Israel is turning the West Bank into Gaza. There’s only one way to stop it

Palestinian boys look toward a young Israeli settler after their soccer ball was taken away in the West Bank Bedouin village of Umm al-Khair, June 2026

Abby Seitz writes in Haaretz on 13 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-ficiation of the West Bank.

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