The Electronic Intifada 25 September 2025
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, announces the resumption of the E1 settlement plan on 14 August 2025.
UPIAs several Western countries formally recognize Palestine as a state, the Israeli government is accelerating its de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank.
The statehood recognition announcements made in recent days by the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, Portugal and other states have prompted top Israeli officials, including the finance, economy and national security ministers, to openly demand formal annexation of the occupied West Bank.
The “only response to this anti-Israel move is sovereignty over the homeland of the Jewish people in the West Bank and removing the idea of a Palestinian state from the agenda once and for all,” finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who wields substantial authority over the building of illegal settlements and demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank – said on X on 21 September.
In reality, Israel is already engaged in a series of aggressive measures taken over the past few years and in line with long-standing Israeli policies of land theft and systematic erasure of Palestine – ongoing since 1948.
For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that no Palestinian state would emerge and that illegal settlement building in occupied territory would continue.
For many in the West Bank, while recognition and public expressions of support for Palestine can be helpful in the long run, they remain highly critical.
“A hundred Palestinians are being killed every single day in Gaza. That’s more important than recognition,” Omar Assaf, 75, a political activist in Ramallah, told The Electronic Intifada. “This [recognition] decision has more symbolic and political weight than any real effect on the ground. While we welcome it, what’s required today is to stop the genocide, starvation and destruction.”
There must also be a comprehensive end to “settlement expansion, fragmentation of Palestinians, and the transformation of the West Bank into countless prisons,” Assaf, who has been imprisoned by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, continued. “They must also stop the forcible displacement of Palestinians in the northern West Bank.”
Accelerating annexation
Statehood recognition, many said, must be followed up with real actions such as sanctions and an arms embargo against Israel. Meanwhile, fear and anxiety of the next chapter under Israel’s violent occupation plagues every Palestinian in the West Bank.
“I’m afraid with and without the recognitions. What’s happening in the occupied West Bank is horrific,” Maysa Yassin told The Electronic Intifada from the streets of Ramallah.
“We don’t have to imagine what the future will look like because we are already living it every day,” Yassin said, citing “terrorist settlers” who are “killing people, stealing land, cutting off roads.”
“All Palestinians here are besieged with gates at the entrances to their cities and villages, in open air prisons. The army enters at any moment, kills, injures, expels,” she said.
Israel has been pursuing annexation and land theft policies in the West Bank and Gaza since it occupied the areas in 1967. But after the start of the genocide in Gaza, there have been record rates of Palestinian land stolen, villages erased, residents expelled, and new illegal settlements built – all achieved through the violence of the military occupation and attacks by settler militias, armed and aided by the government, to silently do the dirty work.
On 23 September, Israeli settlers shot dead Saeed Naasan, 20, in the village of al-Mughayyer northeast of Ramallah, the 12th Palestinian to be killed by settlers since the start of 2025. The first killing took place in June.
In response to increasing global isolation – particularly over the past few months – Israel has doubled down on its confinement and violent oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank by increasing the number of military closures and roadblocks, as well as its daily deadly raids.
It is also taking concrete steps towards formal annexation, with the publicly stated aim of preventing a Palestinian state.
“The supreme principle is the following slogan, keep this firmly in mind: maximum land with minimum [Palestinian] population,” Smotrich, himself a settler living near Nablus, said during a press conference on 3 September while presenting a map showing his proposed annexation of 82 percent of the occupied West Bank.
Separately, on 16 September, the Israeli military installed a new iron gate at the entrance to the town of al-Eizariya in eastern Jerusalem. This road is the only access point for millions of Palestinians traveling between the north and south of the occupied West Bank. The closure of this gate would, within seconds, sever the northern and central West Bank from the south.
E1 nail in statehood coffin
The installation comes as part of the revival of the long-stalled E1 settlement project, which, when completed, would effectively bisect the occupied West Bank and undermine territorial contiguity in the West Bank for any Palestinian state.
Smotrich made no bones about the Israeli government’s motivation when formally announcing the resumption of the plan on 14 August. The E1 plan, he said, “buries the very idea of a Palestinian state. Not in documents, not in decisions or declarations, but in facts.”
The E1 area, a critical stretch of land between Jerusalem and Jericho to the east, functions as one of the last remaining corridors connecting the northern and southern occupied West Bank. It is also one of the final areas of territorial continuity connecting Jerusalem with the rest of the occupied West Bank. Israel intends to empty these areas of Palestinians and render them only accessible to illegal settlers.
At least 7,000 Bedouin living across 22 different villages will be expelled and rendered homeless as their homes are demolished. The Israeli military already issued dozens of new demolition orders between 12-14 August targeting Palestinian Bedouin villages located within the E1 zone. They have been targeted with systematic harassment and demolitions for decades.
Between January 2023 and mid-July 2025, at least 2,895 Palestinians from 69 different – primarily Bedouin – villages across the occupied West Bank, were forcibly displaced due to the coercive environment of intensifying settler attacks and movement restrictions.
Palestinian Bedouin are on the front lines of Israel’s violent annexation due to their residing in open areas, outside of population centers, and being at the direct mercy of the Israeli army and settlers.
Annexation is rapidly becoming a reality for all Palestinians.
“In Area C – in 60 percent of the West Bank – all we see are Israeli flags, Israeli police, Israeli civil defense, settlers moving freely,” Walid Habbas, a researcher at the Ramallah-based Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies, told The Electronic Intifada.
“Palestinians have come to feel it is dangerous to move around between cities and villages,” he continued.
In the case of formal annexation, said Habbas, the lives of residents across many villages in the occupied West Bank – particularly those heavily besieged by illegal settlers – “will either become so unbearable that residents will be forced to leave and move to the cities, or settlers will expel them by force.”
Zena Al Tahhan is an independent writer and TV reporter based in occupied Jerusalem.
