17.5 million—excluding indirect subsidies, such as discounted land sales—for 4,100 new units in the Greater Jerusalem settlements.
The Oslo peace process unravelled after the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and the subsequent election of Benjamin Netanyahu, who opposed key elements of the Accords.
Prime Minister Netanyahu bolstered settlement expansions since he first came to power in 1996 by funding Israeli settlers, building Jewish-only bypass roads, and disregarding Israeli NGOs that weaponize loopholes in land laws to evict Palestinians from their land, a tactic Israeli authorities also use to seize and demolish Palestinian properties.
By 2000, the number of Israeli settlers doubled over pre-Oslo figures to reach 400,000.
The Camp David Peace talks of July 2000 between Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak failed to reach an agreement on a permanent peace arrangement as Israel rejected the return of sovereignty of East Jerusalem to the Arab side as well as the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees to Historic Palestine.
intifada II
As the occupation continued to flaunt its disregard for the Oslo Accords, displacing and detaining Palestinians, demolishing their homes, locking down college campuses, and allowing settlers to commit any number of crimes with impunity, anger amongst disillusioned Palestinians reached a boiling point.
It all spilled over on 28 September 2000.
Ariel Sharon, a life-long notorious Zionist criminal and an agriculture minister at the time, instigated the explosion when he stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem with more than 1,000 heavily armed police and soldiers.
The Palestinian protests that erupted against Ariel Sharon, the butcher of the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982, turned into a full-fledged Second intifada, spreading like wild-fire across the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem within days and became known as the Al-Aqsa intifada.
After more than four years of clamping down on protests, the Israeli occupation forces killed 4,745 Palestinians, while Israeli settlers killed 44 Palestinians.
Mohamed Dorra - The image that shook the world!
Apartheid Wall
The occupied West Bank is a landlocked part of Historic Palestine west of the Jordan River that was occupied by Israel in 1967.
It is home to 3.3 million Palestinians who aspire to build a contiguous independent state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem on the land their ancestors lived on and tilled the land since immemorial.
In 2002, midway through the Al-Aqsa intifada, after refusing the Arab peace offer that year, Israel started building a separation wall in the West Bank, known as the Apartheid Wall, separating Palestinians in the occupied West Bank from Israel, occupied East Jerusalem, and Israeli settlements built in the West Bank.
The nine-metre tall wall, 712km long, consists of ditches, barbed wire and electronic fences, and a massive concrete wall.
Around 15 percent of the wall runs along the so-called Green Line—the 1949 armistice line. The remaining 85 percent runs in a zigzag 18 kilometres inside the West Bank.
The wall isolates nine per cent of the land and cuts off tens of thousands of Palestinians from the rest of the territory, with 146 Israeli settlements and more than 700,000 settlers.
The Apartheid Wall cuts all principal Palestinian municipalities and significant population centres of the occupied West Bank—Jenin, Tubas, and Nablus, with Ramallah north of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron (Al-Khalil) south of Jerusalem, Jericho by the Jordan River valley, and Tulkarm—from East Jerusalem.
The wall, home demolitions, and more than 800 checkpoints on every road that Palestinians use in the West Bank have turned the lives of the Arab population into a daily nightmare.
In a landmark ruling in 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that "the wall, along the route chosen, and its associated regime gravely infringe a number of rights of Palestinians," including the right to healthcare, education, and employment.
The ICJ deemed that constructing the wall was a breach by Israel of its obligations under international law.
Thus, the ICJ asked Israel to dismantle the wall and pay reparations for the damage its construction caused.
This decision came after the United Nations General Assembly requested that the ICJ deliver its advisory opinion on "the legal consequences arising from the construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory."
Israel ignored the ICJ ruling and finished the wall.
Before Al-Aqsa Flood
In 2022, the Israeli occupation forces began a major crackdown on the occupied West Bank against resistance fighters, killing 157 Palestinians, most with live ammunition, as opposed to only three in the previous year, per the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
It marked the deadliest year for Palestinian children since 2002, with 35 children killed.
The occupation also demolished or seized 953 Palestinian residential and commercial buildings across the occupied West Bank, usually with little to no prior notice, displacing 1,031 people, according to a December 2022 UN report.
In the same year, Israeli authorities sealed off four artesian water wells in Area B, up from two in the four previous years combined.
The four wells were the primary drinking water source for at least 3,500 Palestinian families in nine communities.
The Israeli crackdown escalated throughout 2023, culminating in an all-out deadly military operation in Jenin in the summer of that year.
The Israeli occupation forces killed a total of 204 Palestinians in the West Bank before 7 October, including 44 children, per Marsad Shireen [ShireenWatch].
The demolitions and settlement expansion also continued, with the Israeli authorities demolishing or seizing 884 buildings, most of them homes, and displacing nearly 3,000 Palestinians, according to Marsad Shireen.
In a September 2023 interview with the Associated Press, days before the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation against the Israeli army broke out in the under-siege Gaza Strip, former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, Tamir Pardo, described the Israeli set-up in the West Bank as an "apartheid state."
"In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state," he said.
In 2022 and 2023, 350 new Israeli settlements and 348 settlement outposts were established.
Marsad Shireen documented 3,607 settler attacks on Palestinian individuals, buildings, and land in 2022 and 2023.
The current deadly Israeli crackdown - or rather slow-motion ethnic cleansing campaign - in the West Bank has raised new fears and new challenges in the struggle against Tel Aviv's genocidal war on the Palestinian people.
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