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THERE IS NO CEASE-FIRE IN THE WEST BANK  
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Mairav Zonszein
November 11, 2025
The New York Times
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_ The United Nations reported that this October — peak olive
harvest season in the West Bank — saw the highest number of settler
attacks in the area since it began documenting them in 2006. Over 260
attacks were recorded, an average of eight per day. _

Last week, military bulldozers demolished houses belonging to
Palestinians in the West Bank., Zain Jaafar/Agence France-Presse

 

On Oct. 10, the same day the cease-fire went into effect in Gaza, a
group of Palestinians in the West Bank village of Beita set out to
harvest their olives when they were assaulted by a group of Israelis.
Twenty Palestinians were reported wounded
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including two elderly men; one man was hospitalized with a bullet
wound. Nine days later, a masked Israeli settler was filmed by an
American journalist
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53-year-old Palestinian woman
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with a club in the village of Turmus Aya. She was knocked unconscious,
and the video clip captured her as she fell to the ground under an
olive tree. On Oct. 25, video footage showed
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soldiers assaulting a 65-year-old Palestinian man in Nahalin, near
Bethlehem, in front of his family. On Nov. 8, Palestinian harvesters
in Beita once again came under attack. Israeli activists who joined
them to provide a protective presence were assaulted as well,
including a 77-year-old art school principal, who suffered a broken
jaw and cheekbone
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Two Reuters employees were injured in the incident.

Most of the assailants have not been apprehended. The United Nations
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reported that this October — peak olive harvest season in the West
Bank — saw the highest number of settler attacks in the area since
it began documenting them in 2006. Over 260 attacks were recorded, an
average of eight per day.

This is a serious acceleration of violence, but it is not new or
isolated. Since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, over 1,000 Palestinians
in the West Bank have been killed
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Israeli forces and settlers; one in every five dead is a child. In the
same period, over 3,000 Palestinians
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say they have been displaced from their homes and lands largely
because of Israeli settler violence. Another estimated 40,000
Palestinians have been displaced
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Bank by Israel Defense Force operations. In the past two years, Israel
has erected nearly 1,000 barriers
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and makeshift checkpoints across the West Bank, suffocating
Palestinians’ ability to move and work freely.

This is all part of the Israeli government’s explicit agenda of
expanding and deepening its control over the West Bank. Members of
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition are clearly determined
to formally annex
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the West Bank in order to preclude the establishment of a Palestinian
state. (Mr. Netanyahu himself hedges on the issue.)

Most Israelis rarely think about the West Bank. Many are not aware of
the daily violence and displacement of Palestinians and, as is the
case with domestic coverage of the war in Gaza, Israeli mainstream
media seldom show the reality on the ground. When they do, it is
presented as the exception instead of what is clearly policy. The map
Israelis see on nightly weather forecasts and the one used in most
classrooms shows what is known as Greater Israel, an area of land that
stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. On it, there
is no demarcation of the pre-1967 borders, known as the Green Line,
between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Though the Israeli
miliary has occupied the West Bank since 1967, the term
“occupation” rarely appears in Israeli media or public discourse.

For most Jewish Israelis, Israel and the occupied territories are seen
as more and more geographically seamless. This shift has taken place
over the past 25 years, in the wake of the collapse of the Oslo peace
accords, the second intifada, the vanishing of the Israeli peace camp
and, along with it, the long-held hope of land for peace deals and a
two-state solution. The state’s institutionalization of control over
land, resources and people beyond the Green Line is only one piece of
the way Israel has already effectively annexed
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the territory.

That process of backdoor annexation accelerated three years ago, when
Bezalel Smotrich, a messianic settler ideologue, was granted as part
of his party’s coalition agreement with Mr. Netanyahu the role of
effective governor of the West Bank. Mr. Smotrich established a new
government body called the Settlement Administration and assumed
authority over everything defined as daily civilian affairs, including
housing, planning and roads. In so doing, he transferred powers from
the military officials ostensibly, since 1967, presiding over a
temporary military occupation to civilians in government aligned with
Mr. Smotrich’s vision of permanent Israeli sovereignty.

Mr. Smotrich has ratcheted up every aspect of Israeli control in the
West Bank. On his watch, nearly 50,000 housing units
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been approved, including more than 25,000
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this year alone, a massive increase over the previous years. He has
facilitated expropriation of extensive swaths
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territory in the West Bank, declaring these parcels Israeli state
land. In three years Mr. Smotrich appropriated almost as many acres as
Israel had seized in the three decades since the Oslo Accords. He
legalized and funded settler outposts built illegally under Israeli
law. He pushed Israeli authorities to approve construction in a part
of the West Bank known as E1
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an area east of Jerusalem that all previous U.S. administrations have
warned Israel to leave alone, since building Israeli settlements there
would bifurcate the West Bank and render Palestinian territorial
contiguity even more difficult to imagine.

But perhaps Mr. Smotrich’s most ambitious plan is to change how the
state registers land ownership in Area C of the West Bank
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the 60 percent of the territory that has been under exclusive Israeli
control since Oslo. The policy now places a much more stringent burden
of proof of ownership on Palestinians, making it even easier for the
Israeli government to take over land in the West Bank. Once done, that
transfer is almost impossible for Palestinians to reverse.

That is why, when President Trump says annexation is off the table
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it doesn’t mean much. In 2020, when Israel signed the Abraham
Accords, the agreement not to formally annex the West Bank was used as
a bargaining chip at the negotiating table. Israel can once again
promise the global community it will not formally annex the West Bank,
but it has visibly transformed the territory already. The sight of
Palestinian shepherds, farmers and picnicking families, once common in
the pastoral landscape of the Jordan Valley and areas between
Jerusalem and Jericho, has become rare. It’s more common to see
small groups of armed Israeli settlers watching over grazing sheep.

International focus on maintaining the cease-fire in Gaza is crucial,
but the West Bank must not be disconnected from these efforts, or
considered a closed case because of Mr. Trump’s theoretical red line
on formal annexation. Recognizing Palestinian statehood, as more
Western allies of Israel have done recently, and reasserting the
imperative of a path to Palestinian statehood, as the U.N.’s New
York Declaration in September outlined
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plan gave a nominal nod to, are important steps, but sorely lacking in
real impact.

A U.S., European or Arab policy that says no to formal annexation but
does nothing to stop de facto annexation will be interpreted by Israel
as an invitation to continue apace. Israel has made life in the West
Bank increasingly unbearable for the approximately three million
Palestinians living there. Such conditions are disastrous for
Palestinians and dangerous for Israel.

If Palestinians believe there is no prospect for freedom or
self-determination, their despair and frustration will only grow, as
will Israel’s impulse to impose more and more repressive security
measures. This could, at least for a while, pressure Palestinians to
continue to endure their fate, or push those with the means to leave
the West Bank. What’s more likely is that it will eventually lead
— as it did on Oct. 7 — to an explosion of violence and thus
potentially give Israel pretext to do in the West Bank what it has
done in Gaza.

_Mairav Zonszein is a contributing writer for Opinion and the senior
Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group._

* West Bank
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* Israeli Occupation
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* Settler violence
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