Over the past few days, amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, Israeli settlers are reported to have launched a wave of violence in the occupied West Bank.
Since the start of the war on February 28, masked settlers have allegedly killed at least five Palestinians, injured many residents, sexually assaulted and paraded one man, burned cars and homes, and rampaged through villages, according to Reuters reports citing eyewitnesses and rights groups.
West Bank — located to the west of the Jordan river — is a part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories along with Gaza. The latest round of violence comes amid the Israeli government’s push for new settlements on the territory “as attention shifts to the Iran war”, according to an Associated Press report.
Here’s a brief history of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and how the settler project ties with the Israel government’s larger goal of annexing the territory.
Settlement as central to Zionist project
Israeli settlers have long been establishing and expanding their presence in the West Bank with the backing of Israel’s government. But to understand their motivations, one must go back to the first wave of modern Jewish immigration.
Beginning in the late 19th century, Jewish immigrants came to Palestine from Europe, driven by the rise of anti-Semitism and Zionism (the political movement for establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine), alongside anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia.
Sociology Professor Gershon Shafir, writing in the book Settler Citizenship in the Jewish Colonization of Palestine, stated that “the aim of Jewish immigrant-settlers, like most European emigrants, was to acquire land for settlement”.
He cited Menachem Ussishkin, a central eastern European Zionist leader, asking rhetorically: “In order to establish autonomous Jewish community life—or, to be more precise, a Jewish state—in Eretz Israel (Land of Israel), it is necessary… most, of Eretz Israel’s land will be the property of the Jewish people…”
This was initially done by purchasing land, thanks to donations from the likes of banker Baron Edmund de Rothschild, but the approach had natural limitations. It was gradually concluded that a turn to campaigning for political rights was essential to ensure resources remained within the community.
The World Zionist Organisation was a key organisation at this stage in ensuring that land purchased by certain landowners would remain “the perpetual and collective property of the Jewish people” and only be sublet among Jews, Shafir wrote. These exclusive settlements were combined with traditional Russian-style cooperatives, leading to the creation of the “kibbutz” — communal settlements engaging in agriculture and other activities.
In a 2017 article for the International Journal of Law in Context, professor Mazen Masri wrote that it has been argued that the entirety of the “Zionist colonisation project is a form of settler-colonialism”.
Masri said several scholars have pointed to how features of the Zionist movement are characteristic of settler societies — conflict with the native population, controlling the land by displacing them, and separation between the settler society and the native society.
How Israel occupied West Bank
Masri wrote in his article that the transfer of the Arab population was a central theme in the 1930s and 1940s, and became the “prevailing mindset” on the eve of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.
The 1947 UN partition plan proposed dividing Palestine into two Jewish and Arab territories, with Jerusalem under international control. With Arab leaders refusing this two-state solution, conflict erupted soon after. Israel’s victory led to the creation of the Israeli state and forced the displacement of over 7,50,000 Palestinians. This event is remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Almost exactly two decades later, the continued tensions between Arab states and Israel led to the Six-Day War of 1967, which saw Israel capturing the West Bank (then occupied by Jordan), Gaza and East Jerusalem (occupied by Egypt).
In the following years and decades, Israeli control has led to the vast expansion of settlements and a differential system of laws and rules for Palestinian residents.
Since the early 2000s, Israel has been building a planned 700-km barrier to separate the West Bank from Jerusalem and Israel. It began the project after a wave of Palestinian political violence and incidents of terrorism inside Israel during the Second Intifada. The International Court of Justice has ruled that the barrier’s construction breaches international law.
Most countries say Israel’s settlement activity in the West Bank violates international law on military occupations.
In an advisory opinion in 2024, the International Court of Justice said that Israel should stop settlement activity in the West Bank and end its “illegal” occupation of those areas and the Gaza Strip as soon as possible..
Israel disputes that interpretation.
How Israel accelerated annexation plans after October 7 attack
Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, Israel has doubled down on controlling Palestinian territories, citing security threats.
The shift came even as Western nations such as Spain, the UK, France and Australia announced their decision to move towards formally recognising Palestine and its aspirations for statehood.
Last year, Israel approved a housing settlement plan — the E1 plan — that would bisect the occupied West Bank and cut it off from East Jerusalem. Such a settlement would effectively kill off any possibility of a two-State solution.
International leaders, including US President Donald Trump, have opposed Israel plans to annex the West Bank. Trump, in fact, said in September: “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. Nope, I will not allow it. It’s not going to happen. There’s been enough. It’s time to stop now.”
The war in Iran, however, appears to have diverted the world’s attention. There have been over 109 reports of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the war with Iran, Reuters reported citing Israeli monitoring group Yesh Din.
According to UN estimates, by 2023, approximately 465,000 settlers resided in the West Bank, spread across around 300 settlements and outposts, while some 230,000 settlers resided in East Jerusalem.
The think tank International Crisis Group (ICG) identified two key faces of the government’s recent expansionist policy in a report last year: far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich (finance portfolio) and Itamar Ben-Gvir (national security). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party has needed support from far-right parties in recent years to ensure its political survival.
The ICG report notes that in exchange for this support, Smotrich put forth certain demands, including authority over governance in the West Bank. “Smotrich’s powers extend to the demolition of structures built without a permit in the West Bank… In 2023, Israel demolished markedly more Palestinian homes in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem than it had the previous year… At the same time, it practically ceased dismantling illegal structures built by settlers in the West Bank,” ICG’s report said.
On what comes next, it stated that Israel formally annexing the region may lead to some uproar among its ally nations in the West, and this may be driving the current approach.
However, it cautioned, “Even if Israel never formally declares the West Bank’s annexation, the reality is that a substantial and growing number of West Bank Palestinians already live under Israeli sovereignty, though without the rights of Israeli citizens and in a polity that Israel has carved up so as to render a Palestinian state impossible.”
Palestinians inspect a torched vehicle following Israeli settlers' rampage through nearby Nablus-area villages on Sunday night, in West Bank village of Deir al-Hatab, Monday, March 23, 2026. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed) 
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