Under cover of the phony Gaza ceasefire, the Zionist state is pursuing plans for the wholesale annexation of the West Bank, untroubled by the attention of the mainstream media or any large-scale protests by the international Palestine solidarity movement. Those imperialist states that opportunistically recognised a ‘Palestinian state’ in September now turn a blind eye as the Zionist occupation pursues policies of terror, ethnic cleansing, bulldozing of Palestinian land and the exponential expansion of illegal Israeli settlements to create ‘facts on the ground’ that will, in the words of finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, ‘bury the idea of a Palestinian state’.
Throughout December 2025 and January 2026, the Zionists have accelerated the building of a vast military road and new partition wall that will cut across the whole of the West Bank, eventually spanning more than 300 miles from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in the north to the Red Sea in the south. Land has been confiscated from Palestinians with as little as seven days notice to evacuate. A new bypass road will cut off the centre of the West Bank to Palestinians, making way for a vast illegal Israeli colony of more than 3,400 homes. Over the last two years, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been expelled from their land. The map of the West Bank is being redrawn at pace.
Zionist terror
These plans are being forced through with typical Zionist brutality and terror. Since October 2023, over 1,080 Palestinians have been killed by occupation forces and Zionist settlers, with around 11,000 injured and 20,500 arrested. The occupation is using airstrikes, advanced weaponry, mass internment, torture, assassination and collective punishment tactics. In January and February 2025, Zionist forces displaced over 40,000 people from refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarem, leaving neighbourhoods resembling Gaza’s genocidal destruction.
On 19 January 2026, Israeli forces launched a major operation in the occupied southern city of al-Khalil (Hebron), deploying armoured vehicles and troops, bulldozing homes and laying siege to the town. Al-Khalil has long been a focus of popular struggle against colonisation.
The 19 January operation continued for four days before occupation troops withdrew, after over 350 home raids. In Beit Ummar district, gas bombs choked residents, who were physically assaulted by occupation forces in their own homes. In nearby areas of Dura, Khirbet al-Qat, Beit Ullah and Khursa, troops arrested residents, ransacked homes, and stormed and smashed up bakeries and olive presses.
Violence and complicity
Since 2023, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that 2025 saw a minimum of 1,800 settler attacks, about five a day, as Zionist troops and casuals killed 240 West Bank Palestinians. Racist settlers have been emboldened hugely by national security minister Ben Gvir’s moves to provide these illegal groups with arms, complemented by legal impunity whereby few settlers are ever charged for their crimes.
Colonial settlers have renewed their campaign of violence to expel Bedouin Palestinians in Ras Ain al-Auja in the fertile Jordan Valley. Over 100 people were displaced in the first weeks of 2025 in the face of violent intimidation. With settlers targeting livestock, flocks have been reduced from 24,000 to 3,000. This violence is condoned and enabled by the police and armed forces of the occupation. Meanwhile, imperialist governments, including Labour in Britain, may occasionally slap sanctions on a few settlers after particularly egregious examples of their law-breaking makes international news headlines, but otherwise remain silent and complicit, allowing Zionism’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine to continue unchallenged.
At the same time, the imperialist-funded and trained ‘security’ forces of the comprador Palestinian Authority (PA) – the ‘official’ government of the occupied West Bank – continue to target Palestinians and collaborate with the Zionist state. In November 2025, at imperialism’s behest, the PA ended support payments to the families of political prisoners. Since then there has been a rise in PA arrests of former detainees freed by the resistance during prisoner exchanges with the occupation. Mohammad Shalabiya is among those currently imprisoned in PA facilities as part of this concerted campaign.
Solidarity with the Palestinian resistance
Despite huge operations attempting to snuff out armed struggle, the regime has failed to quell the resistance centres of Nablus, Balata, Tulkarem, Bethlehem and elsewhere. In the northern West Bank, state repression has generated new recruits to the Tubas Brigade, which successfully targeted Zionist military vehicles and confronted violent raids during January. In a 10 January statement, Hamas condemned the PA for targeting activists in Jenin and ‘directly serving the occupation in pursuing resistance fighters’. Months after the occupation assault that saw around 40,000 Palestinians displaced from Jenin’s refugee camp, fighters of the Saraya al-Quds Jenin Brigade continue to hit back. Throughout December and January, they hit military vehicles and Zionist troop build-ups. Where is the international solidarity with this unflinching resistance? It is crucial that the hundreds of thousands of people across the world who took to the streets to oppose the Zionist genocide in Gaza understand that the struggle in the West Bank is part and parcel of the same struggle for a free Palestine. Now is the time to step up mobilisations against the complicity of our own imperialist governments in war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, and in solidarity with the demand for total Palestinian liberation.
