Violence as Policy
Hagit Ofran is Co-Director of the Settlement Watch program of Peace Now.
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
A colleague of mine—someone who, like me, has been tracking settlement activity in the West Bank for years—wrote to me recently: “We can’t keep up.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Over the past year alone, more than 77 new outposts have sprung up across the occupied territories—more than one every week. Settlers have carved out over 170 kilometers of new roads through the West Bank in the past two years. Large swaths of land have been closed off to Palestinians by military checkpoints and roadblocks.
While Israel’s Netanyahu-Smotrich government sends our soldiers on impossible and morally untenable missions in Gaza, it is also relentlessly accelerating its project of de facto annexation in the West Bank. Since the start of 2025, approximately 20,000 new housing units have been approved in Israeli settlements. Billion-shekel infrastructure projects—primarily roads—are being advanced to pave the way, quite literally, for the doubling of the settler population. Just this week, the government advanced the E1 plan—a move that, if carried out, would strike a devastating blow to any remaining hope for a viable Palestinian state.
But one of the most alarming developments in recent years has been the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from Area C—and, increasingly, from parts of Area B as well. Hundreds of thousands of dunams have been effectively closed to Palestinians due to violent settler activity. More than 80 Palestinian communities have been forced to flee due to ongoing threats, harassment, and physical attacks by settlers.
For those who closely follow events in the occupied territories, the recent surge in settler violence has been impossible to ignore. Two weeks ago, Odeh Al-Hadaleen—a teacher and community activist from Umm al-Kheir in the South Hebron Hills—was shot dead by a settler. A couple of weeks before that, Sayfollah Musallet, a Palestinian-American was beaten to death by settlers and another Palestinian, Mohammed a-Shalabi was shot dead in the village of Sinjil. This week, Moein Deriya from Aqraba, near Nablus, was killed by settler gunfire; seven others were injured. In many other cases, Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers during clashes that erupted when settlers entered Palestinian towns.
The common thread in all these incidents is clear: they occurred inside Palestinian communities or immediately adjacent to them. Even if, as the army and settler leadership often claim, deadly force was used in response to stone-throwing, the fact remains that it was settlers who entered the Palestinian villages—not the other way around.
Settler violence today falls broadly into two categories. The first consists of organized attacks involving dozens of settlers descending on Palestinian towns—burning property, smashing windows, beating residents, and occasionally opening fire. These pogrom-like events typically take place in larger, more established Palestinian communities in Area B.
The second, more insidious form of violence is the daily harassment faced by small, isolated Palestinian villages and herding communities—mostly in Area C. In these cases, a handful of settlers, often from unauthorized farm-outposts, carry out near-daily acts of intimidation. They bring their cattle to graze in cultivated Palestinian fields, destroying crops. They herd sheep between homes, terrorizing families. Sometimes, they don’t bother with livestock—they simply arrive to menace. The result is a steady erosion of Palestinian presence. More than 80 communities—over 2,000 people—have already been displaced by this daily, grinding violence.
The Israeli military plays a disturbing role. In large-scale settler attacks, soldiers routinely fail to prevent the attacks and usually turn their guns on Palestinians who are trying defend themselves from the settlers. In the first week of August alone, the UN Humanitarian Affairs Unit reported that 2 Palestinians were killed due to settler attacks, 29 were injured—14 by settlers and 15 by IDF soldiers. Police rarely investigate these crimes seriously. A coordinated settler campaign has even succeeded in neutering the Shin Bet’s ability to act against extremist settler violence. While settler leaders and right-wing politicians occasionally offer tepid condemnations of these attacks, such statements ring hollow.
More troubling still, the daily violence—the harassment, the threats, the intimidation—faces no condemnation at all. On the contrary, it enjoys widespread support from settler leadership, security forces, and the Israeli government. In 2024 alone, the state allocated 75 million shekels for “security components” for settlement outposts—illegal by any official standard. Because these outposts lack permits, the government doesn’t directly fund their infrastructure—but it does provide solar panels, off-road vehicles, electric gates, surveillance cameras, and other “security” equipment. This funding has fueled a dramatic surge in the number of outposts.
An additional 40 million shekels annually goes to a program for “preserving open spaces” in settlements municipalities. In practice, this means carving out new roads, salaries, vehicles, and drones for dozens of settler “inspectors” who forcibly remove Palestinians from what Israel calls “state land.”
The government makes no effort to hide its intentions. In recent months, ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Orit Strock have held public ceremonies distributing vehicles to settler “farms”—posing for photos with known violent settlers, some of whom are under international sanctions. The government calls their activities “preserving state lands” as part of the “battle for Area C.” But in reality, it is a systematic campaign of expulsion. Our recent joint report with Kerem Navot shows that most of the land settlers have taken over is not “state land” at all—but private Palestinian land.
For years, Israel has tried to push Palestinians out of Area C through a combination of bureaucratic and legal tools: denying building permits, demolishing homes, declaring vast swaths of land as “firing zones” or “nature reserves.” Now, settler violence has become the most effective method of all. Over 2,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced, and settlers now control more than one-seventh of the West Bank land through those farm outposts.
Violence has always been a feature of the occupation. But what we’re seeing now is different. It is not random or rogue—it is strategic. Settler violence, once dismissed as fringe extremism, has become a central pillar of Israeli policy in the West Bank.
