Some crimes arrive with explosions. Others advance quietly — through a bulldozer at dawn, a rifle at a shepherd’s chest, a child torn from its bed.
In the West Bank, dispossession has become a daily ritual. Palestinian anguish has become background noise that too many have learned not to hear.
Ethnic cleansing, not security
Homes vanish and villages empty. Children tremble through the night.
Families are denied water until leaving becomes the only way to survive. Human beings are reduced to obstacles on land they have called home for generations.
This is not security. It is ethnic cleansing, the deliberate destruction of a people’s ability to live.
Annexation needed Palestinians without rights
Israel’s intention to annex the West Bank first required that law defined the land as Israeli sovereign.
Once sovereignty was treated as a foregone conclusion, Palestinians became obstacles to be cleared. They were no longer persons bearing rights.
In his time, Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher, described such a practice precisely with these words: “Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice.” In that condition, he wrote, “force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.”
Annexation manufactured the lawlessness
Israeli settlers and Israeli soldiers now operate inside that vacuum. The UN Secretary-General warns that displacement is at “levels not seen since 1967.”
Amnesty International calls it state-driven ethnic cleansing. Annexation did not follow lawlessness. It manufactured it.
Six settler attacks a day
The extent of Israeli soldiers’ and settlers’ terrorism in the West Bank offers a shocking picture. Palestinians are enduring it every single day.
Since the beginning of 2026, settlers have committed over 1,200 attacks causing casualties or damage. That is six a day.
Since January 2023, 46 Palestinian communities in the West Bank have been emptied entirely. That is the highest pace on record.
Killings without even the pretense of hiding
Extrajudicial killings in the West Bank are carried out in the open. Security-camera footage obtained by B’Tselem captured two of many short-range executions.
Rami Jundob, 25, was shot and fell. A military jeep then approached, and a soldier fired again. The soldier then filmed the dying man on his phone. Jundob died the next day. Thaar Shahin, 36, had hidden beneath a car. He was shot dead from close range.
An inquiry for show
The footage of a soldier casually filming a man he had just shot is disgusting and revolting. It became a searing emblem of impunity.
Israel’s military opened an inquiry. It was for show, meant for mere public consumption.
A public numb to killing
These gruesome extrajudicial killings reveal a collapse in moral restraint. Such wanton killing barely registers in the Israeli public consciousness.
The killings are committed with full impunity. They continue in the West Bank with chilling regularity, revealing a hardened moral numbness.
Palestinian lives, including the lives of children, are regarded as disposable rather than as lives of equal human worth.
Settler violence is commissioned by the state
Much of the international community is now fully aware of the settlers’ unrelenting terror against Palestinians.
The Israeli government does not merely tolerate settler violence. It commissioned it.
Ministers armed militias, funded outposts and shielded perpetrators from prosecution.
A war on everything that sustains life
Settlers in the West Bank torch olive groves, sever water lines and steal livestock. They burn cars, tents and classrooms.
They also break into homes and beat villagers with rifles. They smash solar panels, empty water tanks and pump sewage onto farmland.
And settlers destroy power lines and steal equipment. As of June, more than 190 water and sanitation structures had been damaged or destroyed this year.
The purpose is exhaustion
Amnesty International concludes that the settlers’ behavior is not the work of rogue individuals. It is state policy designed to accelerate annexation.
Make farming impossible, water inaccessible and sleep unsafe. Then families leave without a single expulsion order being signed.
Peace Now found a stark acceleration. In just two and a half years, settlers seized 70 percent of all land they have taken since the 1990s.
Demolition as an instrument of dispossession
The Netanyahu government has perfected demolition as an instrument of dispossession and subsequently displacement from the West Bank.
At least 37,135 Palestinians were displaced across the West Bank in 2025 alone. That is a record. And Human Rights Watch found roughly 32,000 residents displaced and about 850 buildings demolished. It called this forcible transfer a war crime.
The horror is not merely the rubble. It is the calculated cruelty of a legal architecture. That architecture was built so that Palestinian shelter is always a crime and Palestinian land always available.
Checkpoints that turn daily life into attrition
Palestinian movement within the West Bank itself has been criminalized. The purpose of those checkpoints is not to achieve security. It is attrition — to make ordinary life so exhausting that staying becomes unbearable.
OCHA counted 925 checkpoints, gates and earth mounds across the West Bank. That is the most in twenty years, restricting 3.4 million Palestinians.
A two-mile journey to a clinic can consume half a day. A mother seeking her child’s medicine may not arrive at all. Never mind that a third of essential medicines are out of stock in the West Bank.
Sealed crossings and withheld aid
The state of Israel frequently seals all crossings. It offers various unfounded pretexts, such as suspicious terrorist infiltration or smuggling of drugs.
Children are the first to die. Many die in their mother’s arms en route to the hospital.
The WHO called the policy and practice a “deliberate withholding of humanitarian aid.”
The night raid as the occupation’s signature ritual
The night raid is the occupation’s signature ritual. Soldiers arrive at two or three in the morning.
They are not pursuing a suspect, often with no name at all. They kick in doors and drag children from their beds. They blindfold and cuff the children in front of their parents. Then they take a boy away for weeks.
Children who wake screaming
Israeli forces arbitrarily detain an estimated 500 to 1,000 Palestinian children every year. The overwhelming majority are seized from their beds in terrifying pre-dawn raids.
Save the Children found that 65 percent of detained children were taken between midnight and dawn. Afterward, 73 percent suffered insomnia and 53 percent recurring nightmares.
Cruelty is the reward
The purpose of it all is terror administered for its own sake. In his 1887 book, “On the Genealogy of Morals”, Friedrich Nietzsche named the impulse plainly. “To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more.”
He called it an “ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle.” Cruelty here is not a byproduct. It is the reward.
The purpose is a permanent atmosphere of dread. No family knows which night the soldiers will come for their children.
Why the attempt at erasure will fail
Israel may dispossess Palestinians village by village, hilltop by hilltop, home by shattered home.
But it will never erase the nearly 3.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank. Nor will it break their claim to freedom, dignity and nationhood. Every home demolished, acre stolen and child terrorized does not secure Israel’s future. It hastens its moral ruin.
Israel’s choice on October 27
On October 27, Israelis must decide whether to stop this descent.
The alternative is to empower a government that is hollowing Israel from within.
The Netanyahu government has left Israel isolated, feared and stripped of the moral legitimacy on which its future depends.