ONGOING ANNEXATION OF THE WEST BANK

The West Bank is home to 3.3 million Palestinians but state repression and Israeli settler violence work hand in hand towards the declared aim of displacing Palestinians and annexing their land.

On 23 July 2025, the Israeli Knesset passed a symbolic resolution entitled “Application of Israeli sovereignty in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley”. By a vote of 71 to 13, the parliament declared the West Bank an “inseparable part of Eretz Israel — the historical, cultural and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people”, invoking the Jewish people’s alleged “natural, historical and legal right” to all territories. Eretz Israel historically includes not only present-day Israel but also areas that are not currently part of it. This encompasses parts of Southern Lebanon, Western Jordan, some regions of Syria, the Gaza Strip, Judea, and Samaria

Although this resolution lacks any legal legitimacy, it reflects what has long been a reality: for many decades, successive Israeli governments have pursued a policy of gradual, systematic annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories. The West Bank is no exception.

Today, around 750,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem — and the number is rising.

New settlements are built using two distinct methods. The first is a “bottom-up” strategy: without any permits, supporters of the national-religious Israeli settler movement erect temporary structures they call “outposts”. Settlers are protected and accompanied by the Israeli army while carrying out attacks on the local population in order to drive them out. Once the Palestinians have been expelled, the outposts grow into full-fledged settlements and are later legalized by the state.

The second is a “top-down” strategy: settlement projects are approved and implemented by the government from the outset, and even subsidized by the state. While in the first case settlers take the initiative, in the second the state acts according to a strategic plan; in practice, the two methods are closely intertwined.

Although most residents remain determined not to give up their land, constant confrontations with illegal settlers are taking their toll. The second method of settlement-building follows a strategic plan: the Israeli government selects sites for new settlements that cut off Palestinian towns and villages from one another and subsequently ban Palestinians from passing through these settlements. In this way, contiguous areas are fragmented and isolated.

The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reports that the establishment of settlements in the West Bank violates international humanitarian law. The UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice concur, and even the German federal government has endorsed this view. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own citizens into occupied territory.

Settler Violence in the West Bank

With its settlement and annexation policy, Israel violates not only international law but also human rights. Palestinians in the West Bank face violence every day.

The Oslo II Accord divided the West Bank into three administrative zones. Zone A is under Palestinian self-rule and forms the stronghold of the Palestinian Authority, based in Ramallah; 18 percent of the West Bank falls in Zone A. Zone B, nominally under joint control but dominated in practice by the Israeli army, represents 22 percent of the territory. Zone C accounts for almost 60 percent of the West Bank, including At-Tuwani. In Zone C, Israel, citing its security interests, exercises unrestricted military, civil, and legal control. For Palestinians, this means that those seeking protection must turn to Israeli institutions — where such protection is usually denied.

Although international law and Israel’s own legal code require the state to protect Palestinians in the occupied territories from violence and unlawful acts, the organization concluded “that Israel is unwilling to prevent or stop ideologically motivated crimes committed by Israelis”. The state also fails to fulfil its duty to prosecute them.

(No) Freedom of Movement for Palestinians

In the West Bank, whether roads connect or divide is decided by one’s license plate. Vehicles with yellow Israeli plates can move freely. Vehicles with white-and-green Palestinian plates are barred from many roads; short journeys that should last just a few minutes become detours that take hours. A report by B’Tselem calls this system a “regime of forbidden roads”. Its premise is that all Palestinians pose a security risk and that their freedom of movement must therefore be curtailed. This indiscriminate logic affects the entire population and violates Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees every person the right to freedom of movement within a state.

Even on roads Palestinians are permitted to use, checkpoints and barriers are ubiquitous. In early 2023, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recorded 565 obstacles to movement in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem): 49 checkpoints permanently staffed by Israeli military or private security companies; 139 occasionally staffed checkpoints; and 377 roadblocks, earth mounds, gates, and trenches. The army continuously adds new obstacles; the Palestinian-Israeli magazine +972 now reports roughly 900 such checkpoints and blockades. These open and close arbitrarily, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. Soldiers at checkpoints decide, quite literally, over life and death. According to border police regulations, any ambulance with white-and-green (Palestinian) plates whose journey has not been pre-coordinated may not pass the checkpoint.

Ongoing Annexation

The land-annexation project in the Palestinian territories cannot be attributed to a single government or specific ideological current in Israeli politics. It is instead the result of decades of policies of destruction, expulsion, and land seizure that many describe as colonization.

The Israeli government’s decision of 23 July 2025 to fully annex the occupied West Bank shows that this is not an idea for the future, but rather a present reality. It should be understood as an official affirmation of messianic aspirations tied to the biblical vision of Eretz Israel, an expansionist variant of Zionism dating to the state-building era of the 1940s. Interpretations of this vision vary depending on religious and political outlook.

Unlike ultra-Orthodox Jews, adherents of the religious-Zionist movement believe that settling the land of Israel (in the biblical sense) hastens redemption associated with the emergence of a Jewish kingdom. Final redemption, however, presupposes Israel’s complete military victory and the establishment of a “Greater Israel”, which is to be exclusively Jewish. Nearly 60 years after the 1967 war, this idea has become dominant within the religious-Zionist community, which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the settler population. This is also the logic of the religious-Zionist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a driving force behind the annexation of the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza.

“Maximum territory and minimum (Palestinian) population” is the stated goal of Smotrich’s annexation policy, which he announced at a press conference in Jerusalem on 3 September 2025. Eighty-two percent of the West Bank is now slated for formal annexation. According to OCHA, since 7 October 2023 the number of Palestinians killed by soldiers and settlers in the West Bank has risen to over 1,000 (as of 31 July 2025).

Note

The core of global suspicion regarding Israel’s ambition lies in the concept of “The Greater Israel” or Eretz Yisrael HaShlema. Historically and religiously, this concept refers to the promised land in biblical texts, whose boundaries include southern Lebanon. The broad definition from Genesis 15:18, which mentions territory from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates River, automatically places all of Lebanon within the ideal map of Jewish expansionism. Even in the division of the ancient tribes of Israel, southern Lebanon was considered the inheritance of the tribes of Asher and Naphtali.

What was once considered a marginal aspiration of messianic groups has now transformed into a policy openly voiced by high-ranking government officials. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has definitively stated that Israel’s new international boundary must be at the Litani River. This statement is not merely rhetoric for domestic political consumption, but an operational guideline being implemented on the ground. Smotrich views this boundary change as a “new reality” that must be accepted by the international community after the conflict.

Civil movements such as Uri Tzafon, which emerged in 2024, provide a practical dimension to this theological ambition. This group aggressively campaigns for the settlement of Jewish civilians in Lebanese territories successfully controlled by the military. The appearance of housing advertisements with views of snow-covered mountains in areas that are legally still part of Lebanese sovereignty indicates an effort to replicate the settlement model in the West Bank in southern Lebanon. For adherents of Greater Israel, the Litani River is not merely a military defensive line, but a religious boundary that must be restored.

What is shown by the Israeli military on the ground further strengthens the annexation thesis. The total destruction of villages and the prohibition on the return of Lebanese civilians create a demographic vacuum that becomes a prerequisite for the entry of new settlers. The use of the term “historical correction” by settlement activists to describe the occupation in southern Lebanon indicates that the motivation for this aggression goes far beyond merely weakening Hezbollah; it is an effort to redesign Israel’s national geography in accordance with their eschatological narrative.

The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria at the end of 2024 has created a power vacuum that Israel has utilized to strengthen its dominance. With the existence of a new security coordination mechanism between the Syrian transitional government, the United States, and Israel through the “Joint Fusion Mechanism,” Tel Aviv now has operational freedom on the northern front without significant disturbance from Damascus. This is the foundation of what is referred to as Pax Israelica, a regional order in which security is fully defined by Israeli military power.

Lebanon is currently on the verge of total state failure. With the burden of one million internally displaced persons and the postponement of parliamentary elections until 2028, the central authority in Beirut is losing control over its sovereign territory. This condition is highly ideal for Israel to establish de facto annexation in the south. The most likely projection is that Israel will maintain military control over the area south of the Litani for an indefinite period, while gradually building civilian infrastructure that will permanently change the status of the territory.

Diplomatic efforts to achieve a permanent ceasefire appear deadlocked because Israel proposes conditions that touch the core of Lebanese sovereignty, such as control over airports and ports to prevent rearmament. Without significant international pressure, especially from the United States under the Trump administration, which tends to give full freedom to Netanyahu’s strategy, the occupation of southern Lebanon will become a permanent feature on the new map of the Middle East. Lebanon is forced to enter this new regional order as a security protectorate state, or face the risk of further internal fragmentation that could trigger civil war.

In short, the attack on Lebanon in 2026 is the culmination of the convergence between modern security needs and ancient expansionist ambitions. The Litani River is no longer merely a geographic name, but a monument to the collapse of Lebanese sovereignty and the rise of Greater Israel ambition. Amid the silence of the world’s response, border lines in the Levant are being redrawn with fire and concrete, creating new historical wounds that will haunt regional stability for decades to come. Southern Lebanon, in the vision of Pax Israelica, appears to have been prepared to become a “new Northern Galilee,” completing the territorial mosaic of a nation that feels it has a divine right to continue expanding.