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Amnesty International said that a significant acceleration in the speed and scale of Israeli annexation measures in the occupied West Bank amounted to a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” aimed at removing Palestinians and ultimately annexing the territory.
In a new report published Wednesday, the global human rights organization accused Israel’s government of implementing a state-led and -sponsored campaign that has resulted in the forcible displacement Palestinians in the West Bank.
“Our report exposes that these abuses are not the result of a few ‘bad apples.’ Settler violence is a core component of a state-sanctioned campaign of ethnic cleansing, central to maintaining Israel’s system of apartheid,” said Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard.
“What we are witnessing is deliberate, state-led annexation, in complete violation of international law unfolding before the eyes of the entire world.”
Last week, Israel’s hardline finance minister Bezalel Smotrich announced a major expansion by more than 2,000 homes of three Jewish settlements. Israel rejects international condemnation over expanded settlements, citing historical ties to the land.
Israel has in the past denounced accusations including allegations of “ethnic cleansing,” as reflecting longtime unfair bias. It did not immediately respond to the Amnesty report.
Much of the displacement is driven by settlers who build outposts on Palestinian land, which are illegal under Israeli law and built without permission from Israeli authorities — who sometimes dismantle them but often turn a blind eye or even legalize them retroactively, Amnesty previously said. Amnesty’s report said that the process would not be possible without the support of the government.
The group was the latest in the international community to sound the alarm on Israel’s actions in the territory.
In recent weeks, human rights groups and foreign ministers have condemned a continued increase in Israeli settler violence against Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem — which United Nations experts have called out as aiding in the “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians, a term referring to forced expulsions of population by violence.
“Relentless attacks by the settler-colonial movement, carried out with the support and acquiescence of the Israeli State, have become a daily terror in Palestinian lives, sowing fear, uncertainty, and profound insecurity that inevitably compels the forcible displacement of the indigenous population,” a group of 13 UN Special Rapporteurs appointed by the Human Rights Council said in a statement on June 1.
“The escalating violence, carried out with full impunity, serves as an instrument of coercion in the hands of the occupying power, facilitating ethnic cleansing.”
The 149-page Amnesty report came on the heels of new coordinated sanctions jointly announced by Canada, Britain, France and Norway on Tuesday against Israeli networks involved in financing, enabling and carrying out violence in the West Bank. The measures by the four countries were coordinated with sanctions already announced last week by Australia and New Zealand, underscoring anger in many Western countries towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Over 100 villages fully or partially cleared: UN data
More than 100 West Bank villages have been fully or partially emptied out between January 2023 and April 2026, according to UN data.
During the same time period, the UN has tracked more than 7,280 instances of individual Palestinian displacement because of demolition of homes and structures by Israeli forces, a figure that includes people who were displaced more than once.
“Whilst no part of the West Bank has been spared, the continued displacement of Palestinians would expose approximately 663 square kilometres of land to further settlement expansion,” UN experts said in a statement.
WATCH | Dozens of Palestinian buildings demolished by Israel in latest settlement push:
The Israeli military demolished around 40 buildings in the West Bank as part of its push to expand the E1 settlement. Palestinians say it’s another example of increased violations and aggression in an area considered crucial for a two-state solution.
Palestinian communities in Area C, the largest territorial division of the West Bank which comprises about 60 per cent of the territory and remains under full Israeli military and civil control, are disproportionately affected, experts said.
According to figures cited by the UN, roughly 700,000 Israelis now live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem — areas seized by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and claimed by the Palestinians as parts of a future state.
Peace Now, an Israeli organization monitoring settlement expansion, said that 212 of at least 363 existing outposts in the West Bank were created since 2023. The group says there are 141 officially recognized Israeli settlements in the territory.
“Without accountability, Palestinian communities across the West Bank will vanish before our eyes. For too long, the world has ignored the immense, unfathomable suffering of Palestinians being uprooted and erased from land they have inhabited for generations,” Callamard said.
Amnesty said its report looked into 27 hamlets and villages in the West Bank where Palestinians were displaced between 2023 and 2025. Researchers interviewed dozens of Palestinians and lawyers, spoke with witnesses of settler violence, watched over 420 videos and analyzed government statements and other reports.
Israeli leaders have condemned particularly grave violence by Jewish settlers but tend to denounce them as exceptions.
Amnesty said settler violence is “not an aberration but an integral part of an organized state policy.”
Amnesty identified dozens of bills in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to extend Israeli civil law and jurisdiction over settlement blocs, as well as over courts that try Palestinians. Recently, the parliament approved a measure making the death penalty the default punishment for West Bank Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis.
The rights group said the large-scale displacement of Palestinian Bedouin communities in the territory is caused by settler violence, advancement of new settlements and the Israeli takeover of large swaths of unregistered land. Rights groups have raised the alarm about this form of displacement before 2023, but say it dramatically intensified after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel in 2023.
Dror Etkes, who runs the settlement watchdog group Kerem Navot, said that since the October 2023 attack, settlers have taken about 12.5 per cent of West Bank territory — land that Palestinians can no longer access or cross safely.
“While many of these violations started significantly before the 37th government took power [in 2022]their acceleration and intensification since then demand that the international community fully confront and name the Israeli state-driven project and act decisively to prevent the destruction of Palestinian communities and the annexation of the West Bank,” the Amnesty report said.
Callamard called on the international community to “press the Israeli authorities to immediately dismantle all Israeli settlements and outposts” and allow all displaced Palestinians to return to their homes.
