Rather than being new, it is the same story Palestinians have been living since 1948, updated with a fresh budget line and a new map. This week, Israel moved to build illegal military outposts inside Gaza for the first time since its 2005 withdrawal.
Moreover, it simultaneously bankrolled the largest single wave of West Bank settlement expansion in years. Ultimately, it is a harbinger of the same project in a different decade: taking the land, piece by piece, and daring the world to stop it.
A Land Grab With a 78-Year Head Start.
To adequately understand what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank this month, we have to go back to 1948. That year, the illegal establishment of the state of Israel drove more than 750,000 innocent Palestinians from their homes, termed “Nakba”, the catastrophe.
Hundreds of villages were emptied, most never allowed to be rebuilt by their original inhabitants, and roughly 78 percent of historic Palestine was absorbed into the new state. Even inside Israel’s own recognized borders, close to 173,000 acres of land belonging to Palestinian citizens were expropriated between 1948 and 1967 alone.
Then came the defining year of 1967. Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza in the Six-Day War displaced several hundred thousand more innocent Palestinians. It was the moment Israel started building on the newly occupied territory almost immediately.
Palestinian rights groups call what followed the Ongoing Nakba. It is not a single historical event, but a process that has simply never stopped. What Israel’s government announced this week is the newest instalment.
Settlements Return to Gaza
For the first time since Israel dismantled its Gaza settlements in 2005, the Israeli government is moving to put permanent structures back on Gaza soil. Israel’s Defence Minister, Israel Katz, has advanced plans for multiple “Nahal” outposts in the north of the Gaza Strip.
Nahal is a notorious military-agricultural settlement model Israel has used for decades, specifically because it offers a legal and political stepping stone toward full civilian settlement later. These outposts are how a lot of West Bank settlements started, too.
Building any kind of permanent Israeli presence inside Gaza directly contradicts the terms of the so-called “ceasefire framework”. Secondly, the UN Security Council resolution that underpins it also assumes an eventual Israeli withdrawal. Instead, Israel currently occupies roughly 60 percent of the Strip, with Prime Minister and genocidal figure Benjamin Netanyahu having ordered the military to push that figure toward 70 percent. Katz has said Israeli forces will remain in what he calls “security zones” indefinitely, with no timetable for leaving.
The West Bank Numbers Are Staggering
While that plays out in Gaza, the pace of illegal settlement approval in the West Bank has become almost impossible to track in real time. This week alone, Israel’s security cabinet approved 1.3 billion shekels, around $434 million, to establish 34 new illegal settlements.
As a result, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called this a “day of celebration for Israel and settlements.” Moreover, another 1.075 billion shekels was approved just to pave the roads connecting them. That single announcement brings the total number of illegal settlements built during Smotrich’s four-year tenure to more than 103.
It doesn’t stop there. A separate $2.3 billion framework deal is funding roughly 12,000 additional housing units across the West Bank, and 13 more settlements have been approved in the Binyamin bloc north of Jerusalem. It is a configuration widely understood to be designed to cut East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank.
Additionally, the pace of outpost construction alone has jumped from an average of about 8 a year between 2012 and 2022 to 86 in 2025. Roughly 700,000 illegal Israeli settlers now live among 2.7 million Palestinians across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, on land the Palestinians were promised for a future state.
Illegal Under International Law — Not Just a Palestinian Claim
Genocidal Israel routinely describes the West Bank as “disputed” rather than illegally occupied territory. Even the UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and the overwhelming majority of the world’s governments do not see it that way.
The ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion went further than illegal settlements alone, finding that Israel’s entire occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful and should end as rapidly as possible. Moreover, UN Security Council Resolution 2334, passed in 2016, explicitly states that settlements have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation of international law.
Land Without a People to Put It On
Strip away the press releases, and what remains is fairly simple arithmetic. Every acre allocated to a new settlement, every outpost planted inside Gaza, and every housing unit is an acre Palestinians will never get back.
Rights groups and genocide scholars have increasingly described this slow, bureaucratic, budget-line-by-budget-line erasure of Palestinian land as a territorial dimension of the same genocide being carried out militarily in Gaza. This illegal displacement and dispossession is a policy, not an unfortunate byproduct of genocide.
In fact, seventy-eight years after the Nakba, the method has simply gotten more heinous. The outcome, for the innocent Palestinians watching bulldozers arrive on land their grandparents once farmed, looks exactly the same.
