All events · Empires Unmade

Israeli Settlement Expansion in the West Bank

1967–ongoing · Middle East & North Africa

Displacement Territory Seized Ongoing

Displaced

50,000

Cumulative and imprecise; tens of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced or are at risk of displacement since 1967 due to home demolitions, land confiscation, outpost expansion, and access restrictions in Area C and East Jerusalem

Share of the population affected

7.6%

of the Palestinian population of the West Bank including East Jerusalem when the occupation began, 1967

Territory

3,000 km²

Area C, about 60% of the West Bank (~3,400 km² of a ~5,655 km² territory), under full Israeli civil and security control under the Oslo II framework

As of 2026. Settlement construction, outpost establishment and settler population counts are revised annually and continued through 2026; any figure here is a snapshot of a still-expanding process.

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What happened

Since 1967, and accelerating after the 1993 Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, Israel has built and expanded settlements now housing over 700,000 Israeli citizens in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Settlement growth has been accompanied by land expropriation, demolition of Palestinian structures built without hard-to-obtain Israeli permits, and restrictions on Palestinian movement and construction, particularly in Area C, which covers roughly 60% of the West Bank. Communities such as Masafer Yatta and Bedouin herding communities near Jerusalem have faced repeated eviction pressure and demolitions. The pace of settlement expansion and settler violence against Palestinians has increased markedly since 2023.

Parties

Successive Israeli governments and settler organizations established and expanded civilian settlements and outposts across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, on land occupied since 1967, alongside a road, checkpoint, and barrier network.

Disputed

Israel maintains that most settlements are legal under its domestic law and disputes the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the West Bank; the UN Security Council (Resolution 2334), the International Court of Justice (2004 and 2024 advisory opinions), and the great majority of states consider settlements a violation of international law and an obstacle to a two-state solution.

The denominator

The Israeli census of September 1967 counted about 596,000 people in the West Bank plus roughly 66,000 in the area annexed to Jerusalem, taken after some 200,000-300,000 had already fled or been driven east across the Jordan during and immediately after the June war; those absentees are not in this figure.

Settlement expansion has run for six decades; the West Bank's Palestinian population is now above 3 million and the settler population above 500,000, so a 1967 denominator overstates the share of the affected population.

Where the baseline comes from

Israeli settlementopen-edited
Demographics of the State of Palestineopen-edited

On the death toll

No significant direct death toll is attributable to settlement expansion as such; the harm is dispossession, movement restriction and land transfer. Settler violence has a documented but comparatively small toll: OCHA reported that of 999 Palestinians killed in the West Bank between 7 October 2023 and October 2025, 20 were killed by Israeli settlers and 12 by unidentified Israeli forces or settlers, with the large remainder killed by Israeli forces in military operations — a distinct set of events. Israel disputes the framing of settlements as unlawful and rejected the ICJ's 2024 Advisory Opinion.

Documented forms of violence

Destruction of Property

OCHA recorded that between 7 October 2023 and 6 October 2025 Israeli authorities destroyed, confiscated, sealed or forced the demolition of about 3,590 Palestinian-owned structures across the West Bank including East Jerusalem, displacing more than 7,100 people, with a further 3,095 displaced by settler attacks and access restrictions.

Formal findings

International Court of Justice (Advisory Opinion) (2024) — Held that Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were established and maintained in violation of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, that Israeli policies in East Jerusalem and Area C constitute annexation contrary to the prohibition on acquiring territory by force, and that the near-complete separation imposed between settler and Palestinian communities breaches Article 3 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; Israel is obliged to end its presence as rapidly as possible and cease all new settlement activity — source

Movements mapped

Masafer Yatta → nearby Palestinian towns1,200
Khan al-Ahmar area → East Jerusalem periphery3,000

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Palestine

Related entries

Overlaps with: West Bank Closure, Permit and Barrier Regime
Palestinians displaced by settlement expansion are also among the West Bank population whose movement is restricted by the closure and permit regime.