West Bank Ethnic Cleansing — Amnesty International has accused Israel of systematically deploying war crimes and crimes against humanity to drive Palestinian communities from the occupied West Bank, framing the mass displacement as a deliberate government strategy of ethnic cleansing designed to accelerate annexation and illegal settlement expansion.
The report documents the forced displacement of approximately 5,910 Palestinians between January 2023 and December 2025, with at least 117 villages experiencing either complete or partial depopulation as a result of settler violence and military pressure — figures corroborated by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The overwhelming majority of affected communities sit within Area C, the zone comprising more than 60 percent of the West Bank that has remained under full Israeli military and administrative control since the 1995 Oslo II Accords.
The human cost is starkly illustrated by the fate of Zanuta, a small Palestinian village whose residents have endured years of sustained violence since settlers established the illegal outpost of Meitarim Farm approximately one kilometre away in 2021. Settlers repeatedly broke into homes and deliberately emptied water tanks, rendering daily life untenable. Residents filed repeated complaints with Israeli police; none resulted in action.
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Israel’s Supreme Court intervened twice — issuing rulings in July 2024 and February 2025 ordering police and military forces to facilitate the return of displaced Zanuta residents and shield them from further attacks. Both orders were ignored by the security forces they were directed at, a defiance that Amnesty characterises as emblematic of a broader institutional permissiveness toward settler violence.
That permissiveness has, at times, taken on an explicitly political character. In April 2024, far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Orit Strock attended an event at Meitarim Farm in the Hebron area, where they distributed weapons — including all-terrain vehicles — to settlers. The episode drew international condemnation but no domestic legal consequences.
The surge in settler attacks has unfolded against a backdrop of record-breaking settlement approvals. In a single cabinet session this April, Israel’s Security Cabinet greenlit the establishment of 34 illegal settlements — the largest number ever approved at one time. Since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s government took office in late 2022, a total of 103 illegal settlements have received official approval, a pace that critics and international legal bodies describe as a systematic effort to entrench permanent Israeli control over Palestinian land.
The violence has not been confined to settlers acting alone. Israeli forces have detained at least 23,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023, a period that has also seen a sharp escalation in military operations across the territory. Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities have been disproportionately targeted, their semi-nomadic way of life making them especially vulnerable to displacement and asset destruction.
West Bank Ethnic Cleansing: Regional Implications
Amnesty’s report places these developments within a coherent legal and political framework, arguing that the combination of settler violence, military detention, judicial non-compliance, and government settlement approvals constitutes a coordinated campaign rather than a series of isolated incidents. The organisation has called on the international community to take concrete steps to halt the destruction of Palestinian communities and prevent the de facto annexation of the West Bank.
Israel has consistently rejected the characterisation of its West Bank policies as ethnic cleansing or annexation, maintaining that settlement construction occurs on legally contested land and that security operations target militants rather than civilians. The government has not publicly addressed the military and police failure to comply with the Supreme Court’s rulings on Zanuta.
The report lands at a moment of acute international scrutiny over Israeli conduct in both Gaza and the West Bank. With settlement expansion accelerating, displacement figures rising, and state institutions openly flouting judicial orders, Amnesty argues the window for reversing these trends is narrowing rapidly — and that international inaction carries its own legal and moral weight.
