Israel’s government has approved dozens of strategically placed settlements across the West Bank. The goal: to create an irreversible reality on the ground
By Matan Golan, reposted from Haaretz, June 5, 2026
“Today we are establishing historical facts on the ground. The Palestinian state is being erased from the table, not with slogans but with actions. Every community, every neighborhood, every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea.” Minister Bezalel Smotrich made these remarks last August, following the approval of the E1 plan which allows construction between Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. “This is a significant step that effectively erases the illusion of ‘two states’,” he added.
The approval of the plan, intended to disconnect the northern West Bank from its south, and delayed for years due to international pressure, drew public attention worldwide and in Israel.
But beneath the media radar, during the current government’s term, a much broader move has been underway, one that is increasingly closing off the possibility that many Israelis still believe in – territorial separation from the Palestinians. This is being done through the approval of no fewer than 103 settlements, a strategic development that is changing the map of the West Bank.
From 1967 until the formation of the current government, Israel established and legalized 127 settlements in the West Bank. Since the beginning of the current term, that number has almost doubled, for now on paper. Alongside them are more than 300 outposts in various stages of legalization, more than half of them established during the war. Recently, Defense Minister Israel Katz mentioned a move to legalize around 140 of them.
The result is that across the West Bank there are now more than 470 settlement points designed to erase any chance of establishing a Palestinian state. Smotrich has said so in various ways, including in a video on social media this January, dedicated to French President Emmanuel Macron, in which he declared: “This is how you bury the Palestinian idea.” He receives backing from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who last September stated that “a Palestinian state will not be established.”
“This is a real revolution, and it is flying completely under the radar,” says Hagit Ofran of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch team. “The West Bank does not look like it did three years ago. Extremely dramatic things are happening here – the approval of new settlements, a retreat from Oslo to a reality of de facto annexation, a crazy flow of funds for infrastructure and roads, the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, the takeover of a million dunams by farm outposts [four dunams are approximately one acre], and expulsions that are a combined effort of the Israel Defense Forces and settlers – and there is no public discourse about any of it.”
According to Ofran, this is a recipe for an explosion. “The new settlements will create an enormous burden on the defense establishment, which will not only be required to secure them, but also to deal with their effects – the absence of a political horizon and growing despair and pressure among Palestinians, while weakening Israel’s political standing.”
Her view is shared by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, which recently published a document stating that the political-ideological transformation taking place in the West Bank – with the new settlements at its core – creates a severe security and political risk for the State of Israel.
All of this also costs money. According to Peace Now’s monitoring data, the current government has invested at least 19.8 billion shekels ($6.6 billion) in settlement development and infrastructure. That amount, of course, does not include the expected increase in the defense budget, if, as Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, head of Central Command, recently said, “the size of the challenge” requires the establishment of a new division. “People need to understand that there is less money to develop the country because we are busy defending all the areas outside our borders and inside a Palestinian population,” says Ofran.
An analysis of the data on the 103 approved settlements reveals a carefully planned move. It includes steps that Israel avoided for decades, as well as new developments, such as the legalization of settlements in firing zones and the legalization of outposts that were involved in the expulsion of communities. But above all, a clear purpose emerges: The new settlements, some of which are expected to be established in areas that have never had an Israeli presence, are intended to fragment Palestinian areas in the West Bank.
And while Smotrich repeatedly declares this to be a “revolution,” it seems the Israeli public, which turned out in droves to protest for Israel’s democratic and Jewish character, is oblivious to what is happening, despite the clear connection between thwarting the two-state solution and the state’s character.
The phenomenon of Jewish terror has indeed managed to penetrate mainstream media, but it is only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger move towards silent annexation of the West Bank. Those leading this move are not “hilltop youth” or settlers heading outposts, but the government of Israel; and according to experts in academia and civil society organizations, it may already be irreversible. This annexation is happening not only de facto, but also de jure.
A fever pitch of permits
The most important step in the annexation revolution was sealed in the coalition agreements, with Smotrich’s appointment as an additional minister in the Defense Ministry and the establishment of the Settlement Administration, which took over civilian powers in Area C from the Civil Administration. Thus, Smotrich became the authority managing the army’s work on land, legalization, planning and enforcement, legislation in civilian areas through military orders and other matters. Legal advice on these matters was also transferred from the military advocate general, who is bound by international law, to the legal adviser of the Defense Ministry.
In 2023, two complementary steps were taken: In February, the government authorized the security cabinet to discuss the establishment and legalization of settlements in its place, and in June an amendment was approved that shortened the process for obtaining building permits in settlements and transferred the authority to grant permits from the defense minister to Smotrich. The result was a dizzying acceleration in the promotion of construction in the West Bank on the one hand, and expedited approval of settlements away from public scrutiny on the other.
According to Peace Now data, by the end of 2025, more than 40,000 new housing units had been approved in the West Bank – this month Smotrich announced that the number stands at 60,000 – as well as the establishment of 103 settlements. For comparison, in the decade preceding the current government’s term, only six settlements were approved.
Between February 2023 and March 2025, the security cabinet convened three times and approved 28 settlements, all of which were already established outposts or “neighborhoods” split off from the jurisdiction of existing settlements. But from May 2025, the trend intensified, both in terms of the number of settlements approved – 74 in less than a year – and their locations.
Last March, the security cabinet legalized 34 new settlements, including on private Palestinian lands, in areas designated as firing zones and in isolated locations between Palestinian communities. In that same meeting, the chief of staff warned that the move was inconsistent with the IDF’s manpower needs. In response, the coalition reprimanded him.
The 103 approved settlements include 48 legalized outposts, 24 expansions or splits from existing settlements and 31 new settlements, including four that were evacuated in the 2005 disengagement.
However, the most prominent point emerging from the data analysis is the spatial logic guiding the permits: Alongside the thickening of existing settlement blocs, for example in the Shiloh bloc and the Talmonim bloc, there is a move to densify settlement points along Area C roads and in isolated locations, creating barriers between areas under PA control and preventing territorial contiguity.
This directly serves Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan” vision to create disconnected Palestinian cantons and put an end to Palestinian national aspirations. Last September, Smotrich clarified that the only voting rights Palestinians would be given would be for municipal elections “in their cantons, where they will be managed” and not “for a sovereign parliament.”
According to Ofran, this is not a future vision. “Already today, the situation in the West Bank is that Israelis have rights and Palestinians do not. It’s not for nothing that the world calls this apartheid,” she says. “The densification of settlements between Palestinian areas and the collapse of the Palestinian Authority are a dramatic move that effectively prevents a political compromise.
“Why? Because for that, you need an entity with which a compromise can be reached. You cannot develop a Palestinian entity and a Palestinian economy when its territory contains hundreds of points under the control of another state, including the surrounding roads. It simply doesn’t work.”
The Oslo Accords defined enclaves of Areas A and B scattered across 40 percent of the West Bank, with corridors of Area C between them – from most of which Israel was supposed to withdraw. But the temporary became permanent, and the Oslo map became a trap for the Palestinians. According to data from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, there are now 925 roadblocks in the West Bank, mainly at the entrances to villages, and the roads connecting Palestinian areas are increasingly made obsolete.
Movement from one cluster of villages to another has become a complex task, as checkpoints open and close without warning, while Palestinians’ access to services and employment outside the enclaves in which they live is shrinking, since any passage to another area involves entering Area C. Densifying settlements along the roads in these corridors traps Palestinians in ever-smaller spaces and deepens the disconnection between Palestinian enclaves.
“Consider also the message Israel is sending to the Palestinian public,” Ofran adds. “We’re making it clear to them that there’s no point in trying to resolve the conflict peacefully, and in fact, we’re pushing them towards radical, violent solutions. Smotrich knows that weakening the PA strengthens Hamas. And he explicitly said [in 2015], ‘Hamas is an asset’.”
In the eyes of many Israelis who define themselves as liberal, Smotrich’s cantonization plan is an extreme and “delusional” idea. But to a large extent, this is already the situation on the ground. Although a Palestinian national entity in the form of the PA still exists, the plan is to get rid of it too: Last September, after Netanyahu clarified that he would not apply sovereignty in the West Bank, the finance minister said he would use all means at his disposal to collapse the already failing PA, including its healthcare system. “In practice, Israel already controls the entire West Bank, and the PA has become a subcontractor that takes care of garbage collection and paying teachers’ salaries,” says Ofran.
The spatial planning behind the move is particularly evident in the Samaria Regional Council area, where 28 settlements were approved, 12 of them new and some in areas that have never had an Israeli presence. Nineteen of the settlements are located in the northern West Bank, where the most extensive Area A contiguity in the region stretches, fragmented by two tongues of Area C that until 2023 were subject to the Disengagement Law and where Israeli entry was forbidden.
The settlements approved in the area include the four evacuated in the disengagement, as well as new points, all on lands that surround or fragment Palestinian contiguity. To move between them, settlers must travel through Area A to avoid detours that require exiting into sovereign Israeli territory and returning to the West Bank through another checkpoint. In other words, this means further erosion of the Oslo Accords.
This purpose is reflected in other areas of the West Bank. In the western Hebron Hills, three new settlements were approved, two of them on a narrow tongue of Area C where Palestinians live. Today, only the isolated settlement Negohot is located in the area, accessible from the west through a checkpoint serving it exclusively. But the additional settlements will create contiguity that will require new roads and is expected to fragment Palestinian contiguity, isolate the villages near the fence in Area B and block the Area A contiguity from the west between Dahriyah and Hebron.
Here too, the move is proceeding at extreme speed, and ground preparation work has already begun this month. Similarly, east of Efrat, the Ma’aleh Arugot settlement is planned between three Palestinian villages, serving as a connecting point between settlement clusters in the western and eastern Gush Etzion bloc, which are currently separated by Palestinian contiguity.
West of Ramallah, settlements were approved in two separate sections, creating contiguity up to the separation barrier and the Green Line, and blurring the border: three settlements between Beit Horon and Mevo Horon, and five between the Talmonim bloc in the east, and the Palestinian town Ni’lin in the west.
At the inauguration ceremony of Maoz Tzur, a settlement legalized on private land within a firing zone, Ze’ev “Zambish” Hever, executive director of the settlement organization Amana, called it a dream come true: “We are closing the gap between Modi’in and Beit Horon, and in the coming months, God willing, we will also connect to the Talmonim and Dolev blocs.” The blurring of the Green Line is also happening in other areas, including through the legalization of buffer outposts along the fence.
Rewards for expulsion
An analysis of settlement data reveals some developments that have been seen before but that Israel avoided for decades, such as the legalization of seven settlements on lands used for military bases and the establishment of 44 settlements on lands that are not approved state lands, including private Palestinian lands. Alongside these, unprecedented developments have been identified: the approval of settlements in firing zones, the legalization of outposts involved in expelling communities and the establishment of settlements on ethnically cleansed lands.
The last figure emerges from an examination of settlement locations compared to B’Tselem’s map of expelled communities. In 19 out of 103 cases, the security cabinet approved the legalization of outposts near which communities had been expelled since 2022, with direct settler involvement in the expulsions known in most cases. In two other cases, the establishment of a new settlement near expelled communities was approved. Ten of the settlements already have defined jurisdiction zones, though these have not been applied to the abandoned structures of the expelled communities, most of which stood on lands whose status was recognized as private Palestinian property.
Farm outposts were established in coordination with the political and military echelons and were given, non-transparently, state land as grazing areas. A 2024 report by Peace Now and Kerem Navot reveals that most of the lands taken over by the farm outposts, totaling hundreds of thousands of dunams, are not state lands at all and were not legally allocated to the farms. Since the beginning of the war, dozens of communities have fled because of the terror inflicted on them by these residents.
The Mitzpeh Eretz settlement, for example, is the legalization of the Netzah Harel outpost, established in 2023 between the compounds of the Bedouin Mu’arrajat al-Markaz community. The community’s structures stood on recognized private Palestinian lands, while the farm outpost was located on an adjacent plot of state land, terrorizing its surroundings. In December of that year, the Bedouin community was forced to flee. A satellite photo from 2023 shows the farm nestled between community compounds, while a 2025 photo shows it next to abandoned structures.
The same happened in the settlement Kanfei Hashahar. It began as the Ga’on Yarden farm outpost, established in 2020 on a small plot of state land, north of the Ein Samiya community and west of Ras al-Tin, both of which were on recognized private Palestinian lands. In July 2022, the residents of Ras al-Tin were expelled, and in May 2023, Ein Samiya was expelled. Not far from there, in 2023, HaTe’ena farm was also established, north of Malachei Hashalom farm outpost, which was recognized as a settlement that same year. Between the two farms was the al-Qabun community. It was expelled in August 2023.
Malachei Hashalom, established in 2015, is considered the ‘mother farm’ in the area. Its first offshoot, Harashash farm outpost, was established in 2020 and closed off vast grazing areas. In October 2023, the nearby Ein al-Rashash community was expelled, and two months later, the Khirbet Jaba’it community was expelled. Additional communities on the outskirts of Duma and al-Mughayyir were expelled after prolonged harassment by other Malachei Hashalom offshoot outposts, including the Giborei David outpost, which was approved for legalization last March, the same month it expelled the al-Ka’abneh community.
While al-Ka’abneh residents debated whether to try to return to their homes, which were on lands recognized as private Palestinian property that are now designated “survey lands,” the security cabinet has already approved the establishment of a new settlement there.
The legalization of Malachei Hashalom embodies all branches of the Palestinian land grab mechanism. It sits on private Palestinian lands belonging to the village of al-Mughayyir, for which the army issued a seizure order in the late 1970s. International law indeed stipulates that such orders should only be imposed for military purposes and temporarily, but in those years, they served as the primary means for establishing settlements, which the state then claimed served a temporary security purpose.
In 1979, following the Elon Moreh settlement High Court petition, in which settlers clarified that for them it was a permanent settlement, the approach changed. The government passed Resolution 145, which stipulated that the establishment of settlements would henceforth be on “state lands.”
Most of the military orders imposed remained in effect, and on al-Mughayyir lands, an IDF Nahal brigade outpost was established and converted into an artillery base. Over the years, the base shrank, and in 2015 settlers took over its abandoned part. Eight years passed, and in February 2023, the security cabinet approved the legalization of the outpost. However, on such land – private Palestinian land in an area supposedly seized for military purposes – building plans cannot be approved.
To solve the problem, an old solution was pulled out: Last June, 750 dunams were declared state land for the retroactive legalization of the settlement. Since then, the area has been designated an independent jurisdiction, and its full legalization is imminent.
This trick is expected to be used to legalize 43 additional settlements on land that is not approved state land for construction. Like Malachei Hashalom, 15 of them sit on lands that the Civil Administration defined as private Palestinian lands.
Malachei Hashalom is also one of seven settlements approved in abandoned military bases. In this respect, it is a particularly extreme case: A settlement established on private land subject to a military seizure order, and around which massive community expulsions were carried out, is being legalized through the declaration that the land is state land.
This is an extreme case, but it is not truly exceptional. Over the decades since Resolution 145, hundreds of thousands of dunams in the West Bank have been declared state lands, meaning public lands. According to the Hague Regulations, the occupying power (Israel) is supposed to preserve the land resources of the occupied population as a temporary deposit and manage them for its benefit. But in 2018, following a petition by the nonprofit organization Bimkom and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, it became clear that more than 99 percent of the state lands allocated for civilian development were handed over to settlements.
Alongside these, seven settlements were approved in firing zones, where civilian entry is forbidden – a prohibition enforced against Palestinians but not against settlers who violate it. This is a new phenomenon, but anyone with even a slight knowledge of history should not be surprised. In the years after 1967, nearly 20 percent of West Bank lands, including recognized Palestinian-owned lands, were declared firing zones.
In a 1979 protocol of a discussion of the Joint Ministerial Committee on Settlement Affairs, then-agriculture minister Ariel Sharon, who initiated the move in 1967, explained that the firing zones “were all intended for one purpose: to provide an opportunity for Jewish settlement in the area.”
In the years since, the state has continued to link the ostensible security purpose with the less-discussed intention of preventing Palestinian development in the area. Among other things, in 2014 a senior official in Central Command said that training in firing zones was intended to reduce the number of Palestinians living there, and in 2022 the High Court allowed the expulsion of eight villages from Firing Zone 918 in Masafer Yatta, after the army claimed it was essential for maintaining combat readiness.
Since then, about ten outposts have been established there, including three farms that arose in coordination with the political and military echelons; this did not prevent the army from once again claiming, in June 2025, that Palestinian construction interferes with its ability to train. Recently, the head of Central Command signed orders to subtract lands from several firing zones in the West Bank after outposts encroached on their territory – a step expected to accelerate their legalization.
Rocking the boat
Vast segments of the Israeli public hope change will come in the upcoming elections, if Netanyahu’s government is replaced. But will it be possible to reverse the revolution that the state has been implementing in the West Bank in recent years? “Some of the moves are reversible. Transferred powers can be returned, budgets can be canceled. Many things can be dramatically changed – but that requires active steps at a heavy political cost, especially on the issue of [settlement] evacuation,” says Ofran.
“The next government will be able to cancel the establishment of the new settlements, but as we speak, they are already being illegally established on the ground at an accelerated pace and with a dedicated budget. Every stage advanced – a tender published, a contract signed, a structure occupied – will require much greater political effort if they wish to undo it. The further away we get from a political agreement, the higher its price.”
Dr. Shaul Arieli, who heads the Tamrur-Politography research group that focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, presents a different opinion. “In the short term, the 103 new settlements are largely a bureaucratic bluff, an attempt to create future infrastructure. Many of them are splits of neighborhoods and outposts that have been legalized, not additional construction or demographic additions,” he says.
“In practice, over the last 20 years, there has been a gradual decline in the overall migration balance to the settlements, and during the current government’s term, it has become negative – more people are leaving than arriving. Therefore, in the medium term, even if the next government doesn’t change the policy and these settlements are populated, only hundreds of residents are expected to live in them, while they create a heavy security burden. Militarily, the smaller a community, the easier it is to evacuate. The issue is making a decision and taking comprehensive systemic action – and for that, a different political environment than the current one is needed.”
Arieli insists that a two-state solution is still feasible. “The territory still allows for separation at a reasonable political cost for both sides. With land swaps of 4 percent of the territory, 80 percent of the Israeli population beyond the Green Line can remain under Israeli sovereignty,” he says, “but we find it difficult to convey this data to the public. The feeling that a political solution is no longer realistic is a cognitive victory for the settlers over the Israeli public.”
And what about the long term? According to Arieli, “If the 103 settlements become established and Israel moves towards a political agreement, the national price it will have to pay will increase, partly because of the need to evacuate them. Conversely, if it chooses not to pursue a political agreement but rather to annex the territories – these 103 settlements will not change the loss of the Jewish majority or, alternatively, the loss of democratic rule in Israel.”
Dror Etkes of Kerem Navot is not optimistic. “It’s clear that what’s been done in the West Bank over the last three and a half years is irreversible,” he says. “A state that fails and refuses to evacuate outposts in Palestinian Authority areas that were established to cause the collapse of the Oslo Accords, and fails and refuses to discipline its own soldiers, certainly will not evacuate over 200 outposts established during the current government’s term, which has forged an alliance with nationalistic criminals.
“The evacuation of these outposts and settlements, whose locations were carefully chosen, or even a small part of them, will require the state to exert authority and violence that have never been used against settlers in the West Bank, not even during the disengagement. It’s difficult to imagine former Yesha Council of settlements director Naftali Bennett entering such a confrontation with his friends and partners, and likewise Gadi Eisenkot, who was photographed a few months ago in one of the most violent outposts in the West Bank. In the coming years, Israel will continue to deepen its entanglement in the apartheid swamp it created and nurtured with its own hands.”
Matan Golan (b. 1988) is an Israeli freelance photojournalist and reporter. She graduated M.A studies in IPSD (International Planning & Sustainable Development) in Urban Resilience (DRR) and environmental policies pathway from the University of Westminster in London with distinction.
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