Israel’s Slow War on the West Bank

Israeli leaders seem increasingly comfortable with the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.

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For Israel’s settlement movement, this April was a moment of triumph. For years, the movement had lobbied the Israeli government to reverse its 2005 decision to remove multiple settlements from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank. This month, the lobbying paid off. Israel formally reestablished Sa-Nur, the last of four West Bank settlements evacuated in 2005, to be relegalized. The settlers, then, had finally removed all traces of the disengagement in the West Bank. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described Sa-Nur’s legalization as a “historic correction,” while settler leader Yossi Dagan claimed that Israel had finally managed to “turn back the clock.”

But Israel is doing far more than turning back the clock in the West Bank. It is creating a new reality that will—in Smotrich’s words—“kill” Palestinian statehood once and for all. Its chosen means for doing so are threefold: expanding settlements; forcing West Bank Palestinians into smaller physical spaces; and, above all, increasing the pressure on the Palestinian Authority (PA).

For Israel’s settlement movement, this April was a moment of triumph. For years, the movement had lobbied the Israeli government to reverse its 2005 decision to remove multiple settlements from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank. This month, the lobbying paid off. Israel formally reestablished Sa-Nur, the last of four West Bank settlements evacuated in 2005, to be relegalized. The settlers, then, had finally removed all traces of the disengagement in the West Bank. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described Sa-Nur’s legalization as a “historic correction,” while settler leader Yossi Dagan claimed that Israel had finally managed to “turn back the clock.”

But Israel is doing far more than turning back the clock in the West Bank. It is creating a new reality that will—in Smotrich’s words—“kill” Palestinian statehood once and for all. Its chosen means for doing so are threefold: expanding settlements; forcing West Bank Palestinians into smaller physical spaces; and, above all, increasing the pressure on the Palestinian Authority (PA).

This campaign, which began before Oct. 7, 2023, but has subsequently escalated at an alarming pace, is now pushing the febrile status quo in the West Bank to the brink of collapse. Left unchecked, it risks undoing the post-Oslo status quo for good, bringing about the collapse of the PA and transforming what is currently one of Israel’s quietest borders into a quagmire of indefinite chaos.

Centrist Israelis frequently express frustration when the international community takes Smotrich’s messianic pronouncements as reflective of policy or public opinion. Yet when it comes to the West Bank, it is Smotrich who increasingly calls the shots.

This began in late 2022, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power. In a leaked recording that year, Smotrich described Netanyahu as “the liar of all liars.” But he recognized Netanyahu’s value: having burned his bridges with other parties, the prime minister was more dependent on the far right than ever. This calculation was vindicated when Netanyahu gave Smotrich the powerful Finance Ministry and created a new Defense Ministry post for Smotrich that would control zoning, construction, and infrastructure in the West Bank.

With these steps, Netanyahu transferred the power over developments in the West Bank away from Israel’s military, which traditionally prioritized quiet. The shift also dovetailed with another preexisting trend: The West Bank becoming more violent. In October 2022, Israel’s military launched incursions into PA-controlled Nablus to counter the rise of new, armed Palestinian groups. But these incursions remained time-limited.

After Netanyahu’s return to power, however, government policy began to drive violence. After Palestinian attacks killed two Israelis in February 2023, settlers rampaged through the town of Huwara. The government then revoked a ban on Israelis entering areas of the West Bank that were evacuated during the 2005 disengagement. More outposts (settlements that had not been officially sanctioned by the Israeli government) were founded in 2023 than in any previous year. With more settlers came more violence. This is why, on Oct. 6, 2023, the vast majority of Israel’s military was deployed in or around the West Bank and away from Gaza.

Subsequently, as war has raged in Gaza, Israel has taken steps that escalated the levels of violence and political instability in the West Bank. The territory did see an increase in attacks on Israelis shortly after Oct. 7, involving local Palestinians likely inspired by or directly taking orders from Hamas. Palestinian attacks, however, declined shortly afterward and had already halved by November 2023; by February 2024, they had declined further to roughly pre-Oct. 7 levels.

Yet settler and military violence against West Bank Palestinians continued to intensify. Israeli troops used to be a rare sight in West Bank cities, with the exception of Hebron and Jerusalem. No longer. In January 2025, Israel launched “Operation Iron Wall,” which gave its military a broad mandate to enter territory under PA control.

Unlike previous military operations that responded to increased Palestinian attacks, this operation coincided with a decrease. Simultaneously, settler attacks on Palestinians almost doubled between 2022 and 2025. The result is that more than 1,000 West Bank Palestinians—most of them civilians—have been killed by Israel’s military or settlers since Oct. 7.

All this was accompanied by transformative changes at the political level. Since the 1994 Paris Protocols, Israel had handed over customs duties on all goods bound for the West Bank to the PA. But as finance minister, Smotrich ended this policy, immediately depriving the PA of more than 50 percent of its annual income. At the time of writing, Israel has withheld more than $5 billion in tax revenue.

The result is that the PA—the West Bank’s biggest employer—has withheld a portion of the salaries of all its employees, many of whom are taking home less than 40 percent of their wages. West Bank unemployment, meanwhile, has more than doubled since Oct. 7, as Israel cracked down on Palestinians crossing the border for work. The result is that fewer Palestinians have jobs, while many of those that do have taken a significant pay cut.

Israel is also practicing systematic population transfer, which is putting more pressure on the cash-strapped PA. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem,59 Palestinian communities have been completely depopulated after Oct. 7; a further 16 have seen partial expulsions. This is primarily due to settler violence. It is also not random: The vast majority were situated in Area C, the part of the West Bank over which Israel exercises full political and military control. This is also where most settlers live.

Further, 2025 marked the first year ever where Israeli authorities demolished more Palestinian homes in Area C than Palestinians built. This suggests that Israel’s government and settler movement are working hand in hand to depopulate Area C and displace Palestinians into areas A and B, where the PA exercises more control.

While stymieing Palestinian construction, Israel is also green-lighting more settlements. Between Oct. 7 and mid-March settlers had built 152 new outposts throughout the West Bank. Israel’s government, in turn, has retroactively legalized multiple outposts, meaning that they can be connected up to the road, electricity, and water networks.

Most of the new outposts founded after Oct. 7 are zoned as farms. This is strategically expedient, because farms require more land than small villages or towns. Though the number of settlements is increasing, settler numbers (beyond natural growth) are not. In this context, the farm designation allows the settler movement to claim maximum land with the smallest necessary population. It also disproves the settlers’ argument that recent settlement expansion is simply a supply-side response to housing demand.

Once created, new settlements need protection. As a result, Israel’s military has established 220 new checkpoints since Oct. 7. This all comes at the Palestinians’ expense, elongating journeys, strangling business development, and frustrating access to goods and necessities. What’s more, as displacement expands, absorbing and providing for the displaced also becomes the PA’s problem. This is compounded by the Israeli military expelling up to 40,000 Palestinians from refugee camps in PA-controlled territory since Oct. 7.

Initially, the point of the PA was to bring order to the West Bank’s cities, which would make Israel feel secure enough to withdraw from large parts of the territory. For decades, even as leaders such as Netanyahu publicly condemned the PA, the Israeli government cooperated with it to combat violent actors, including Hamas. But where many in the security establishment still see the PA as a vital source of order, the settler movement and its political allies now increasingly see it as an obstacle to their desire to expand Israel’s presence in the territory.

With the PA confronting a more violent environment with less money and less legitimacy, it is facing an uphill battle to maintain order. An anonymous Israeli military source claimed that cooperation with the PA caused a 78 percent decrease in Palestinian attacks on Israelis between 2024 and 2025. In 2025, a Shin Bet source warned that the PA’s collapse could cause its security forces to degenerate into a well-armed militia; in effect, transforming them from a security asset into a security threat.

This was echoed in April by former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, who described Israel’s West Bank policies as “planting the seeds for a future October 7” by creating chaos on Israel’s most sensitive border.

But for Smotrich and his fellow travelers this is seemingly a risk worth taking. This is because expanding Israeli control of the West Bank, while squeezing Palestinians into smaller spaces, is a means to the end of preventing Palestinian statehood and securing de facto, if not de jure, Israeli annexation of most of the territory.

For hints of Israel’s planned “day after” in the West Bank, look to Gaza. Hamas now controls less than half of the coastal enclave. The same territory contains around 90 percent of Gazans, many of whom were displaced from other parts of the strip that Israel now controls. In the West Bank, Area A has long comprised just 18 percent of the territory while containing 55 percent of its Palestinian population. Israel seems intent on shrinking the former number while increasing the latter.

This strategy is less regime change than attrition. Israel is pushing Palestinians into smaller spaces, which it expects its counterparts—Hamas in Gaza, the PA in the West Bank—to govern. This expand its own territorial control while a substantial and potentially hostile population.

The difference, of course, is that Hamas spearheaded the worst mass casualty attack in Israeli history. The PA did not. There is no threat comparable to Hamas or Hezbollah in the territory. Equally, Israel has deliberately pushed the PA to a breaking point while still expecting it to police and govern the territory’s Palestinians. Taken together, this is a recipe for disaster. But Israel shows no signs of backing down from treating the West Bank, its inhabitants, and above all the PA as hostile threats to be degraded and confronted.

Rob Geist Pinfold is a lecturer in international security at King’s College London, a research fellow at the Peace Research Center Prague, and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. X: @DrRGeistPinfold

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Israel has forgotten the wisdom in an iconic funeral oration delivered 70 years ago.