Report: Israeli plan to settle "one million settlers in the West Bank by 2030"

Settlers, backed by the Israeli military, have managed to displace some 1,390 Palestinians, including 660 children, in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023, through violence, restrictions on movement and coercive measures.

This data was reported by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

According to the report: Settlers, in various parts of the West Bank, launched 1,084 attacks targeting the Palestinian presence, 107 of which resulted in casualties, including dead and wounded, while 859 attacks caused damage to property, during the period between October 7, 2023 and July 8, 2024.

Displacement of 5 Bedouin communities

A report issued by the “Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission” states that the measures of the Israeli authorities and the settlers’ attacks “contributed to the displacement of 5 Palestinian Bedouin communities, consisting of 18 families and including 118 individuals, during the first half of 2024.”

The same period witnessed the establishment of 17 new settlement outposts on the occupied Palestinian territories, bringing the total to 95 outposts controlling an area estimated at about 412 thousand dunams, in addition to 190 settlements inhabited by about 740 thousand settlers.

According to the report: “Researchers and experts agree that settler terrorism, in parallel with the war of extermination on the Gaza Strip, has become an almost daily activity that cannot be separated from the state’s policy aimed at consolidating the occupation, its plan for ethnic cleansing, and enabling settlement expansion.”

Incubators for breeding terrorist thought

In the same context, the National Bureau for Defending Land and Resisting Settlements points out that “the criminal acts of settler groups, whose arming was facilitated by Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and who provided them with security and legal cover, have entered an advanced stage of organized terrorism; while the settlements have turned into incubators for the incubation of terrorist thought and the formation of armed extremist organizations.”

"Violence is committed by private individuals, not the state."

A report issued by the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, "B'Tselem", indicates, in the context of its reference to settler violence, that it is part of the policy of the occupying state, which permits it and enables its implementation, as part of the strategy of the apartheid regime seeking to complete the process of seizing Palestinian lands.

The report explains: “The acts of terrorism carried out by settlers enable Israel to claim that the violence is committed by ordinary individuals and not by the state or its security services, while it strategically benefits from this abnormal situation without being subject to international criticism.”

He continues: “On the surface, it appears that there are two separate tracks: the state seizes Palestinian land in public and official ways, while the settlers can also seize land in order to achieve their goals, using violence against the Palestinians on their own initiative and for reasons of their own.”

In addition to neglecting the legal complaints of Palestinians regarding their exposure to settler terrorism, the Israeli authorities do not force the settlers to disturb the lands they have seized by force, and even more than that, they give them support to establish “random outposts” and later work to regularize their legal status.

New settlement outposts

For its part, the Israeli Peace Now movement pointed out that Benjamin Netanyahu's government is exploiting the war to create new settlement facts on the ground, as it has authorized the establishment of 25 additional settlement outposts, approved the establishment of 8,721 settlement units in existing settlements, agreed to legalize 5 new settlements, annexed 3 outposts as neighborhoods affiliated with neighboring settlements, and recognized 70 "illegal" settlement outposts.

40 thousand acres since 2024

In the same context, data from the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission and the Jerusalem Center for Legal Aid and Human Rights indicate that the Israeli occupation authorities have announced the seizure of 40,000 dunams since the beginning of 2024. This is with the aim of geographically linking existing settlements or expanding the borders of other settlements, or legitimizing settlement outposts, which ultimately leads to the isolation of Palestinian communities and severing communication between them.

One million settlers in the West Bank

The report quotes Walid Habbas, a researcher at the Palestinian Center for Israeli Studies (Madar), as saying that “the far-right government in Israel, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, began its work at the beginning of 2023 with accelerated practices to achieve the vision of the Minister of Finance from the Religious Zionism Party, Bezalel Smotrich, to raise the number of settlers in the West Bank to one million settlers by 2030, in implementation of the understandings of the coalition agreement, which stipulated that settlement in the West Bank is an inalienable right of the Jews.”

He explains that the most prominent of these practices is the settlement of the status of settlement outposts and their transformation into independent settlements, and the transfer of the powers to use “state lands” from the so-called Civil Administration of the occupation army to civilian ministries led by settlers.

"Evacuating the settlers will become more difficult"

Habbas believes that the Palestinian right to establish an independent state will become more complicated, as evacuating hundreds of thousands of settlers will become more difficult in practice.