"More than five hundred thousand Jewish settlers already reside among more than three million Palestinians in the West Bank, which has been designated as part of a future Palestinian state since the 1947 United Nations resolution that proposed the creation of the state of Israel. And the Israeli government’s support for those settlements has grown increasingly bold. During the eight years of the Obama Administration, Israel approved just three new settlements in the West Bank; since the start of 2023, roughly when the current Israeli government came to power, it has approved one hundred and four. It has authorized construction of more than fifty-eight thousand units of housing, and the total number of settlements and outposts has more than doubled over the same period, from about three hundred to about six hundred and forty. Violence against the Palestinians, meanwhile, has increased in tandem with the settlements, often perpetrated with the apparent protection or approval of the Israeli security forces. In 2016, the United Nations counted a hundred and seven settler attacks that damaged Palestinian property, caused Palestinian casualties, or both. Since 2023, the U.N. has documented more than fifty-three hundred—a rate of more than four a day. More than eleven hundred Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed either directly by settlers or by the Israeli security forces. (In the first seven months of 2026, there were at least one thousand three hundred and eighty settler attacks, a rate of more than six a day, and seventy-six Palestinians were killed.) Over the same three years, according to the U.N., demolitions and intimidation in the West Bank fully or partially displaced one hundred and seventeen Palestinian communities, uprooting over fifty-nine hundred Palestinians.
Where such assaults or evictions once occurred sporadically, (...) “now it is going haywire every day.”"
newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-…
#Israel #Palestine #WestBank #SettlerColonialism #Zionism
New Maps Show How Israel Has Thwarted Hopes for a Palestinian State
The breakneck expansion of settlements in the West Bank has rendered American talk of a two-state solution increasingly irrelevant.David D. Kirkpatrick (The New Yorker)
