Afrasianet - Salah A-Din Abu Hlassan - On July 22, residents of the town of Beit Ulla, west of Hebron, woke up to an unusual sight: a settler pitching a tent on their land adjacent to the 1949 armistice line. The following week, Mahmoud al-Amla and his father were tending to their land they had inherited from their ancestors, but the settler got in their way. After a long argument and the presence of the occupying forces, everyone left the area temporarily.
Mahmoud returned with his father in the following days, and it was only a matter of minutes before the army arrived with the same settler, but this time the latter was wearing the full uniform of the occupation army . He advanced towards Mahmoud and attacked him violently, threw him to the ground, pressed his head against a rock and put his foot on his neck for half an hour, beating him, before withdrawing with the soldiers and leaving Mahmoud with bruises on his head and neck, after which he was taken to the hospital.
Mahmoud explains what happened between him and the settler the first time: the settler told him that he was expelling them because these were "state lands" (the occupation had initially declared the area a closed military zone, then in 1983 it was declared state land), to which Mahmoud replied: "This is my land and the land of my ancestors, and then you are not authorized to guard the state lands, if we hand it over as such."
However, the logic of the law in the occupying state dictates that the army protects the settler but does not have jurisdiction over him, because he is an "Israeli citizen" whose accountability is subject to the police – which, ironically, opened a headquarters in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, east of Hebron in 2018 – so Mahmoud resorted to filing a complaint there.
The irony is that international law sees the exact opposite, as it is the occupying military power that bears full legal responsibility for the land and the population under occupation.
Mahmoud's story is an intense example of what is happening in the West Bank, the scene of "de facto annexation" as described by the International Court of Justice in its 2024 judgment on the occupation in the Palestinian territories.
Settlements are not just outposts and settlements, but an integrated system that has been working since 1967 to reshape the land, the authority, and the borders, and in which Israeli laws are applied – only to the settler and the settlement – as if it were Tel Aviv. But those laws do not apply to a Palestinian who is subject to the temperament of the occupying military power.
This sweeping control was not enough in the eyes of the leaders of the settlement project, who were beginning to lay the groundwork for the "decisive moment," as Smotrich called it in his 2017 plan.
Although 13 settlements are now directly under the Israeli Ministry of Housing – that is, they have been effectively annexed – and all government ministries fund and manage programs and plans in the settlements, including "illegal" outposts even by Israeli definition, Smotrich, as a minister in the Ministry of the Army, has gone further. He has worked to accelerate the process of legal annexation through tangled bureaucratic paths, building a system that transforms the West Bank into a full Israeli administrative sphere.
It was no secret that his ambition went beyond reality itself. In his published plans, Smotrich called on September 3 for Israel to declare formal annexation of 82 percent of the West Bank, a figure that exceeded even the perceptions of some of the most extreme settler supporters.
Although the legal declaration has not yet taken place, what has been achieved on the ground through laws, institutions, budgets, and infrastructures indicates that de facto annexation is progressing step by step, and that what we are seeing today is only the latest chapter in the silent annexation process that began in 1967 and has not stopped.
In this article, we will review how Smotrich was able to establish the bureaucratic and financial foundations of the annexation process, and how Israeli ministries' control over Palestinian land expanded from planning and construction to antiquities and historical heritage, in an attempt to forge a new reality that would make the West Bank an organic part of Israel without the need for an official declaration.
Gradual Annexation
Just eight days after the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said, "I think we will establish firm bases on the mountaintops from which we will not move, this is the Land of Israel, and from there we will not move." This statement was an early declaration that the intention was not just a military occupation, but a long-term annexation project.
Two months later, Dayan proposed the establishment of five settlement outposts in five main governorates: al-Zababdeh south of Jenin, Huwara south of Nablus, Beit El north of Ramallah, Gush Etzion south of Bethlehem, and Adorim south of Hebron, each of which would include a military base alongside a "civilian" settlement, which actually happened, and connected these outposts to Israel through a network of roads, electricity, water and communication lines, at the same time that it was completely isolated from its Arab surroundings Palestinian.
At the same time, Israeli military commander and minister Yigal Allon proposed a plan to confined the Palestinians in the West Bank between a border strip with Jordan where settlements are established, and a settlement line that extends to Jerusalem, dividing the West Bank into two parts.
Later, Ariel Sharon presented what was known as the "Canton Plan," which aimed to isolate Palestinians within separate pockets cut off by roads and checkpoints, while surrounding the West Bank with eastern settlements to isolate it from Jordan, and western settlements to facilitate their later annexation. On the same lines, came the Matityahu Dropbels plan, which emphasized the need to besiege Palestinian villages and towns with settlements to prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian entity.
All of these plans reveal that the goal from the first moment was annexation, and that the settlements and their accompanying services were nothing but the infrastructure for the expansion of the Israeli occupation into the West Bank.
Indeed, Israel has gradually implemented it until today, according to Peace Now's Settlement Monitoring Division, it has now taken control of more than 50 percent of the West Bank, and approximately 87 percent of Area C as defined by the Oslo Accords. So how did we get here?
Annexation of Jerusalem
The annexation of Jerusalem was in the same vein, but in a crude and clear manner, as soon as a few days had passed since the occupation of East Jerusalem in June 1967, Israel began its first steps towards annexation.
The first was the dissolution of the elected Jerusalem Municipality Council, and then the Israeli Deputy Military Governor invited the mayor and its members to meet with him individually, offering them to join the Jerusalem Municipality in the occupied part in 1948. However, the members, headed by Ruhi Al-Khatib, rejected this invitation and the occupation measures, and demanded that the situation be restored to the way it was before the occupation.
On June 27, 1967, the Knesset passed two fundamental amendments: First, amending the Municipalities Law to allow the Israeli interior minister to expand the boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality to include an additional 70,000 dunams of Palestinian land to its original area (38,000 dunams), while excluding densely populated neighborhoods such as Ram, Anata, Abu Dis, and Al-Eizariya, so that the area tripled.
The second was to amend the State and Administration Law to allow for the imposition of "Israeli sovereignty" over East Jerusalem, and to consider its Palestinian residents as "permanent residents" rather than native citizens.
These measures were the first steps in de facto annexation after the 1967 war, and the most notable development came on July 30, 1980, when the Knesset passed the Basic Law: Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel, which explicitly stated that Jerusalem with its eastern and western parts is the "unified capital of Israel."
In 1971, MK Shmuel Namir proposed a project to expand the boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality to include 600 square kilometers (10 percent of the West Bank), under the name "Greater Jerusalem." The project excluded Palestinian towns and villages, but it incorporated the major settlement blocs adjacent to the city.
In the 1990s, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, when they headed the housing ministry, re-adopted the project, with the aim of reducing the percentage of Palestinians in the city and preventing them from becoming a majority, which could reach 55 percent by 2040, according to estimates by the right-wing Jerusalem Center for Security Studies.
Later, the separation wall embodied the vision of the Jerusalem municipality and its actual borders, as then-Mayor Nir Barkat put it: "This is where the boundaries of sovereignty begin and end." This perception was endorsed even by the Israeli left, "out of fear of what they described as a demographic threat" at a Labor Party meeting in 2016. The Israeli right, on the other hand, holds to the vision of "Greater Jerusalem" as a sacred and non-negotiable thing.
Therefore, Likud MK Dan Illouz came back a few months ago to bring forward a bill to annex Greater Jerusalem and impose Israeli law within its borders, a proposal that was preceded in 2017 by the current Minister of Education Yoav Kisch and Minister of the Army Yisrael Katz, with a plan to annex 19 settlements in the vicinity of Jerusalem to "Israeli sovereignty."
Through these legal, political, and field actions, Jerusalem has become the first model of annexation policy, which is gradual in stages: from direct annexation through the Knesset, to redefining borders, to imposing a fait accompli through the wall and settlements, to modern expansion projects. Thus, it is clear that the issue of Jerusalem was not an exception, but rather constituted the first building block in the annexation process that is now being extended to the entire West Bank.
Closed Military Zones
The "legal" fraud in the annexation of the West Bank began in the early days of the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, and the occupation resorted to a "legal-military" means of controlling the land, by declaring large areas of "closed military zones." With this measure, it prevented Palestinians from exploiting their agricultural or residential lands, and opened the door to the conversion of those lands into future settlements or settlement projects.
Between August 1967 and May 1975, Israel declared approximately 1.5 million dunams (26.6 percent of the West Bank) closed military zones for Palestinians to enter except with special permits, most of which were located in the eastern slopes and the Jordan Valley. The process then continued in stages: in 1997, Israel declared the settlements' municipal areas (a total of 540,000 dunams/10 percent of the West Bank) as closed military zones, and in the second intifada it added some 180,000 dunams under The name "contact zones" are closed to Palestinians.
According to Kerem Navot, the Blue Line team (which is responsible for determining "state lands") has drawn more than 68,500 dunums located within declared military training zones, which means that they have been transferred from a temporary military designation to the property of the occupation government.
In a study prepared by Dror Ethics for the same organization, which documented the issuance of 1,150 military orders from the occupation until 2014, about 100,000 dunams were confiscated, two-thirds of which belong to the private ownership of Palestinians. Forty-seven percent of these areas were allocated for the establishment of Israeli settlements (43 settlements) or for projects that serve the settlers, not the occupation army.
Despite the occupation's claim that these measures are temporary, and that a major part of them is dedicated to training, the Kerem Nabot report indicates that 80% of the areas classified as training do not have any activity, and the orders have only been revoked in a very narrow scope: as of 2016, only about 21,000 dunams of orders were canceled, while an additional 27,000 dunams were confiscated by new orders or amendments to existing orders. In practice, the "closed military zones" have turned into a reserve reservoir for settlements. It is gradually emptied in favor of outposts and settlements.
Over the decades, these areas have taken on new names and classifications: "nature reserves," "state lands," or "contact zones." But the essence remains the same: to exclude Palestinians from their land and facilitate settler access to it.
Thus, it is clear that the policy of "closed military zones" was not a security tool, but was and still is a key pillar of the annexation project: a tool that is ostensibly "temporary" and inwardly a tool that gradually transforms the Palestinian land into a settlement stockpile ready for actual annexation at the right political moment.
Nature Reserves
If settler colonialism in general was primarily motivated by the exclusion of indigenous people for access to land, Israel's occupation of the West Bank was no exception. In order to reinforce the myth of the settlement project of "a land without a people for a people without a land", Israel used nature as a pretext to expel Palestinians from their lands or prevent them from developing them, and to turn them into settlements in preparation for annexation.
From 1969 to 1997, Israel declared 340,000 dunams as nature reserves spread over 51 sites. Later, the total area until 2005 was 12.35 percent of the West Bank. Five years ago, seven new protected areas were announced, and the current government announced an additional 20,000 dunams a year ago as expansion orders for existing protected areas. Within these areas, about 40 percent of which are privately owned by Palestinians, they are prohibited from building, farming, and raising livestock.
A study by Mazen Qumsiyeh and Charlotte Alembert proved that 22 of the 51 protected areas do not meet the criteria stipulated in international conventions and conventions, as they do not meet the criteria of the "reserve".
The Peace Now report confirms that 21 settlements and 10 outposts have attacked the borders of these reserves by building and building roads and annexing areas of them within the walls of the settlements.
In 1996, the occupation government turned Jabal Abu Ghneim from a nature reserve into a residential neighborhood to be built on it by the settlement of Har Homa, which ignited widespread Palestinian protests that lasted for months.
On May 24 , 2023, Haaretz revealed that lawmakers in Netanyahu's current government are preparing to introduce an amendment to Israel's National Parks, Nature Reserves, National Sites and Monuments Law, which includes imposing Israeli civil law on national sites and nature reserves in the occupied West Bank.
Although the amendment has not yet been enacted into law, one month after its introduction, the government announced the establishment of seven new nature reserves in the West Bank, a practical sign of direction, and issued military orders to mandate protected areas in areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority for the first time.
Although the Israeli Army's Civil Administration is supposed to supervise these protected areas, as it coordinates the activities of ministries and government agencies in the West Bank, the Israeli Ministry of Environment and the Nature and Parks Authority confirm that they carry out direct activities in the West Bank, including supervising nine parks and nature reserves there.
In practice, this means treating these protected areas as part of Israel in terms of administration and jurisdiction, thus consolidating an additional annexation step entitled "Environmental" and "Protective", the essence of which is tightening control over the land, closing it to the Palestinians and preparing it for settlement expansion and de facto annexation.
Declaration of "State Lands"
Immediately after the occupation of the West Bank, the Israeli army issued a military order to stop the registration of land and property rights for Palestinians, but this order excluded the registration of so-called "state land." Since then, Israel has resorted to exploiting some of the Ottoman, British, and Jordanian laws that were in force in the West Bank, but through biased inverse interpretations, to justify the seizure of large areas of Palestinian land under this name, even though a large part of it is privately owned.
Accordingly, most of this land is allocated exclusively for settlement purposes, where Israeli law is fully applied, while presumably being subject to Jordanian or Palestinian law in force in the West Bank, on the basis of which it was originally declared "state land."
Between 1979 and 1992, Israel declared more than 900,000 dunams as state land, and this policy was resumed in 1998, and continues to this day. From that date until the beginning of September 2025, more than 53,000 additional dunams have been declared state land, of which 24,000 dunams have been declared in 2024 alone. If these areas are added to those that have been classified as such since Jordanian rule (about 527,000 dunams), the total land classified as "state land" would be about 1,300,000 dunams, or approximately 22 percent of the West Bank.
The declaration of land in the West Bank as state land was based on a government order deeming those lands to be the property of the "Government of Israel," under the name "Order Concerning Government Property in Judea and Samaria." Its administration was also associated with an employee of the Israel Lands Department with the title of "Custodian of Government Property in Judea and Samaria."
A report by Peace Now shows that 99.76% of these lands were allocated exclusively for settlements, while what was allocated to Palestinians did not exceed 0.24%, and this was often for purposes that are inseparable from serving the settlement project itself, either to displace some of them from targeted areas in favor of settlements, as happened with the Bedouins of Khan al-Ahmar when they were offered to be transferred near the Abu Dis landfill, or to compensate some Palestinian owners for their properties confiscated for the benefit of the settlements.
Thus, "state lands" have turned into a legal instrument ostensibly an organization, but its essence is a silent and systematic annexation: confiscating Palestinian land, transferring it to the ownership of the occupying state because there is no state in the West Bank, and opening it exclusively to settlements.
Agriculture
In addition to urban settlements, Israel has employed the agriculture sector as a central tool in the project of silent annexation of the West Bank. A report by Kerem Nabot indicates that the cultivated areas of Palestinians in the West Bank have declined by about a third in recent decades, in contrast to a significant expansion of agricultural land managed by settlers.
Israel has taken over more than 93,000 dunams of agricultural land, more than the built-up area of the settlements combined (excluding East Jerusalem). Since 1997, settlers have seized more than 24,000 dunams through agricultural activities, some 10,000 dunams privately owned by Palestinians, most of which are located adjacent to settlements and outposts in the mountainous highlands.
While Palestinians were denied access to 170,000 dunams of their agricultural land in the border area with Jordan under the pretext that they were closed military zones, settlers were allowed to expand the use of these lands, especially for date cultivation, relying on water infrastructure established by Israel, including the use of treated sewage transferred from East Jerusalem. With this mechanism, Palestinian farmers' ability to remain on their land is undermined, and resources are redirected to serve an agricultural settlement project that entrenches field dominance and paves the way for subsequent legal annexation.
The current Minister of Agriculture, Avi Dichter, is leading legislative and government efforts to try to control the land behind the separation wall, whose owners have been denied access since Oct. 7. Dichter seeks to use this argument that the land is unused — to turn it into state property according to the interpretations of Ottoman law, even though his government is the one who forbids Palestinians from exploiting it.
Smotrich's coup. Changing DNA
"The people of Israel have a natural right to the Land of Israel. In light of this phrase and thanks to it, the prime minister will formulate and develop certain policies according to which sovereignty will be imposed on Judea and Samaria, choosing the right time, and taking into account Israel's national and international diplomatic calculations."
With these words, the coalition agreement signed at the end of 2022 between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Finance and Minister of Settlements in the Ministry of the Army, Bezalel Smotrich, was opened, clearly declaring that the government's project is based on the prelude to the imposition of sovereignty over the West Bank, i.e., annexation, even if it is spoken of as "the right time."
For more than five decades, Israel has pursued a policy of "silent annexation," accumulating control over Palestinian land, resources, and space at a calculated pace, through seemingly legal tools and administrative procedures that conceal an integrated settlement project. But this "quiet" approach changed radically with the rise of Bezalel Smotrich to the heart of the ruling system, as annexation moved from a gradual path to something akin to a systematic reversal of the instruments of control.
We are no longer talking about sporadic decisions issued by different ministries, but rather about an integrated architecture of the occupation institutions that redistribute the powers within them, so that the settlements become the center of the decision and not the subject.
It can be said that Smotrich did not invent annexation, but rather inherited his deep structure and then unleashed its potential, turning the accumulation into an organized rush, and redrawing the relationship between the occupation army and the settlers to serve one project: to make the occupation a permanent civil administration under legal cover.
In July 2023, in an interview with Israel's Channel 14, Smotrich boasted about what he had accomplished in the previous six months: "We are really changing the infrastructure, the property, the legal, and we are changing the DNA of the occupation regime. We do it slowly and professionally, we do it in an ongoing process."
This "DNA" that he spoke of is nothing but a reproduction of the occupation system in a new form: de facto annexation in the guise of a "civil and legal administration." Within the Ministry of the Army, Smotrich established a civilian apparatus that included all the settlements in the institutions of the occupation government, away from the authority of the army's "Interim Civil Administration," and appointed a civilian deputy head of that department to be directly subordinate to it. He also established a new land registration body in Area C within the Israeli land registry, in a move that transformed the settlement presence into a sovereign system.
These transformations come four decades after the establishment of the Civil Administration in 1981 under the government of Menachem Begin. At that time, Israel sought to burnish the ugly military face of the explicit military occupation behind a civilian façade, where the new administration – which is practically affiliated with the occupation army – took over the supervision of the land and the population, and coordinated the activities of the Israeli government's ministries inside the West Bank, through civilian employees known as "Civil Administration officers." But the essence of this administration has been and continues to be a tool for managing gradual annexation, while maintaining the appearance of "legal."
However, Smotrich considered this bureaucracy to be slow and ineffective in facilitating settlement and land confiscation, and sought to reshape it to speed up annexation. He explicitly expressed this in June 2023 during a conference of his party in a settlement near Salfit as "the de facto and legal annexation of the West Bank."
First: Settlement Management
On June 9, 2024, among the vineyards that were planted in place of hundreds of perennial olive trees cut down by settlers in 2014 under the auspices of the occupation army in the "Dhahr Sobh" area of Kafr al-Dik, southwest of Salfit, and on the ruins of Roman and Islamic monuments, Smotrich stood in front of about 100 members of his party in the outpost that has been turned into the "Shaharit Alcohol Farm", to declare: "We have created a separate civil system. There's a ministry within the Department of Defense. There's a minister. There's a department that looks like a government department. The head of the department is equivalent to the CEO of a government ministry."
This announcement practically embodied what began in February 2023, when a new civilian body known as the Settlements Administration was established, under the direct supervision of Smotrich and a decision by the Israeli government. It was headed by Yehuda Eliyahu, his former partner in the Regavim movement (which monitors Palestinian construction in Area C and is pushing for its demolition).
Eliyahu is a settler from a family that dedicated its life to settlements, as his parents settled in Sinai, Gaza, and the West Bank, while he was famous for establishing several outposts before settling in the settlement of Harsha, of which he was one of the founders and leaders. Today, Eliyahu assumes a pivotal position as the highest administrative officer in charge of settlements and their "legalization."
Since then, the Department has been responsible for all stages of settlement planning, including the establishment and expansion of new settlements and the development of infrastructure and roads. The Palestinians' urban planning is at the mercy of military-civilian committees that limit their growth and decide to demolish their homes.
Smotrich's experience in Regavim was also replicated by this administration, where it was granted expanded powers to demolish Palestinian construction in Area C, which has always been a gateway to the displacement of Palestinians and the emptying of land for settlements. It has also placed under its control all the confiscation of Palestinian land and its conversion into "state land," including the registration and approval of real estate transactions. It also controls the distribution of these lands in order to serve the expansion of settlements and the consolidation of Israeli control.
The administration's most prominent strategic tasks are to work on the "legalization" of "illegal" outposts and their integration into existing settlements. It also provides legal and financial cover for the transformation of Palestinian land into settlement farms and the expansion of the establishment of such outposts.
The administration has also been tasked with controlling electricity, water, roads, and communications in the West Bank. This has been translated over the past year by reducing the amount of water allocated to Palestinian areas and raising electricity tariffs on them since September 2024, in exchange for expanding services to settlements.
Second: "Civilian" Deputy
Control of planning and urbanization was not enough to achieve Smotrich's project, but also required the dismantling of the traditional chain of command within the Civil Administration itself, so the appointment of a "civilian deputy" came to be his direct executive arm within the occupation apparatus and transform the Civil Administration from a "temporary" military tool to a permanent bureaucratic tool for annexation.
At the same conference, Smotrich said, "The fact is that we initially thought about transferring it (the settlement administration) entirely from the Ministry of Defense. Ultimately, we did so in a way that was easy to understand in the political and legal context. The military commander is still the sovereign, but there is the deputy head of the Civil Administration, who is a civilian, an employee of the Ministry of Defense, who is not subordinate to the head of the Civil Administration, nor to the commander of the Central Command, but to the Settlement Administration."
"The powers are in the hands of Hillel Roth, he signs orders, he calls the Supreme Planning Committee, he declares state lands. He signs the blue lines, manages the staff officers, issues the tenders for the employees, signs the acquisitions of the roads, everything is in his hands."
On May 29, 2024, Ruth, a settler living in the settlement of Rivava, which is built on land confiscated from the villages of Haris, Farkha, and Deir Istiya, west of Salfit, is a longtime Smotrich's longtime comrade in the settlement movement, and a former member of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva religious school, two of whose rabbis are known to have authored the book "The King's Torah," which permits the killing of Palestinians.
Roth did not wait long to use the powers granted to him, as his first strategic decision was to announce the largest seizure of Palestinian land in more than thirty years, under the name of "state land." Less than a month after his appointment, the Civil Administration (under whose name he works, but effectively under Smotrich's supervision) announced the confiscation of 12,700 dunams of land in the northern Jordan Valley. This came as a continuation of previous announcements in the areas of Al-Eizariya and East Bethlehem, bringing the total number of confiscated lands in 2024 alone to more than of 24 thousand dunams.
A review of the lists of declarations of "state land" issued between September 28, 1998 and December 9, 2024 indicates that the confiscation of 2024 alone amounted to 46% of the total seizure of it in this way since 1998, meaning that in just one year it is equivalent to almost half of the confiscation of a quarter of a century.
Third: Planning is in Smotrich's hands
With the transfer of the powers of signature to the civil representative, the way was paved for accelerating the pace of confiscation, which was immediately reflected in the decisions to confiscate the land, so that these confiscated lands became a tangible reality on the ground through a parallel mechanism: absolute control over planning.
In June 2023, the Israeli government approved a fundamental amendment to Netanyahu Government Resolution 150 (1996), which had reactivated settlement construction after a brief freeze under Rabin. The previous regime required construction plans in the West Bank to go through six consecutive phases, five of which required the approval of the defense minister, making them tied to political calculations.
The new amendment reduced these phases to just two: Initially, the defense minister retained the authority to approve the first phase, while the settlement administration with the Supreme Planning Council (of the Civil Administration) took over the rest of the stages. However, on June 18, 2023, the government revoked even this authority, transferring full responsibility to Bezalel Smotrich. Under the resolution, once Smotrich approves a building plan, it goes directly to the planning committees to begin implementation.
On August 14, 2025, he announced that the Supreme Planning Council would approve six days later plans for construction in the E1 area of the Ma'ale Adumim settlement, a project that had been on hold for 20 years due to its geopolitical implications and danger to the future of any Palestinian state.
Smotrich himself described the project as "burying the promised Palestinian state," as the plan calls for the confiscation of about 18,000 dunams of land in East Jerusalem, the isolation of occupied Jerusalem from its Palestinian surroundings, and the splitting of the West Bank into two parts, while completing the separation wall around the area and linking it to the settlement of Ma'ale Adumim and linking the latter to Jerusalem.
Throughout the occupation, urban planning has been a tool of political annexation in the guise of "technical", as Palestinian villages are besieged by narrow or outdated structural maps that prevent their natural growth, while the settlements are given broad and flexible plans that exceed their needs for decades.
According to the Israeli organization Bimkom, 67% of the "state land" allocated to settlements remains vacant pending expansion, while 98% of Palestinian applications for construction in Area C are rejected.
But the data we gathered from the Planning Commission's website (where the plans are announced) for the period 1980-2025 shows a steady rise in approval of settlement plans since 2013, with 2025 expected to be the largest year in its history, due to the changes approved by Smotrich.
Fourth: Sponsoring the hotspots financially and legally
Settlement planning was only part of the equation: Smotrich paid strategic attention to the outposts, sponsoring them financially and legally to transform them from individual actions to an organized state policy. In June 2024, he said in one of his speeches, "Take a farmer, a thousand cows, and a penny and a half of investment, and preserve 40,000 dunams," in an explicit reference to the strategic value of these outposts.
Already, the Settlements Administration has prepared a list of 63 sites containing 70 outposts, and sought to include them in a "twisted legalization" process by classifying them as "illegal sites," based on a government decision issued in February 2023. This path allows government budgets to be injected into these outposts, to build public buildings, and to connect them to electricity, water, and road networks, while refraining from demolishing their "illegal" buildings, and even allowing settlement councils to annex them as their neighborhoods.
At the "Shaharit Farm" conference, which we referred to earlier, Smotrich spoke about the allocation of 85 million shekels for these outposts, explaining that this money will go to all the "illegal" outposts, whether on the list or others, through the channels of the regional councils and the Settlement Administration. The budgets include security and infrastructure components, such as protected roads and public buildings, solar panels, vehicles, cameras, drones, and others.
According to the Land Research Center, 94 new pastoral outposts were established between 2020 and 2024. It controlled 786,000 dunams, equivalent to 14 percent of the West Bank, according to a report released by Peace Now and Kerem Nabout in April 2025.
The same report indicates that the occupation has resorted to "legal" tools to circumvent the status quo, through grazing contracts granted by the World Zionist Organization to settlers on 80,000 dunams of "state land" in the West Bank.
These contracts allowed them to effectively control hundreds of thousands of dunams outside the agreed areas, including 36% Palestinian private land, and more than 4% in areas classified "A" and "B" belonging to the Palestinian Authority. More dangerously, these contracts authorized the settlers to call in the occupation army to expel the Palestinian shepherds.
According to the two organizations, the funding came from multiple channels: part of the state in the form of security budgets (NIS 85 million), another in the form of grazing grants (NIS 3 million), a third in the form of support for entrepreneurship (NIS 1.6 million), and NIS 4.7 million injected by the Jewish National Fund under the cover of "volunteer programs for youth." The Amana settlement movement has also raised additional millions for these outposts, despite being subject to British and US sanctions for supporting violent settlers, as well as allowing local and international charities to raise funds for them.
Fifth: Displacement
In exchange for strengthening the settlement presence, Smotrich's policies worked to undermine the existence of the Palestinians at their roots, through a systematic policy of displacement and house demolitions, to make their lives impossible and empty the land of its inhabitants, although it was a policy as old as the occupation, but Smotrich sought to deepen it.
From the very first moment after the 1967 occupation, displacement was part of a systematic Israeli policy. Former Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol described the West Bank and Gaza as "dowry," but added, "The problem is that the dowry is followed by a bride [of the Palestinians] that we don't want." In a similar vein, Foreign Minister Abba Eban expressed to the U.S. envoy to the United Nations that Israel wanted Gaza to be depopulated, but he could not find a way to do so.
In the West Bank, this policy has been embodied through successive plans, from Yigal Allon's plan to confine Palestinians to narrow areas, to Moshe Dayan's "Five Fingers" plan, then the cantons at Druples, Sharon and Netanyahu's plans, to the vision of Smotrich, who said in his plan in the Knesset in 2017 that the goal was to besiege the Palestinians and force them to accept the "fait accompli" or leave.
Achieving this required making the lives of Palestinians an unbearable hell, something that Um Muhammad Jadallah knows very well, whose family was closed to their home by the Iron Gate near the settlement of Nogohot in the southern West Bank, and they are only allowed to enter or exit every two months, and no one is allowed to visit them. "We had to send our children to relatives in the city of Dura so that they could attend their schools, and we don't have the opportunity to see them for long periods," Um Mohammed adds.
In 2006, Smotrich founded the organization "Regavim" to monitor Palestinian construction, especially in Area C, and to incite the occupation authorities to demolish it. When he came to power, he turned this vision into an official apparatus by expanding the "Supervision Unit" and establishing two new units, one to enforce the law in built-up areas and the other in open areas.
The results are devastating; in the first four months of 2025, displacement rates due to demolition in Area C increased fivefold compared to the previous year. According to OCHA data as of September 2025, the ongoing demolitions have displaced 11,680 Palestinians since 2009, 75 per cent of whom were in Area C alone.
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) estimates that the occupation has demolished about 60,000 homes since 1967 until August 2025 in the West Bank and Jerusalem. OCHA confirms that the monthly rate of demolitions in the last three years is unprecedented, ranging between 90 and 100 structures per month, and it can be deduced from the data of the PLO's Negotiations Affairs Department that for every ten houses built by settlers in the West Bank, a Palestinian house is demolished.
Sixth: Blurring the Differences
On July 19, 2023, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee held a special session titled " Israel's Response to the Palestinian Authority 's Control of Open Land," but the focus of the discussion was not on the "C" lands, as the title suggests, but on how Israel could enable Israel to demolish Palestinian buildings in Areas A and B, which are officially administered by the Palestinian Authority.
Smotrich used the session to announce the preparation of a new strategy that would allow the demolition of "illegal" structures in Areas A and B, saying, "The Palestinian Authority is actively working to seize land. We have to do the same. This means land rationing, construction, agriculture."
He also noted that he is coordinating with the Jewish National Fund to cultivate 10,000 dunams in two areas in the West Bank, stressing that demolition decisions must not be based on the law, but on what he called "Israel's national and security interest."
The day before that session, the commander of the Israeli army's central region had signed two orders granting the deputy head of the Civil Administration (Hillel Roth) the authority to sign demolition orders in areas known as the "agreed reserve" in the 1998 Wye River Agreement, which are classified as nature reserves extending over an area of 167,000 dunams (about 3% of the West Bank) and are located within Area B, i.e., under the administration of the Palestinian Authority, with only existing construction allowed before the signing of the agreement.
One month after this decision was issued, Smotrich visited the village of Al-Malha, east of Bethlehem, where he declared, "We will roll up our sleeves, and Israel will return as the owner of the house." On December 12, Israeli forces carried out the first demolition of Palestinian buildings in Area B since the Oslo Accords, demolishing eight buildings under construction under the pretext of illegal construction, a dangerous legal precedent that effectively granted Israel legal sovereignty over land in the area.
Although demolitions in Areas A and B have not completely stopped in recent years, they have been under the category of "punitive demolitions", especially in cases of individual attacks. Human rights reports indicate that about 4% of all Israeli demolitions in the West Bank were carried out in these two areas, which in practice perpetuates the obliteration of the borders between the areas of Palestinian and Israeli control, and redraws the equation of sovereignty on the ground according to the annexation vision led by Smotrich.
It is noteworthy that in July last year, the occupation approved the Knesset in the first reading of a bill guaranteeing control of archaeological monuments in addition to reserves in the West Bank, which was manifested in allocating an amount of (150 million shekels) for the construction of the "Samaria Archaeological Park in the Sebastia area, which contains Islamic and Roman antiquities, and implemented projects and administrative procedures in the Ibrahimi Mosque, which the occupation considered Jewish antiquities, and expelled its director and two employees from the mosque last February.
Seventh: Huge budgets
Over the past decades, the occupation has spent billions of dollars to stabilize the settlements and equip the infrastructure that connects them inside – roads, water, electricity, security services, schools, and public buildings – so that the settlements become organically connected to the Israeli economy and protected from any future settlement. But under the current government, the inflation of these budgets exceeds all that came before it.
Data from the Israel Statistics Center indicate that the additional (non-current) expenditures that the government injects into settlements exceeds NIS 2 billion annually. But in 2023 in particular, the volume of development and construction expenditures in the settlements reached a historic peak, exceeding NIS 2 billion, with an increase of 52% in the fourth quarter of this year compared to the previous quarter, and an increase of 40% over the average of the previous decade.
These figures do not include security spending or most of the costs of building roads, which Israel has built with billions of shekels to ensure that the settlements are connected to the occupied territory, and the promised budget over five years has reached about 3.6 billion shekels after being reduced by the war from 7 billion, nor do they include the current budgets for the daily services provided to the settlers (from teachers' salaries to social welfare, health and transportation services).
As for the Ministry of Housing and Construction, its expenditures in settlements have witnessed an unprecedented jump, as they increased in 2023 by 150% compared to the previous year, and by about 200% compared to the average of the previous decade (2013-2022). Researcher Shlomo Swiersky of the Adva Center estimates that Israel spent $15.2 billion on settlements between 1988 and 2015 alone, all of which highlight the extent of long-term government investment in consolidating the settlement project as part of a policy of gradual annexation.
Eighth: Silent Legal Annexation
Data collected from the website of the Israeli organization Yesh Din shows that since 2015, the Israeli Knesset has debated a total of 175 bills related to the annexation of the West Bank or parts thereof, or the application of Israeli sovereignty to specific areas thereof. Eleven of these bills have been approved by the Knesset in the final terms, and 52 others have passed the first reading.
It is noteworthy that 32% of these projects were submitted under the current Israeli government, roughly equivalent to the previous four governments combined, reflecting an accelerated push towards formalizing legal annexation.
On February 6, 2017, the Knesset passed the so-called Expropriation Law, which allows for the seizure of private Palestinian land on which settlements are built without official expropriation from its owners. According to the law, such land is treated as "state land," while those who can prove their ownership before the Civil Administration's military committees—rather than the judiciary—are allowed to receive financial compensation or alternative land. This law was the first direct legislative step to legalize the theft of private Palestinian land and turn it into Israeli state property.
One year later, on February 12, 2018, the Knesset abolished the Council of Higher Education of the Civil Administration (which oversaw higher education institutions in the settlements) and transferred its powers to the Israel Council of Higher Education, effectively integrating the settlements' academic education sector into the Israeli state system.
On June 27 of the same year, the Knesset amended the Capital Investment Promotion Law to include investment activity in settlements. In 2017, it passed another law prohibiting Israeli companies from refusing to provide services to settlements, including infrastructure and telecommunications, and in 2023 it passed a new law that allows revenue sharing between local authorities inside Israel and their counterparts in settlements, treating the latter as if they were "Israeli" municipalities under full sovereignty.
At the same time, the Knesset passed a law prohibiting Palestinians in the West Bank from petitioning the Israeli Supreme Court in cases of planning, construction, freedom of movement, information, and deportation, transferring jurisdiction to the Jerusalem Administrative Court.
Yesh Din considered the amendment a direct extension of Israeli jurisdiction over the occupied territories. Former Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked commented on the decision, saying, "The festival of petitions held by Palestinians and extreme left-wing organizations before the High Court of Justice against settlements in Judea and Samaria ends today."
One of the most visible projects on the annexation process is a bill that passed its first reading to change the name of the West Bank in government documents and departments to "Judea and Samaria," which was introduced by Simha Rotman of the Religious Zionist Party in September 2024.
According to the data, 100 legislative initiatives have been put forward to annex the West Bank or parts of it, including 35 projects under the current government alone. The most serious of these was the bill introduced by Tzivka Vogel of the Religious Zionist Party in March 2023, which provides for the imposition of Israeli sovereignty and jurisdiction over all settlement areas in the West Bank.
Although most of these projects have yet to become law, the overall legislative and political orientation reflects the transition of annexation from an administrative act to a formal legal framework. This trend was clearly demonstrated on July 18, 2024, when the Knesset voted overwhelmingly on a non-binding resolution rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state even within the framework of a peace agreement, in a clear declaration of permanent control.
Then, in January, he introduced a bill to repeal Jordan's Law No. 40 of 1953 on "the rental and sale of real estate to foreigners," which would open the door to the sale of Palestinian land in the West Bank to Israeli settlers, a move that legal experts considered one of the most dangerous annexation attempts to date.
The most dangerous development of all was on May 11, 2025, when the Israeli government announced the start of the registration of land in Area C within the "Israeli Land Registry", which effectively closes the door for Palestinians to claim their ownership, and paves the way for the conversion of the largest part of the West Bank land into Israeli "state property", in a step that paves the way for de facto annexation of the land.
Just four months after this proposal, the government announced the extension of the powers of the Israel Land Authority to Area C, through the creation of a new unit within the Land Protection Division, which marks the culmination of a creeping annexation process that began administratively and then became fully legal.
The behavior of the occupation governments since its occurrence in 1967 indicates that annexation was not an emergency option or the result of a temporary political circumstance, but rather a gradual strategic path that began from the first day of the occupation, through the control of the land with legal-looking tools and aggressive in essence.
From the declaration of closed military zones, to the confiscation of land and its transformation into "state land", to the expansion of settlements and the expansion of infrastructure, to the construction of an integrated bureaucratic and legislative system, the interim military control has been transformed into permanent de jure and de facto sovereignty.
Israel has prepared for annexation for decades, as one prepares for a long-planned wedding; it has prepared the land, built the house, and completed the administration, financing and legal arrangements, and only the official announcement remains that this process is complete.
But if this is the wedding of the occupation, it is the new Nakba of the Palestinians, a Nakba embodied not in the scene of a direct military occupation, but in a silent and continuous annexation that swallows the land and the right together, and turns the West Bank into an administrative, legal and economic extension of the state it occupies. Do they need a "publicity party"?