The (not so) fine line between Gaza and the West Bank

For years we have been talking about the violence of settlers in the West Bank. So much so that perhaps we have settled into a too comfortable imaginary. When we talk about it, we do so to refer to extremist groups that attack Palestinians, burn houses, uproot olive trees, or appropriate land, while the Israeli state appears in the background, incapable, little or not at all willing to contain them. But this image explains less and less what is happening.

In 2025, the UN registered an average of nearly six settler attacks and three Palestinian injuries per day, compared to one every three days in 2020. 55% of the injuries sustained by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank this year occurred in the context of settler attacks. By early July, more than 2,300 people had been displaced as a result of these attacks and the associated access restrictions.

Behind these figures lies something more organized than an accumulation of individual aggressions. Armed settlers enter Palestinian communities, occupy pasture land, destroy crops, and attack homes. Last week, dozens of Israeli settlers decided tobesiege for days the Palestinian village of Qusra, south of Nablus. The Israeli army was present, as usual. Palestinians and human rights organizations have been documenting cases for years where soldiers protect the aggressors, allow attacks, or intervene afterward against those who try to defend themselves.

Added to the violence are demolitions, confiscations, closed roads, military checkpoints, restrictions on access to water, and a planning system that makes it extraordinarily difficult for Palestinians to build legally, while Israeli settlements continue to grow. It is increasingly difficult to disconnect settler violence, with state support, from the process of displacement and annexation that pushes Palestinians to live in ever-shrinking spaces.

As many of us have been trying to remember time and again for years, this is part of a much longer story. Israeli settler colonialism did not begin with Netanyahu, nor with October 7th, nor with the destruction of Gaza. It began decades ago, even before the establishment of the Israeli state itself, and affects the Palestinian people as a whole, intrinsically linked, moreover, to a multitude of dynamics within and outside of historical Palestine. For decades, Israel has been creating a territorial reality in which Palestinian presence is fragmented and is, whenever possible, annihilated while the space available for settlements, and those who inhabit them, increases. One family can no longer access their land. Another loses access to water or crops. Another mourns their dead, wounded, and prisoners. Another receives a demolition order. Another is forced to flee after months of attacks and threats. Shortly thereafter, a new settler enclave appears nearby, with the blessing and protection of Tel Aviv. Viewed village by village, it seems like a sum of local stories. Viewed on the map, the result is considerably less ambiguous.

If anything has changed the current context, and over the last three years, in Gaza, it is our way of understanding the situation (still not intervening, unfortunately). Although we are often tempted to stick to the facts separately, we now understand how far this project can go. Especially when dehumanization, impunity, and military force find fewer and fewer political limits – Israel's National Security Minister claimed this weekend on a podcast that Israeli forces should "kill 30 or 40" Palestinians every night in Gaza—. And this forces us to look at the West Bank with different eyes. Because there, elements we already know are combined with increasing intensity: expulsion of the population, destruction of the conditions necessary to remain in the territory, territorial expansion, violence of different forms and intensities, military incursions, and an increasingly open Israeli political discourse about annexation, displacement, and racial superiority. Even the army's operations and settler violence are becoming increasingly difficult to separate when they produce the same effect on the ground: fewer Palestinians in certain areas and more Israeli control.

The time has come to realize that the issue of genocide also takes shape outside of Gaza. It is not about comparing two territories that live – at least until now – in different situations, but about raising a series of questions about the process we observe, the continuities and the need to study and understand history, and about how long we intend to allow it to advance before taking it seriously as a structure with an ideology and material interests that accompany and sustain it. After Gaza, saying that we did not know how far it could go should no longer be an option.