By Tamara Nassar: Israel is establishing facts on the ground in the occupied West Bank faster than ever before.
In March, Israel’s so-called security cabinet covertly approved the establishment of 34 new settlements – not units, entire settlements – in West Bank Mega Concentration Camp.
News of this decision only became public last week after being kept confidential by the cabinet when it was approved, reportedly in an effort to avoid backlash from the United States during negotiations for a ceasefire with Iran.
This is Israel’s “largest-ever colonial expansion,” Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, said on 9 April.
This is “the largest ethnic cleansing/land grab in Palestine since the Nakba. It’s happening. Under our watch,” she continued.
Before the current government took power in 2022, there were 127 recognized Israeli settlements in the West Bank, according to Israeli group Peace Now, which monitors settlement activity.
The newly approved 34 settlements would add to 68 that the government has already advanced since its formation, bringing the total number of settlements approved under this administration to 102, Peace Now added.
This is roughly an 80 percent increase of all settlements in the West Bank advanced under this government alone.
This is “the highest number ever approved at one time,” the UN human rights office said, adding that building those settlements “extends and consolidates Israel’s annexation of occupied Palestinian territory.”
It added: “Israel must immediately cease the establishment and expansion of settlements and reverse its settlement policies by evacuating all settlers and ending the occupation of Palestinian territory.”
Private, depopulated land
Out of the 34 newly approved settlements, nine are existing outposts to be legalized, two involve expansions of established settlements and three would be carved out from existing settlements as separate entities, according to Tel Aviv daily Haaretz, which obtained a list though the state has not yet published details.
The remaining 20 would be entirely new Jewish-only colonies.
Eight of the settlements will be built on privately owned Palestinian land – as opposed to what is designated as so-called state land, Haaretz said. Israel declares Palestinian land as “state land” as a legal maneuver aimed at confiscating that land through an interpretation of an Ottoman-era law that was utilized in a completely different context two centuries ago.
Ninety-nine percent of “state land,” in reality, has been allocated for Israeli settlements, according to data obtained through a petition by two Israeli non-profits, Haaretz reported.
While all of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights are illegal under international law and are considered a war crime, what Israel refers to as “outposts” are often built without even Israel’s permission and are considered illegal even under Israeli law – at least initially.
These outposts often start with a small group of more extreme settlers gathering in an area with structures and caravans. Over time, the Israeli government begins extending basic infrastructure, such as water and electricity, effectively paving the way for their recognition as official settlements.
This process has been accelerated and streamlined under ultra-far-right Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich.
All 34 newly approved settlements are located in Area C, according to Peace Now.
Area C is the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli military control according to the Oslo accords of the 1990s. But in effect the Israeli military controls the whole of the West Bank and has been conducting raids in the smaller areas where the Palestinian Authority has nominal control.
Six of the new settlements will be in the Jenin area, alongside one in the Tulkarem area. The refugee camps of those cities in the northern occupied West Bank have been depopulated since Israel began a major military operation in January 2025.
This is “an area with no prior Israeli presence,” Haaretz reported.
The newspaper said this was consistent with a plan to attract new settlers to the northern West Bank area under the slogan “Million in Samaria” promoted by the Samaria Regional Council, a local settler authority.
“Their location amid Palestinian villages is expected to require a significant military presence, with access possible only through those villages or via roads designated for military use,” Haaretz reported. This is expected to lead to more settler violence against Palestinians in those areas, and as a result, forcible displacement.
Satellite analysis published by the UN in early March shows how the Israeli military is changing the urban landscape of the camp.
Six of the new settlements will be built in the Ramallah area – the seat of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank.
Settlements are top priority
Settlement expansion has been a top priority for the current Israeli government.
The Higher Planning Council – a branch of the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation which advances settlement expansion in the West Bank – has been meeting every week to advance new plans.
Previously, the advancement of such plans was limited to approximately four times a year.
This shift “not only normalizes construction in the territories but also accelerates it,” Peace Now said.
Since the beginning of last year, the council advanced nearly 28,000 housing units in the occupied West Bank.
That’s an “all-time record,” Peace Now said.
This bureaucratic shift in advancing settlement approvals followed a change introduced by the current Israeli administration in June 2023, which effectively removed the requirement for approval from the Israeli defense minister – previously necessary for deciding on such plans.
In December, the government agreed to roughly $915 million in spending on settlement development over the next five years.
Peace Now said that increased Israeli military spending following the war on Iran has forced cuts across other ministries, but that “despite these adjustments, settlement funding remains assured,” the group added.
“While the government cuts budgets inside Israel, it pours money into the settlements. As communities in the north and south have yet to begin recovery, the government funds new settlements and outposts that Israel will ultimately have to evacuate.”
That does not resemble a government responding to the, at best, restrained objections of its American and European allies regarding annexation.
Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said on Monday that he “made it clear” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “there must be no de facto annexation of the West Bank.”
This raised the ire of Smotrich, who invoked the German government’s murder, persecution and ghettoization of Jews during the Holocaust and compared that to Israel’s Jewish-only settler expansion on Palestinian land, which is illegal under international law.
“The days when Germans dictated to Jews where they were permitted or forbidden to live are over and shall not return. You will not force us into ghettos again, certainly not in our own land,” Smotrich wrote to Merz on Twitter/X.
Ethnic cleansing
These developments are taking place against a backdrop of accelerating settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
At least 37 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank so far in 2026, at least 10 of them by settlers.
“The fact that large groups of settlers storm Palestinian communities, brutalize residents and torch buildings is an outrage in itself,” Philippe Lazzarini, who bowed out of his role last month as the head of the UN agency for Palestine refugees UNRWA, said.
“But what is worse is that these egregious acts are accompanied by total impunity.”
He added: “The International Court of Justice has ruled that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is illegal and must cease. Yet settlers run riot, settlements expand and de facto annexation accelerates.”
Last year, Israeli settlement activity and intensifying violence contributed to the forcible displacement of more than 36,000 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
UN human rights experts called it a form of ethnic cleansing.
“This displacement, driven by [the Israeli military] and state-backed settler terrorism, is ethnically cleansing the West Bank through daily attacks resulting in killing, injury and harassment of women and children, and the widespread destruction of Palestinian homes, farmland and livelihoods,” they said.
The human rights experts also connected this displacement to the enormous similar crime in Gaza.
“The scale and pattern of these actions, occurring alongside mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes and land in Gaza shows once again the ongoing broader policy of ethnic cleansing across the occupied Palestinian territory,” they added.
Whether through de facto or de jure annexation, the Israeli objective has always been the same.
The underlying logic of Zionism, as it is with any colonial movement, is the expansion of settlements, and the displacement of the Indigenous population to replace them with colonial settlers.
Every Israeli front, whether in Gaza, the West Bank or elsewhere, is ultimately rooted in that objective.
Correction: An earlier version of this article said Philippe Lazzarini is the head of UNRWA. He bowed out of that role last month.
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