With international attention trained on the Gaza Strip, Jewish settlers backed by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank are stepping up a campaign to displace vulnerable Palestinian communities in the largest expulsion drive in decades, residents and human rights groups say.
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel, which killed more than 1,400 people, settlers are using the cover of the war to “attempt to redraw the West Bank demographic map,” according to Dror Etkes, the director and founder of the settlement watchdog group Kerem Navot.
The idea, he says, is to force out Palestinians from what is known as Area C—the mostly rural hinterland of the occupied territory, envisioned by the international community as the core of a future Palestinian state—and to confine them in enclaves in Area A, which includes the urban centers of the territory. (These area designations were part of interim peace accords between Israelis and Palestinians going back to the 1990s).
The effort to pressure some Palestinians to leave Area C is not new. But Etkes said that some Jewish Israeli settlers and Israeli officials see the Israel-Hamas war as an opportunity to widen the initiative through intensifying violence and the intimidation of Palestinians.
Several Israeli officials denied the claim in interviews, including Moshe Solomon, the deputy speaker of the Knesset from the pro-settler Religious Zionist Party.
Calls for a mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in both the West Bank and Gaza have proliferated since the war with Hamas began a month ago, in what rights groups say is a process of mainstreaming deportation in the Israeli discourse.
In one particularly stark example, an Israeli intelligence ministry proposed the mass deportation of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Egypt, as a part of a position paper on war options. The ministry has no authority over intelligence policy or other government agencies, and there’s no indication the paper was discussed in high-level government forums. But the very existence of such a document seemed to reflect the thinking in at least some pockets within the government.
Mass deportation has also been promoted by hard-line lawmakers, including Ariel Kallner of the ruling Likud party. In a social media post, Kallner urged an even harsher repeat of the 1947-49 Nakba, or catastrophe in which about 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes.
Rights groups fear that the rhetoric is helping legitimize violence against Palestinian civilians. Settler attacks have risen dramatically during the war, from an average of three to seven a day, according to the United Nations Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The Israeli army is also involved in the violence, with security forces participating in or accompanying nearly half of the settler attacks, according to OCHA.
In the main area of displacement so far, the south Hebron Hills, Palestinians and Israeli activists say settlers are breaking into homes, beating civilians, firing their guns, cutting electricity, blocking roads, and issuing ultimatums to leave or be killed. Some of the settler violence has been filmed by Israeli activists and Palestinians.
The spokesman’s office of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that soldiers’ orders are to prevent violations against Palestinians and asserted that those who fail to do so are disciplined. Solomon, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, who until last week chaired a subcommittee on the West Bank, reacted angrily when asked about soldiers and settlers engaging in violence against Palestinian civilians, saying, “This is demagoguery that tries to turn things on their head.” He said Palestinians pose a “constant threat” to Israelis living in the West Bank—citing shooting attacks and other violence.
The escalation comes within a climate of shock and outrage among Israelis from Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of the communities bordering Gaza. In addition to the mass killing of civilians and soldiers—marked by atrocities—the group also dragged more than 200 hostages back to Gaza, including elderly people and children. It was the single deadliest day for Israel in its history. But Israel’s devastating strikes in Gaza, with their high toll among civilians, have also kept passions boiling among Palestinians in the West Bank.
Evidence of the vanishing of Palestinian communities can be seen on hilltops and in valleys of the south Hebron Hills, which are now empty except for a few ramshackle structures. About 15 communities located in the south Hebron Hills, the Jordan Valley, and in herding areas east of Ramallah, housing a total of 133 families, have been emptied since Oct. 7, with more coming under settler threat, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. The group provided a detailed account of the violence and threats allegedly deployed against each community. Most of the residents fled to larger villages or towns.
On Saturday in the south Hebron Hills, one of the displaced individuals, Issa Abu al-Kibash, a bearded 77-year-old with a heart ailment, seemed dazed as he looked across a valley at the dwelling he had to leave behind on Oct. 13, in the Khirbet al-Radhem community of 50 inhabitants located to the west of a Jewish settlement called Asael.
“After the war started, settlers told us that our sheep are not allowed out of the village,” Abu al-Kibash said. “First, they kicked out our neighbors and threatened them and destroyed their wheat truck. My neighbor fled. Then, the morning after, they destroyed his house. A day after, they came to my house and beat me.”
Abu al-Kibash said that one of the settlers struck him in the head and stomach with his gun. He pulled up his robe, revealing a large purple contusion on his stomach.
“All of my life was invested here. This area was calm—we never had problems here.” He said his children had to sell their flock of sheep for less than market value because there was no pastureland in the area where he took refuge.
As Abu al-Kibash spoke, Israeli soldiers arrived on the scene, broke up the interview and detained him and others—including four journalists and an Israeli activist—along a highway.
“They need to be scared. Otherwise they will kill us,” one of the soldiers said, referring to Palestinians. “This old man as well. If he has a chance, he will kill us. We are in a war over our lives.” Police arrived within 30 minutes and told the soldiers to release everyone.
The IDF spokesman did not respond to a query about Abu al-Kibash’s displacement.
With many of the soldiers normally stationed in the West Bank relocated to Gaza and the conflict’s northern fronts, the IDF has called up local settlers to form rapid response teams in their own areas, a major factor in the spike in violence against Palestinian civilians, rights groups say.
But Yochai Damri, the chairman of the Mount Hebron Regional Council, dismissed that allegation as “nonsense”
“The settlers aren’t doing anything—99.9 percent of them are not violent,” Damri said.
When asked why so many Palestinians had fled, Damri responded: “I haven’t got the vaguest idea why they left.”
He also said that the allegation that settlers are trying to forcibly transfer Palestinians from Area C to Area A is “nonsense” and a “blood libel.”
Palestinians and video footage tell a different story. “Everything became more complicated because settler militias took advantage of the war to escalate their actions,” said Hafez Hureini, a community leader in At-Tuwani, a town that serves as the gateway to the south Hebron Hills—an area known to Palestinians as Masafer Yatta. “At-Tuwani and Masafer Yatta are under siege,” he said.
The displacements pale in comparison to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, where up to 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in the past month of fighting, according to medical officials in Gaza. But some 30 Israeli human rights groups said in a joint appeal last week that the ongoing displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank should also be watched closely.
“In the absence of significant international pressure to calm things down, this will just accelerate,” said Yehuda Shaul, the co-director of Ofek: The Israeli Center for Public Affairs.
A retired Israeli general and former senior defense official said he was also worried by the surge in settler violence. “It has to be suppressed,” said Amos Gilad, the former head of the security and political department in the defense ministry. “It harms security, and it is an unacceptable phenomenon that must be addressed.”
But Menachem Klein, a professor emeritus of political science at Bar Ilan University, said that meaningful action against the settlers is unlikely. “The settler movement is the establishment in Israel today,” he said. “There is no distinction between the settler leadership and the government. The violence reflects the government’s desire.”