The Gaza-fication of the West Bank

Israel Is Turning the West Bank Into Gaza. There’s Only One Way to Stop It

Israel’s ongoing Gaza-fication of the West Bank is threatened as long as there are on-the-ground witnesses. As it works to get rid of them by barring and deporting activists, foreign intervention may be required

Abby Seitz, Haaretz, 15 June 2026

Sanitized as a counter-terrorism effort named “Operation Iron Wall,” the IDF displaced more than 40,000 residents from Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps in the northern West Bank in early 2025. Journalists and UN envoys on the ground at the time pointed to similarities between the scale and brutality of Israel’s operations in Gaza.

Last week, Haaretz revealed the Israeli army’s big plans for the ruins of Jenin: establishing a permanent military outpost – and breaking a 33-year status quo by building in the Palestinian Authority-controlled Area A for the first time since the Oslo Accords divvied up the West Bank in 1993.

While the army was busy razing Gaza and Jenin, Israeli settlers carried out their own ethnic cleansing campaign across the West Bank. According to B’Tselem and UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs data, 5,910 Palestinians – from 66 rural and Bedouin communities in Area C – were forced to leave their homes between January 2023 and April 2026 due to settler violence and access restrictions.

A community’s impossible decision to leave is bookended by years of harassment: loss of access to water and land, arson attacks and pogroms that go unpunished, loss of livelihood, violent state-funded farm outposts multiplying like rabbits and setting up camp beside a family’s home.

These attacks are well-documented, because unlike Gaza, the West Bank remains mostly open to the people who record these atrocities: reporters, humanitarian workers, human rights defenders and citizen journalists. Palestinian journalists have long been targeted by the IDF in the West Bank – and, more recently, by settlers – but it appears that Israel is stepping up its efforts to rid this swathe of land of witnesses by weaponizing closed military zone orders and targeting foreign activists.

Activists – some on Jewish and Israeli programs like Hashomer Hatzair’s Achvat Amim – who travel to the West Bank to partake in protective presence, have been deported and banned from re-entering Israel for up to 10 years, or had their visas revoked. In the most recent and most extreme instance, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence told Haaretz that one of its Jewish activists was deported from Umm al-Khair back to the United States in May and given a lifetime ban for the nonviolent and vague charge of “disturbing a soldier in his duties.”

North of Ramallah, two Bedouin communities that were under attack asked Rabbi Arik Ascherman to facilitate around-the-clock protective presence shifts for months until both communities were given yearlong closed military zone orders that prevented Israeli and international activists – whose main objective is to document settler violence and IDF misconduct – from being present on the ground.

The orders are not enforced against the Hilltop Youth residing in nearby illegal outposts, some of which have been demolished repeatedly by the Civil Administration. Both communities – Shakara near Duma, and Khalet as-Sidra – have since been emptied and razed.

As Ascherman told Haaretz’s Matan Golan in January: “The settlers alone aren’t capable of carrying out what they are doing, and we are witness to the fact that the state and security forces aren’t using all the tools available to them.” Israel’s ongoing Gaza-fication of the West Bank is threatened as long as there are on-the-ground witnesses to its campaigns of mass displacement. In their absence, foreign intervention may be required, as condemnations from opposition Knesset politicians, American Jewish institutions and even West Bank settlers themselves have yet to meaningfully affect the escalating state-backed vigilante violence, IDF misconduct or creeping annexation.

And while international pressure has accomplished little in Gaza, it has prevented the expulsion of West Bank villages and, as of last week, halted far-right Bezalel Smotrich’s E1 takeover plan, making it what is likely the last resort remaining to those who seek to stop the Gaza-fication of the West Bank.

The Jewish Ku Klux Klan Has a Calculated Plan for the Palestinians

The local KKK hopes its violence will spur an angry Palestinian reaction to justify murdering more Palestinians and expelling the majority of them to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon

Amira Hass, Haaretz, 15 June 2026

Be aware that for every news report that you read about an act of settler terror, the Jewish Ku Klux Klan is carrying out dozens more acts of assault, harassment and bullying, while the army attacks and abuses Palestinians in dozens of neighborhoods and checkpoints to protect the KKK and its missions.

Be aware as well that these so-called rampages are part of a calculated, multi-pronged plan. Their ultimate goal is a land “cleansed” of Palestinians (in German, that already sounds clichéd). There is a direct line between the events of today and the violent takeover of Palestinian lands and springs by settlers in the 1990s and early 2000s. Similarly, there is a connection between the apathy back then and the fatalism of today, as if the rioters are a biblical swarm of locusts and we are helpless against them. Perhaps the fatalism at least testifies to the fact that some are shocked, rather than delighted, by our hardy pioneers, who remind us of the great-grandfather from an Anita Shapira biography.

Remember that behind every man with a mask, weapon and tzitzit stands a normative society, warm and loving. It comprises of local settlement councils, rabbis, social workers and synagogues. Its warm embrace comes in the form of donations, the provision of herds, and water and support with logistics that enable hundreds of so called rotten apples to take pleasure in abusing the elderly, the young, and children, and then to squat on their land and infest the homes of the owners they’ve evicted.

Do not forget that behind every attack, act of destruction and theft of sheep, there are police officers who do not bother to answer calls for help, and soldiers who rush to the scene to arrest those under attack and join in the beatings, if not killing. And behind everything, there is a glorious legal system – prosecutors and judges – who never knew, saw or heard what was happening around them, while legalizing the abomination called settlements. They sit at home and mourn (or not) for Israeli democracy, and are content with its Jewish part, with their grandchildren, the promotions and pensions.

Please refresh your memory: Every shepherd community that these dark, ultra-kosher forces managed to expel had struggled for decades with the “legal” prohibition against living with dignity that Israeli governments put in place. Civil Administration officials prepared the demolition orders for every new tent or renovated cave dwelling, every connection to water and electricity or installation of solar panels. They signed off on fines for the offense of transporting drinking water in a tanker, using a tractor and grazing their herds. These former officials sit in their homes and mourn (or not) for Israeli democracy, but are proud of their children who go on to “meaningful and value-based” army service which means the killing of many Palestinians and Lebanese.

And regarding the WhatsApp groups of hilltop jugend shouting “gevalt” over the few among them who have been arrested by the police, or over a fraction of an outpost that was destroyed for the eighth time and will be rebuilt tomorrow: behind every person known to have been arrested are dozens of bone-crushing bandits who fall into the category of “no suspects found.”

When you drink beer, or work on research that examines the impact of global warming on the color of butterfly wings, or plan your trip to Rome, choose which watermelon to buy, fill up your bus pass or get quietly angry at your boss at work – what you don’t want to know is indeed happening. Moment by moment, even if our media refrain from reporting it, and the world is preoccupied with other matters, Israel continues its war of annihilation in Gaza. Or rather, in about a third of the 365-square kilometers of the Strip that the state representing the victims of the Holocaust and its survivors allows two million living-dead to stay in, at a density that only the devil could create.

The living-dead walk kilometers between growing piles of trash and stinking puddles of sewage to bring home water. They walk on crutches and one leg waiting for a coupon from the World Food Programme that will keep their families alive, and take their daughters to a makeshift clinic, perhaps there they will know what to do about the fleas, the ticks and the rat bites. As they play music, write poetry, or plant mint and beans among the tents, dozens of their dead loved ones cry out from the ground. And in between, the living are slaughtered by more Israeli bombs.

Pretend you are surprised: The Jewish KKK is hoping for a Palestinian reaction to their violence to advance its goal – a campaign of mass killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, and then a campaign of deportation of the living to Jordan, Syria or Lebanon. The Blue-and-White KKK knows full well that the Palestinians are afraid, shocked and angry. Their hands are tied, and they are alone. Both of their unelected leaderships are concerned with their own survival. No country has issued the appropriate ultimatum to Israel: Stop the pogroms and arrest the perpetrators, now, or we will ban Israelis from our countries and halt all trade and scientific collaboration.

The KKK is waiting for some Palestinians who have personally been assaulted, or have seen their loved ones assaulted, or for young people unable to bear the helplessness in the face of so much evil to get weapons, money and advice from Iran to organize and take revenge on the Israelis. The weeds (as they are termed by other settlers) are waiting for a stone to cause a bus full of children to roll over.

And then the majority of the people of Israel will be united with the heroes of the KKK and the army, which will carry out most of the killing and deportation, because after all, we were attacked. We are the victims.