Israeli settler attacks have wholly or partly emptied 107 Palestinian villages and hamlets in the occupied West Bank since January 2023 — communities home to 5,900 people — according to figures compiled by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
OCHA has logged an average of 6.6 settler attacks a day causing casualties, property damage or both — the highest rate in its records. More Palestinians were forcibly displaced by settler attacks, demolitions and evictions in the first four months of 2026 than in the whole of 2025.
At least 15 Palestinians, two of them children, had been killed by settlers as of 24 July. That puts 2026 on course to pass the previous record of 16 such killings, set in 2023. The military separately expelled 32,000 Palestinian refugees from their homes in the West Bank in January 2025, emptying the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps.
A pattern aimed at livelihoods
Field documentation gathered by an international rights organisation covers attacks in April and May on seven villages in the Ramallah, Nablus and Jordan Valley governorates, including killings, assaults, arbitrary detention and arson. Residents described a pattern aimed at making rural life unsustainable: grazing land and water put out of reach, livestock stolen or killed, fields and crops destroyed. Many sold their herds at a loss.
State funding, few prosecutions
In March the government approved roughly 50 million shekels ($16 million) for illegal outposts, the Times of Israel reported — spent on quad bikes, night-vision goggles and drones. The budget of the settlements ministry has risen by 122% under the current government, according to Amnesty International.
Accountability is rare. Yesh Din, an Israeli group, reported that only 3% of the hundreds of cases it has documented since 2005 ended in a conviction. Channel 12 reported a 70% fall in police cases against settlers accused of attacking Palestinians since Itamar Ben Gvir became national security minister in 2022. The Guardian has reported that just one Israeli has been charged over a Palestinian’s killing in the West Bank since 2019.
Settlement expansion
Defence Minister Israel Katz told Channel 7 in July that his government had approved 104 new settlements since taking office, almost doubling the total from 127 to 231. Settlers established 248 new outposts over the same period, 65 of them in 2026 up to 1 August, according to Peace Now. Peace Now and Kerem Navot report that outposts now effectively control more than a million dunams, close to 18% of the West Bank.
The legal position
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention bars an occupying power from forcibly transferring the civilian population of occupied territory, and from moving its own civilians in. In July 2024 the International Court of Justice found Israel’s occupation unlawful, held that a systematic failure to prevent or punish settler attacks had contributed to a coercive environment, and concluded that Israel must evacuate settlers, allow displaced Palestinians to return and provide reparation.
This report was produced by the HuMedia newsroom.
