OCCUPIED WEST BANK – When Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, leaned into a microphone on Channel 14 News last week and declared that Israeli settlers “will not be able to live here in peace until we expel all the Arabs from this area,” he was not speaking in a vacuum. The Likud lawmaker was giving voice to a policy that has been accelerating on the ground for nearly three years, a policy driven not by a fringe few, but by the highest levels of the Israeli state.

“There should not be any Arabs there at all,” Vaturi said, using the biblical name “Judea and Samaria” for the occupied West Bank. “We need to strengthen Jewish settlement… They all need to be expelled from here.” It was the latest, most explicit, in a series of eliminationist statements from a senior parliamentarian. In November 2023, Vaturi praised the ultraethno-nationalist rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was outlawed for racism and incitement, saying Kahane was “right” about expelling Palestinians. He has also publicly called for Israel to “separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza” and demanded Israel “burn Gaza.”

Vaturi’s words are not idle. Investigative analysis of military orders, settlement data, displacement records, and interviews with Palestinian residents, Israeli and international human rights organisations, and United Nations investigators reveals a multi-pronged, state-driven apparatus that is emptying Palestinian communities, seizing land through obscure legal mechanisms, accelerating settlement expansion, and weaponising archaeology, all while the death toll in the West Bank climbs to its highest in nearly two decades.

A Surge In Killing And Forced Displacement:

The scale of violence that has swept the West Bank since October 2023 is staggering. A new report by Oxfam found that more Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank during the period of Israel’s war on Gaza than in any other year over the previous 17 years. Palestinian health authorities record over 1,152 Palestinians killed, including 239 children, since October 2023. UN figures, covering October 2023 to April 2026, document at least 1,081 Palestinians killed, among them more than 235 children. In the first months of 2026 alone, Israeli forces killed at least 71 Palestinians in the occupied territory.

“The mounting killing of civilians in the West Bank is tragic and horrifying,” said Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam’s humanitarian policy specialist. “While the eyes of the world have been on Gaza, attacks in the West Bank have been accelerating.”

The killings are accompanied by the largest wave of forced displacement the West Bank has witnessed in decades. Oxfam recorded nearly 46,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced over the past three years, compared with just over 13,000 during the previous 14. The drivers include military raids, settler attacks, demolitions, and a choking network of movement restrictions. A record 925 obstacles now restrict the mobility of around three million Palestinians, a 43% increase on the two-decade average.

Children have borne a disproportionate burden. Oxfam found that children made up more than 20% of Palestinians killed in the territory over the past two decades, and that Israeli forces and settlers killed more Palestinian children in the West Bank in the last three years than in the 17 years before that: 268 children killed between 2023 and the end of 2025, against 225 between 2006 and the end of 2022.

State Complicity: “Not The Work Of A Few Extremist Settlers.”

The persistent narrative that settler violence is the work of renegade extremists has been systematically dismantled. A UN Commission of Inquiry concluded earlier this year that Israeli authorities are directly implicated in settler violence that has killed, injured, and displaced Palestinians. The commission found that Israeli occupation authorities have enabled such attacks through military and financial support while fostering a climate of impunity. It went further: the violence serves broader state objectives, including territorial expansion, displacement of Palestinians, and annexation of occupied land.

“The relentless, daily assaults by Israeli settlers against Palestinians are intolerable, and must end,” said commission chair S. Muralidhar, who urged international action to dismantle settlements and halt the violence.

Amnesty International, in a report published this month, challenged the “prevailing view that settlements were the work of rogue actors or what the international community has repeatedly labelled as extremist settlers, organisations or one or two ministers.” Secretary General Agnès Callamard stated bluntly: “What we are witnessing is deliberate, state-led annexation, in complete violation of international law unfolding before the eyes of the entire world.”

Impunity is structural. Israeli human rights group Yesh Din documented in January 2020 that 91% of files relating to settler violence against Palestinians were closed without an indictment. “No one is putting the pressure on Israel or on the Israeli authorities to stop this, and so the settlers feel it, they feel the complete impunity that they’re just free to continue to do this,” said Allegra Pacheco, director of the West Bank Protection Consortium, a coalition of NGOs supporting Palestinian communities against displacement.

The Hidden Legal Machinery: Military Orders Redraw The Map.

Behind the scenes, a little-known legal mechanism is radically reshaping the West Bank. Israeli human rights group Bimkom has documented a dramatic acceleration in the use of military orders to establish, expand, or divide settlement jurisdiction areas. Since October 2023, the Israeli government has issued 114 such orders, roughly the same number as during the entire 22 years preceding the Gaza war. These orders have added around 6,200 acres that will lay the groundwork for 53 settlements, including 39 entirely new ones.

Most disturbingly, Bimkom’s research reveals that settlement jurisdiction areas established in 2026 have, for the first time, been designated on land previously inhabited by Palestinian communities that were only recently displaced. The cases of Ein Samia and Mu’arrajat Centre, whose populations were forced out by Israeli settlers, are stark examples. “In these cases, jurisdiction orders are being used to formalise Israeli control over areas from which Palestinian communities have already been displaced, making their return increasingly difficult,” Bimkom stated. The group said the findings suggest “a shift beyond the expansion of existing settlements” toward creating substantial planning and legal barriers that effectively prevent Palestinians from ever returning to their land.

The strategy is complemented by sweeping cabinet decisions. Recently, the Israeli cabinet announced measures that make it easier for settlers to buy land in the occupied West Bank and give Israeli officials stronger powers to enforce laws on Palestinians. The Finance Minister declared the measures “fundamentally change the legal and civic reality in the West Bank” and would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.” Meanwhile, nearly 47,390 housing units were advanced, approved, or tendered in settlements in 2025 alone, almost double the 26,170 of the previous year.

Annexation Through Archaeology: The Heritage Bill.

In an adjacent tactic, Israel is extending state control over ancient sites across the West Bank, a move Palestinians and Israeli rights groups condemn as cultural annexation. The “Heritage Authority in Judea and Samaria” bill, which passed one of three votes in the Knesset in May and could face final approval before elections expected by October, would place Roman, Byzantine, and Crusader-era archaeological sites under the Israeli Ministry of Heritage and permit “expropriation and purchase of real estate” in the occupied territory.

For the Palestinian village of Sebastia, near the ancient site of the same name, the consequences are already tangible. The village, whose residents trace their lineage back centuries, relies heavily on tourism to the archaeological ruins that sit on a UNESCO tentative list. In late 2025, Israel announced a plan to seize about 1,800 dunams (445 acres) at the site, claiming it was for development. Village officials say the confiscation swallows up around 5,000 olive trees, water resources, and roads. “They are incorporating areas containing water resources, roads and antiquities, leaving us as residents without any resources. It is part of settlement expansion,” said Sebastia Deputy Mayor Nizar Kayed.

Restaurant owner Nahed Sakha, whose business sits on land slated for confiscation, said tourism had already collapsed because of the regional war. “It seems that the Israeli plan is to isolate the archaeological site from the people,” he said. The PA’s tourism minister, Hani Al-Hayek, told Reuters that “control over these antiquities is intended to expand control and expand settlements in these areas, deep inside Palestinian territories.”

Peace Now called the heritage bill “an annexationist measure in every respect” that would trigger broad-scale land confiscation. Even the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities has publicly opposed it, writing to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the law “will undoubtedly lead to an immediate deterioration in Israel’s international relations in the field of archaeology, and it will also have an impact on other areas of science and research.”

Bill co-sponsor Zvi Sukkot of the pro-settler Ethno-Zionist Party defended the measure, telling Reuters it was about protecting remnants dating to biblical times and proving “the ties between the people of Israel and this land.” Sukkot, like many in Netanyahu’s coalition, opposes a Palestinian state and advocates full annexation. His party’s ideology infuses the government’s accelerating annexation agenda.

Genocide And The Targeting Of Children:

The UN Commission of Inquiry’s latest report, issued just this week, found that Israel has committed genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity across the occupied Palestinian territory. It specifically noted that the government deliberately targeted children “to weaken demographic vitality and deny the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.” The finding adds a legal dimension to the demographic engineering already visible in forced displacement and settlement expansion.

Vaturi’s call to “expel all the Arabs” is thus not an outlier but a distillation of what multiple international bodies now describe as a deliberate, state-led campaign to eliminate the Palestinian presence from large swaths of the West Bank. As Pacheco put it, the settlers operate with the backing of the Israeli government and military, feeling “complete impunity.” To force Palestinians out, settlements are paired with “harassment, intimidation and violence,” Peace Now stated.

For the residents of Sebastia, the herders of Mu’arrajat Centre, the children killed in Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus, and the tens of thousands displaced from their homes, the evidence is everywhere—in the confiscation orders pinned to olive trees, in the new settlement outposts on hilltops, in the ancient ruins that now serve as instruments of annexation, and in the words of a deputy speaker who says openly what the state machinery enforces silently every day.

Source: Veritas Press C.I.C. | Multi News Agencies