^{Photo: Palestinian mourners attend the funeral of three people killed the previous day in Kufr Malik in the West Bank, June 26, 2025. (Oren Ziv)}

While the genocide in Gaza rages, the Israeli military and Israeli settlers are not-so-quietly carrying out a massive, increasingly coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing across the Occupied West Bank. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes and entire towns have been emptied: mass displacement on a scale not seen in the West Bank since 1967.

But while the decimation of Gaza makes headlines in the U.S., the mainstream media has largely ignored skyrocketing Israeli violence and settlement expansion across the West Bank — obscuring that the two are deeply intertwined.

In this week’s Wire, we’ll break down a string of recent settler attacks and explain why violence in the West Bank is rising apace with Israel’s deepening genocide in Gaza.

“The largest population displacement…in the West Bank since 1967”

Even before October 2023, killings by the Israeli military and settlers in the West Bank were on the rise. Between January 1 and October 6, 2023, the Israeli military and Jewish settlers killed over 200 Palestinians, including 42 children — the deadliest year since the U.N. began keeping records in 2005.

When Israel launched its war of annihilation against Palestinians in Gaza, violence in the West Bank skyrocketed. More than half of the over 500 Palestinians killed in the West Bank in 2023 were killed in the three months after October 7. Since then, another 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers. These killings are far from isolated incidents; they are part and parcel of the Israeli government’s policy of de facto annexation.

After a temporary ceasefire agreement was reached in Gaza in January of this year, Israel accelerated its theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank. Just days after the agreement came into effect, the Israeli government launched a large-scale military operation dubbed “Operation Iron Wall” that targeted refugee camps including Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams. More than 40,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes. Months later, they still haven’t been able to return.

“The refugee camps in the north have been destroyed, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been without shelter for nearly 200 days, and they have no body protecting them from Israeli assaults– either by the Israeli military or Israeli militias.”

_{– Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti}

“Iron Wall” is the longest Israeli military operation carried out in the West Bank in over twenty years, UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma told reporters this week — and it has prompted “the largest population displacement of the Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.”

Settler attacks skyrocket.

As it forces tens of thousands to flee their homes, the Israeli military is drafting and arming thousands of Jewish Israeli settlers who live on stolen Palestinian land, and directly collaborating with them as they carry out attacks on Palestinian towns.

As a result, settler attacks have skyrocketed in the two years since the genocide in Gaza began. In the first six months of 2025, settlers carried out over 2,000 attacks across the West Bank: from establishing illegal outposts, to setting fire to Palestinian homes and property, to organized attacks where dozens of settlers descended on Palestinian villages, often in coordination with the Israeli military.

“Settlers came again and tried to take some of our sheep. Israeli soldiers arrived with them. They surrounded us, took our IDs and phones, and led the settlers through our homes. Then they said we had three hours to leave or we’d lose our lives.” 

_{-local activist Aaliyah Malihat describes a settler attack in Jericho}

In the last two weeks alone, settlers have carried out dozens of attacks. In many cases, the Israeli military either ignored or actively participated in those attacks:

• “Their tactics mimicked those of military and police units”: On June 25, settlers descended on Kufr Malik and killed three Palestinians trying to defend their land, just two days after the Israeli military killed a 13-year-old boy in the same town. Mere hours after a funeral was held for those killed, settlers carried out another attack in the nearby town of Turmus Ayya. As reported in +972 Magazine: “The settlers slowly withdrew, passing right by the troops. None were stopped. Meanwhile, the military poured into the village, not to halt the settler assault, but to contain the Palestinians trying to defend their homes.”
• “Residents were forced to leave at gunpoint”: On July 2, settlers attacked Al-Muarrajat, invading Palestinian homes, stealing dozens of livestock, and erecting an outpost within the village. In just two days, the town’s entire population had fled — only to be attacked again by settlers in a nearby refugee camp.
• “Settler youths armed with clubs”: On July 11, a 20-year-old Palestinian American was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in Sinjil. This year, the Israeli army constructed a “towering barbed wire fence” that separated Palestinians in Sinjil from their farmland and from the outside world, part of an increase in restrictions on movement imposed on Palestinians across the West Bank since the genocide in Gaza began.

The Zionist blueprint.

Settler and Israeli military attacks in the West Bank cannot be understood in isolation from Israel’s two-year long campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza.

In the West Bank, killings by Israeli settlers and soldiers have skyrocketed as the genocide in Gaza deepens. And the same tactics are being used: After the Israeli military forcibly displaced the population of Jenin refugee camp, it brought in tanks and bulldozers to destroy roads and demolish large areas of the camp, intentionally targeting critical infrastructure to ensure that residents could not return.

Across historic Palestine, the end game of Zionism has always been the permanent theft of Palestinian land. The genocide in Gaza and settler rampages across the West Bank are the latest escalation in a decades-long war of annihilation against the Palestinian people.