When a ceasefire took hold in Gaza on 10 October, hopes rose that pressure could ease in the West Bank, too. Israel had imposed harsh and sweeping new measures there during the two-year war in Gaza, arguing that Hamas or other militants could launch attacks from the territory and that civil unrest might ensue. Though the West Bank’s 3.3 million Palestinian residents suffered nothing near the scale of trauma, devastation and death inflicted upon their compatriots in Gaza, Israel’s tighter restrictions on movement kept many of them trapped in their hometowns, crippling an already hobbled economy. Violence by Israeli soldiers and settlers surged to new heights, as did the pace of land confiscations, house demolitions and settlement growth. The Gaza truce should have removed the rationale, dubious as it was, for this conduct – particularly since the West Bank is under tight overall Israeli occupation and since Hamas and other armed groups wield far less influence there than in the coastal strip. 

Yet Israel’s policy and practice in the West Bank remain unchanged, and there is little sign of the heightened repression easing. Many Israeli Jews believe that security risks would increase if it were relaxed, and there is little appetite for that. A loosened grip on the West Bank would also jeopardise the parallel national agenda, pursued consistently by successive Israeli governments – and with much greater vigour by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s present coalition – that aims to concentrate Palestinians into fragmented enclaves by accelerating and formalising Israeli control of the rest of the territory.

Indeed, since the ceasefire in Gaza, a dangerously fraught situation has grown worse, with settler violence and settlement expansion intensifying. The month of October – when, normally, the Palestinians are at the peak of the olive harvest – brought an unprecedented spike in settler attacks. UN monitors counted more than eight incidents per day involving serious injury or property damage, the highest number since the UN started keeping track in 2006. Typical incidents saw groups of settlers disrupting the harvest by assaulting Palestinian farmers and uprooting their trees, with Israeli soldiers and border police standing by, and sometimes even joining in the mayhem. The attacks continued into November, at lesser frequency but the same impunity from Israeli law enforcement.

The machinery of settlement has continued apace since the ceasefire, despite President Donald Trump’s insistence that Israeli annexation of the West Bank is off the table. In late October, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who also serves in a defence ministry role that allowed him to wrest control of major civilian authorities from the military, announced approval for thousands more settler homes in addition to the record-high 28,000 he had already greenlighted in 2025 to date. In the same week, Israeli lawmakers passed a preliminary reading of two bills demanding that parts of “Judea and Samaria”, the biblical terms by which Israel designates the West Bank, should be officially annexed by Israel.

In early December, Smotrich laid out plans for another big boost to settlement in the next national budget. This includes extra funds for infrastructure and home construction; the reimplantation of three Israeli army bases in areas that were placed under Palestinian control by the 1993-1994 Oslo accords; and the creation of a new, civil “Judea and Samaria” land registry under Israeli law to which all property records will be transferred. This last move is part and parcel of measures that imply the de facto annexation of lands, since the new registry would replace the old army-run one, a system that reflected earlier efforts to administer the West Bank as occupied territory under international law. On 10 December, the Israeli cabinet quietly approved 19 new Jewish settlements. This brings the total planned expansion under the Netanyahu government to 68 communities, compared to 141 implanted over the previous 55 years of Israel occupation.

The Israeli military has also stepped up activity in the West Bank since the ceasefire. In November, the army launched its biggest offensive in the territory for a year, sending three combat brigades backed by helicopter gunships into villages and refugee camps, confiscating homes for army use and taking in hundreds for questioning. In one incident in Jenin, soldiers were captured on film shooting two unarmed, captive Palestinians at close range. The army says this operation is “open-ended”.

The Israeli government has taken numerous actions, many since the Gaza ceasefire, that make it harder for West Bank Palestinians to provide for themselves and their families. Measures contributing to economic suffocation include the nearly 900 roadblocks that Israel has scattered throughout the territory, 200 of which popped up during the Gaza war. Opened or closed at the whim of Israeli officers, few if any of these checkpoints have yet been removed; they cause a huge disruption to daily life, affecting both individuals and businesses.

Israel continues to enforce a near-total ban on permits for West Bankers to work in Israel and, in parallel, a clampdown on informal trade with Israel (which has also affected Palestinian citizens of Israel, many of whom interact and do business with Palestinians in the West Bank). Also imposed during the Gaza war, these measures have damaged two crucial pillars of the West Bank’s economy. Nor has Israel moved to compensate some 35,000 West Bankers made homeless by army and settler attacks during the war (32,000 from army incursions into refugee camps in January and 3,000 by violent settler encroachment on isolated Palestinian shepherding communities). 

At the same time, Israel has given no relief to the Palestinian Authority (PA), the territory’s biggest employer and provider of social services. For years, Israel has been transferring an ever smaller share of the tax that it collects on the PA’s behalf and is treaty-bound since the Oslo accords to pass on. These “clearance” funds accounted for much of the PA’s revenue. They had also been more predictable than the doses of foreign aid that some countries have injected to prop up the Palestinians’ proto-government. Smotrich cut off the clearance flow completely in May, as a penalty for diplomatic moves by many countries to recognise Palestine as a state. The accumulated arrears now amount to well over $3 billion, half of which is owed to the PA’s 90,000 employees (including health workers, teachers, police and civil servants), who have been getting by on reduced salaries for the past two years.

On 1 December, Smotrich announced measures that will squeeze Palestinians further. In his capacity as finance minister, he decided to renew for just two weeks a key waiver that allows the Palestinian banking system – which is barred from direct dealings with the outside world – to interact with Israeli banks. In mid-December, he relented, but only to extend the waiver by two months. Previously, the ministry had renewed the waiver for six months (and, before Smotrich took it over, for a year or longer). By shortening these extensions, say economists interviewed by Crisis Group, Israel has signalled intent to hold the West Bank’s financial system in suspense, creating a cascading effect that depresses investment and business activity. Without such waivers, the Palestinian finance system would operate as an island, making it difficult for the PA to function and forcing Palestinian businesses to rely on Israeli partner firms.

Israeli security figures have warned that too much pressure could cause some kind of explosion or even an intifada in the West Bank. Certainly, Palestinians have seen their space, prospects, morale and incomes shrink: a recent UN report reckons that in the past two years, per capita GDP in the West Bank – which even before the Gaza war was less than one tenth of Israel’s – has crashed to the level of 2008. At the same time, many are angry at the PA for its failure to improve Palestinian fortunes. “Before the ceasefire it was hard, but we had hope”, a local government official in Ramallah told Crisis Group in late November. “Now we have no hope.” Yet, as discussed below, with Israeli operations and pervasive intimidation having systematically dismantled the Palestinian capacity for collective action and even meaningful individual agency, a mass uprising seems unlikely. Many Palestinians in the territory voice a sense of impending doom as Israel – since December 2022 under the most hard-right government in its history – disrupts their lives with complete impunity, under the shadow of fear that the worst horrors of Gaza could be repeated here, too.

Many of the tactics adopted by Israel to manage the West Bank are old, some dating even to the first days of its occupation. The decades since the 1967 war have seen a slow but relentless expansion of Israeli settlement and shrinkage of Palestinian space, combined with increasing control of Palestinian life. The far-right coalition that assumed office in December 2022 accelerated these processes, with the declared objective of thwarting any possibility of creating a Palestinian state. The empowerment of Smotrich, an energetic settler leader and a proponent of annexation, as both finance minister and de facto West Bank governor has allowed him to advance far-reaching institutional changes. His policies have streamlined and mainstreamed the settler movement’s maximalist ambitions, instilling greater confidence among settlers to pursue more aggressive actions with the assurance that the state will have their backs. He has also sought to hamstring the West Bank economy and consign the PA to irrelevance. Longstanding counter-arguments from military professionals that it is better for Israel to sustain the PA (and its modest forces) as a buffer, and to keep Palestinians working rather than jobless, are increasingly ignored. 

The Gaza war boosted and gave cover to this campaign. Given freer rein by the state following Hamas’s assault of 7 October 2023, the Israeli military and army-backed settlers in effect turned the West Bank into another front. Inhibitions were dropped as Israeli forces adopted a new doctrine aimed at crushing threats before they emerge and as settlement advocates reiterated with new force the argument that settlement expansion does not merely fulfil Zionist dreams, but also constitutes a shield of forward defence. Israeli police, under an interior minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who if anything is more extreme than Smotrich, scaled back their already minimal efforts to extend protection to Palestinians: the number of police investigations of settler violence dropped from 265 in 2023 to just 60 in the first eight months of 2025. In tandem, the number of gun licences granted to Israeli citizens – including settlers – surged.

At one level, Israeli fears of violence rippling from Gaza were understandable. In the two intifadas, the first beginning in 1987 and the second in 2000, sparks created by rumour or minor Israeli provocations spread flames that quickly engulfed both occupied Palestinian territories. Just before the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, there had been signs of a revival of militancy in the West Bank. Several hundred youths are thought to have joined local “defence” militias that lack party affiliation and rely on smuggled arms. The pace of attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers in the West Bank increased markedly during 2022, with the number killed rising from three in 2021 to ten in 2022 and 30 in 2023. Worried by the trend and in cooperation with Israel, the PA mounted an initiative to coax the young people to lay down their arms.

Yet the Gaza war did not produce an upsurge of violence in the West Bank. Even before it broke out, several of the new armed groups had surrendered to PA forces. In the early months of the war, Palestinian police adopted harsh tactics, including live gunfire, to quash solidarity protests that erupted across the territory. Another factor that may have dampened passions there was the 2006 schism in Palestinian politics that had left Hamas in control of Gaza and the PA administering (if only nominally in many places) much of the West Bank. In the intervening years, Palestinians living in the two territories drifted apart, as Israel drastically limited the movement of people and goods between them. Community pressure on recruits to stay out of the fray also likely played a role, with many Palestinians fearing that a surge of militancy in the West Bank might expose them to even more devastating Israeli actions akin to those in Gaza.

Israel’s heavy military intervention after October 2023 has clearly contributed to dissuading West Bankers from engaging in organised resistance. Israel has made over 19,000 arrests in the West Bank, holding many in “administrative detention” – ie, for an indefinite period without charge or trial. In January, Israel launched Operation Iron Wall, its largest offensive in the West Bank since the second intifada. Backed by airstrikes and tanks, Iron Wall unleashed widespread destruction and displacement, with refugee camps “reshaped” by Israeli bulldozers in an echo of similar actions in Gaza. None of the 32,000 people uprooted have been allowed to return. Overall, in the past two years, Israeli forces have killed over 1,000 people in the West Bank, nearly a quarter of them children. 

In the same period, nineteen Israeli civilians – fourteen of them identified as settlers – and 23 soldiers have also been killed in the West Bank by Palestinian gunfire, knife attacks or car rammings. Israel claims to have thwarted hundreds more attempts. Such sporadic, low-level violence targeting Israelis is neither new nor unexpected, particularly considering the sense of rage and impotence that images of Gaza’s horrors have inevitably generated among Palestinians. But since 7 October 2023, Israel has been more willing to accept casualties to achieve its political and military objectives. Nor has it faced significant international pushback for its West Bank policy.

In sum, rather than being seen as a reason to reduce tensions in the West Bank, the Gaza ceasefire seems to have served as a catalyst for Israel to accelerate de facto annexation of the territory. Smotrich appears intent on pushing his agenda as far as possible before international attention swivels from Gaza back to the West Bank or the forthcoming Israeli election compels him to slow down. Scheduled for October 2026, the vote could take place sooner if Prime Minister Netanyahu or one of his coalition partners decides to bring down the government. Israel’s turbulent politics and proliferation of small parties make the outcome unpredictable, but the settler camp is wary that in a future coalition, where power could shift toward centrist parties, it might not wield as much clout. In the interim, the movement intends to do all it can. “We are killing the idea of a Palestinian state – day by day, hour by hour”, Smotrich declared in a 19 November appearance on Israeli TV. 

Since the Gaza ceasefire, foreign leaders have repeatedly warned that strife in the West Bank could upset the delicate diplomacy around Gaza. Speaking on 13 November, following a particularly ugly settler attack in the West Bank, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed hope that such incidents would not affect peace efforts. “There is some concern about events in the West Bank spilling over and creating an effect that could undermine what we’re doing”, he said. Later in November, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and Italy issued a joint statement warning that West Bank violence could undermine President Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan, which the UN Security Council endorsed in its Resolution 2803.

Fears of a direct transmission of violence between Gaza and the West Bank may in fact be overstated. Twenty years of separation between the territories, combined with severe repression in the West Bank, make a mass uprising unlikely. As noted, Palestinians are worn down. In conversations with Crisis Group, many lament the whittling of sumud, a philosophy of “steadfastness” that forms a bedrock of Palestinian political struggle, into a priority of basic survival. The fact is that Palestinians in the West Bank, including the rump national government represented by the PA, are not in a position to do much about what happens in Gaza, or the West Bank for that matter.

Yet, much as Israel might wish to do so, Gaza and the West Bank cannot be decoupled. Most obviously, Palestinians consider them parts of a single country, and in legal terms the two territories make up an entity that 159 of 191 members of the UN now recognise as the State of Palestine. The two-state solution that nearly all countries pay lip service to necessarily involves both of these parts. There is also a practical linkage, though the U.S. and Israel are reluctant to acknowledge it: the PA, which runs several parts of the West Bank, will almost certainly need to play a role in sorting out Gaza, which it controlled until Hamas seized power in 2006. As the European ministers stated in their protest of Israeli actions in the West Bank, “Weakening the PA undermines its ability to deliver its reform agenda and to take on responsibility in Gaza, as envisioned in UN Security Council Resolution 2803”.

Consider some of the obstacles that are delaying the progress of Trump’s plan. One of these is decommissioning Hamas’s weapons, a non-negotiable aim for Israel. The Israeli army failed to achieve this objective in two years of brutal siege and at the cost of an estimated 70,000 Palestinian lives. No foreign force is willing to try the same, so it is clear that this goal must be met by negotiation. Hamas has signalled that it may agree to surrender its heavier “offensive” weapons, but only to a credible Palestinian government. The obvious Palestinian candidate to take Hamas’s guns is the PA in the West Bank, which still has thousands of civil servants – including police – in the enclave on its payroll. More Palestinian policemen are being trained to deploy in Gaza by Egypt and Jordan, which expect to place them under PA command. Yet Israel’s policy in the West Bank is rendering the PA toothless.

A similar problem confronts deployment of a stabilisation force and reconstruction. Many countries are willing to commit troops to help police Gaza and to help pay for rebuilding. But thus far none have shown willingness to do so before a disarmament deal is in place, and few are likely to do so in the absence of a clear political horizon for the Palestinians. First and foremost, Israel’s Arab neighbours continue to hold Israel to its commitment, at least nominally, not to formally annex the West Bank. Later, they would like to see practical steps toward extending ordinary PA government services from the West Bank – the Palestinian civil registry, judicial system, school system, police and so on – to Gaza. For Israel to veto this arrangement, or to keep hollowing out PA structures in the West Bank, would in all likelihood put off or even derail a long-term settlement in Gaza, extending the misery of its two million people.

Relieving economic strains in the West Bank is a place to start. Governments can lean on Israel to lift at least some of the needless restrictions that throttle growth and immiserate Palestinians. First among these measures would be to hand over tax revenues to the PA and drop threats to pull the plug on the Palestinian banking system, punitive policies that serve no security purpose. Additional moves that would help include restoring tens of thousands of work permits (something that even Israeli security officials have encouraged) and easing restrictions on movement within the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Palestine Donor Group, newly established by the EU, can be a platform to coordinate direct funding of PA institutions, including the civil service and the health and education sectors, and efforts around PA governance reforms.

Where Palestinians’ physical safety is concerned, a range of policy tools that might help push Israeli authorities to curb violence by settlers and soldiers remains barely tested. European governments, as well as the U.S. under the Biden administration and more recently Singapore, have tried targeted sanctions such as travel bans and financial restrictions on individual settlers, settler organisations and senior officials (including Smotrich) as a means of deterring settler violence and wider settlement expansion. Most such measures have amounted to slaps on the wrist, half-heartedly applied or prematurely reversed. (One of the Trump administration’s first acts was to scrap the Biden-era sanctions.) Such penalties have also failed in their intended effect because, by and large, they have attempted to isolate their targets from the system that bolsters settler violence, including Israeli state institutions and powerful settlement-promoting organisations, some of which enjoy tax-free status as charities.

To have any real prospect of making an impact, foreign governments will have to be much bolder. The EU, Israel’s largest trading partner, briefly showed willingness to get tough over the summer. As Israel’s starvation policy in Gaza began to foment actual famine, the 27-member bloc debated suspending parts of its Association Agreement, which grants Israel numerous trading and other privileges. In doing so, the EU got Israel’s attention; the agreement is the core document defining the relationship, covering not only trade but cooperation in scientific research and other fields. The European Commission’s proposals for exerting its leverage over Israel remain on the table but are no longer being seriously discussed since the Gaza ceasefire. While progress currently seems elusive, the EU should restart earnest discussions of these proposals unless the Israeli government takes clear action to block settler attacks, freeze settlement activity and lift stifling economic restrictions on West Bank Palestinians. 

Arab partners must also question how they are contributing to Israel’s sense of impunity. Israeli officials ignore Arab verbal condemnations of their West Bank policy in the belief that core economic and security ties will remain untouched so long as Israel does not cross the “red lines” of formal annexation or expulsion of Palestinians to neighbouring states. Arab capitals should instead signal that there can be no “business as usual” without addressing basic Palestinian concerns of human dignity and a political horizon. Saudi Arabia has set an example in this regard, stating plainly that it will not join the Abraham Accords, as the first Trump administration called the normalisation deal it brokered between Israel and four Arab states, unless Israel changes course.

In dealing with the West Bank, Israeli officials have learned to use stratagems that avoid creating diplomatic inflection points. Such tactics need to be called out for what they are: creeping annexation. Israel’s friends can help by taking their own declared principles and policies more seriously. Countries that say they favour a two-state solution, or oppose annexation, should make it clear that Israel cannot quietly coast toward contrary goals without consequence. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel’s presence in the occupied territories unlawful and finding that its actions amounted to de facto annexation of some areas. The UN General Assembly endorsed the ruling, calling on members to hold Israel to account for violations of international law. But few countries have followed up with constructive action. The EU, for example, could bring its trade policy in line with the advisory opinion and its own legal assessments of Israel’s settlement policy by banning trade in goods and services emanating from settlements in the West Bank. This step would not require unanimous backing of member states, just approval by fifteen member states representing 65 per cent of the EU’s population.

Under recent legislation, the EU could also move to restrict visa-free travel for certain Israeli decision-makers implicated in abuses for breaches of human rights, fundamental freedoms or the UN Charter without requiring a unanimous decision among member states. This measure would have greater impact if carried out at the EU level rather than on an ad hoc basis by the bloc’s member states.

To date, Israel has been able to rely on silence, or merely mild protest, from the Trump administration regarding its West Bank policies. That could be changing. President Trump has invested his own prestige in the Gaza ceasefire deal, suggesting that he is unlikely to welcome complications in the West Bank that could affect the negotiations. White House officials say they are concerned about the implications of settler violence for administration efforts to expand the Abraham Accords, particularly to Saudi Arabia. Washington may thus be less forbearing than usual with provocative actions by Israel’s hard right. Vice President JD Vance signalled impatience after the Knesset’s pro-annexation vote in October, calling it “insulting” and “very stupid”. Trump himself said Israel would lose “all support” if it pursued formal annexation.

Yet even this flicker of focus on the West Bank is tied far more to Gaza – and to attracting more adherents to the Abraham Accords – than to actual concern for the West Bank. To the extent that Washington worries about the territory, its preoccupation is how an explosion there might complicate the president’s agenda elsewhere. Without more focused and concerted international pressure on Israel, the likelier scenario is that the West Bank continues on a slow burn: its population ground down, its territory carved up, its future foreclosed.