The Guardian view on Israel and the West Bank: the other relentless assault upon Palestinians | Editorial

Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.

The Israeli state is not merely complicit in these acts. In addition to the economic suffocation and increased military raids in the West Bank, the Guardian reported last month that settler-only units of the army are acting as “vigilante militias”. Haaretz newspaper reports that the military has ordered soldiers to prevent Palestinians from ploughing their land at the behest of settlers – not only threatening them with destitution, but paving the way for land seizure.

With Israel heading to elections in months, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are in a hurry. While they and their allies have changed the facts on the ground dramatically, and have steadily expanded Israel’s control, the bureaucratic measures adopted by the security cabinet last Sunday are “tectonic”, as one scholar notes. They ease land theft, stripping away the very limited constraints on purchase, and destroy the nominal authority of Palestinians in areas A and B.

The White House has reiterated Donald Trump’s opposition to annexation, but talks with Mr Netanyahu in Washington on Wednesday focused on Iran. To the extent that the US president thinks about Palestinians at all, he thinks about Gaza. Yet this cannot be treated separately from the West Bank. Arab and Islamic states central to his peace plan have warned that the new measures will “inflame violence, deepen the conflict and endanger regional stability and security”.

The declaration of a ceasefire in Gaza – which has not stopped the Israeli military killing Palestinians there either – has reduced the political pressure on other governments to act. There are no signs that the outrage at last Sunday’s decision will translate into action. The UK “strongly condemns” the measures. The EU said that sanctions were “still on the table” but is clearly in no hurry to act. Within Israel, only a handful dissent.

Hunger and desperation endure in Gaza while the Trump administration promotes fantastical visions of a glittering skyline. Israel has demolished the East Jerusalem headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), the UN body which supports millions of Palestinian refugees, and is booting out NGOs, including Médecins Sans Frontières, from across occupied Palestine.

In 2024, the UN’s international court of justice ruled that Israel should end its illegal occupation as quickly as possible. Last year international outrage over Gaza forced multiple governments, including the UK, to recognise a Palestinian state, dragged by their publics. Those symbolic announcements look increasingly hollow. Real action cannot wait, for Israel’s government will not.