Israel’s genocide isn’t over. It’s been expanded.

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2025/11/20/israels-genocide-isnt-over-its-been-expanded/

Israel’s genocide isn’t over. In the days and weeks after a ceasefire was declared, many Israeli soldiers were withdrawn from Gaza — and then deployed back to the West Bank. 

Right now, Palestinians in the West Bank are experiencing the highest rates of settler and state violence in recent history, all while the mainstream media continues to push Palestine out of the news. 

The Israeli government is rapidly expanding its project of ethnic cleansing, making it abundantly clear that its intention is not simply to erase Palestinians in Gaza, but to erase all Palestinians from their land.

In this Wire, we shine a spotlight on the unfolding crisis in the West Bank.

Settler violence is Israeli policy.

As the Israeli state continues to accelerate its ethnic cleansing and mass displacement, it has again made use of extremist Israeli settlers. These mobs surge into a Palestinian village, carrying clubs and weapons, beating people and burning their homes, fields, and olive trees. Children are not spared. Attacks like this are happening multiple times a day in the West Bank right now, as settlers try to disrupt the olive harvest season. 

Last week, a group of settlers attacked the villages of Beit Lid and Deir Sharaf, burning vehicles, wounding four Palestinians, and attacking Israeli soldiers who responded. Only a day later, settlers torched and defaced a mosque in Deir Istiya and burned a Quran. 

In Turmus’ayya, Israeli settlers descended on the town, one clubbing a Palestinian woman known as Umm Saleh over the head, knocking her unconscious, then striking her repeatedly as she lay on the ground. A freelance journalist caught the attack on video, calling it “the single worst individual act of violence” he’d ever seen.

Settler violence has grown so fierce that Israel has begun to draw international condemnation, reaching such a level that Israeli politicians were recently compelled to make statements claiming these extremist settlers will be held accountable. On Sunday, PM Netanyahu stated that these attacks “do not represent” the majority of the “law-abiding” Israeli settlers in the West Bank. But in reality, extremist Israeli settlers and their ultraviolence against Palestinians is structurally backed by the Israeli government — because their goals are one and the same.

The objective of all Israeli settlements is to push Palestinians out of their land and claim the entire West Bank. These settlements, while baldly illegal under international law and condemned by every legitimate human rights organization in the world, are backed by Israeli military courts, protected by Israeli forces, and represented in the highest levels of the Israeli government. In this process, settlers have been effectively deputized by the Israeli military to terrorize Palestinians. 

Settler attacks are only one strategy in this overall policy of forced displacement, attempting to make Palestinians’ lives unlivable and force them out of their homes. Since the genocide in Gaza began, cooperation between violent settlers and the Israeli state has grown even more blatant: The Israeli government is arming West Bank settlers on an even greater scale, transferring hundreds of thousands of guns and other weapons to Israeli settlers since October 2023.

Displacement at a scale not seen since 1967.

Settler mob violence is far from the only form of regular violence that Palestinians in the West Bank face under Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing. In fact, the majority of documented attacks on West Bank Palestinians and their land in the last month were carried out by the Israeli military, in the form of direct physical attacks, destruction of homes, villages, and infrastructure, and the uprooting and poisoning of Palestinian olive trees and livestock. 

These direct attacks, by both the Israeli state and their settler arm, serve to accelerate Palestinian displacement from the West Bank. After the total destruction of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams refugee camps by the Israeli military, the UN reports that at least 31,919 Palestinian refugees have been displaced from those areas alone — creating the largest displacement crisis in the West Bank since 1967. Operating hand-in-hand with this mass displacement is the further acceleration of Israeli settlement construction, another process that has been turbocharged since the onset of the Gaza genocide — after already ramping up significantly since Trump’s first term in office.

Israeli forces also continue to routinely kidnap Palestinians in the West Bank — arresting 442 West Bank Palestinians in October alone. Released Palestinian prisoners, including the thousands of Palestinian captives freed by the ceasefire deal, have described in detail the conditions of systematic torture and abuse, including extreme physical violence and assault, deprivation of food and sunlight, and sexual abuse. More than 9,200 Palestinians are still being held in Israeli military prisons, the vast majority of whom are held arbitrarily and have not faced any form of trial. 

New records for violence in the West Bank

Even before Israel’s genocide began, violence against West Bank Palestinians was already at record levels. By September of 2023, UN officials had already declared it the deadliest year for Palestinian children in the West Bank on record. But once the genocide began and the world’s attention moved to Gaza, Israeli settler and state violence against West Bank Palestinians spiked further — and the last few months have become the worst in recent history.

In October 2025, Israeli settlers carried out at least 264 attacks, the highest number in a single month since the UN began keeping records 19 years ago. Since January of this year, 45 Palestinian children in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces, and more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in total by the Israeli military and settlers since October 2023. 

This most recent spike in settler attacks is due in part to the onset of olive harvest season in the West Bank, which Israeli settlers attempt to disrupt by burning trees, villages, and descending on olive groves by the dozens and physically attacking farmers. As a result, non-Palestinian activists and press will often accompany Palestinians to harvest in what is known as “protective presence” — but this is no guarantee of safety. Two Reuters journalists, part of a group of villagers, activists and press attempting to harvest olives, were recently clubbed and stoned in an attack by Israeli settlers, their helmets dented and their cameras smashed.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide: This is Zionism

Whether it’s Israeli settlers attacking villagers or an Israeli military court ordering Palestinians to destroy their own homes, the end goal remains the same: to gain the maximum amount of land for Jewish settlement, with the minimum amount of Palestinians on it. This is the fundamental political goal of Zionism — a politics of eradication and supremacy.

From the West Bank to Gaza, we know what this means in action. The privileging of the rights of one people, and the dehumanization of another, paves the way for genocide. Our work, as a movement, is to grow the fight for an end to U.S. support for the Israeli government’s politics of dehumanization.