From Occupation Management to Creeping Annexation: Israel Re-engineers the West Bank

What has been happening in the West Bank since October 7, 2023, can no longer be understood within the logic of temporary security measures or military reactions related to the war on the Gaza Strip. Instead, it has become an integrated political trajectory reflecting a deep structural transformation in the nature, tools, and objectives of the Israeli occupation. This is the conclusion reached by a wide range of Israeli human rights organizations in a recently issued joint statement, which provided an unprecedented description of what they called a long-term structural change in the Israeli control system over the West Bank.
The statement, titled "Report on the State of the Occupation 2025: The Fifty-Eighth Year of Occupation and the Two-Year War on Gaza," derives its importance not from documenting additional violations, but from providing an analytical framework for what is happening. It reveals that Israel is not managing the West Bank today with the mindset of a temporary occupation, but with the mindset of political and legal re-engineering in preparation for an undeclared de facto annexation, which is being implemented gradually and quietly, away from media attention.
The statement included the signatures of a wide spectrum of Israeli human rights organizations, including entities that have long represented legal and human rights authorities within Israel itself. This gives the report double weight, not because it comes from opponents of the occupation outside the system, but because it reflects a growing internal realization that what is happening transcends everything the West Bank has known in previous decades, both in terms of the scale of control and the nature of the entities exercising it.
The report clearly indicates that the central turning point began with the formation of the 37th Israeli government, the most extreme government in Israel's history. From its very first moments, there was a push to transfer essential powers from the Israeli army, which had managed Palestinian civil affairs through what is called the Civil Administration, to civilian entities directly under the control of the government and its ministers, primarily representatives of the national religious settler movement.
This administrative shift is not a technical or organizational matter; rather, it carries deep political implications. It means dismantling what remains of the formal separation between military occupation and the Israeli state, and transforming control over land and people into a civilian administration managed with a sovereignty mindset, not an occupation mindset. This allows for accelerating settlement expansion, legitimizing illegal outposts, changing planning and construction policies, confiscating land, and demolishing homes, without even going through the formal restrictions previously imposed by the military system or traditional security considerations.
The report notes that the war on Gaza provided a historic opportunity to accelerate this process. The general atmosphere of the war, the mobilizing security discourse, and the international community's preoccupation with the massacres in the Strip were used as political cover to impose new realities in the West Bank. These included tightening checkpoints, expanding closure areas, imposing unprecedented restrictions on Palestinian movement, and transforming villages and cities into isolated islands, thereby disrupting the social and economic fabric and pushing the population into a permanent state of exhaustion and instability.
In parallel with the administrative transformations, the report observes a sharp escalation in settler violence, not as an uncontrolled phenomenon or individual behavior, but as part of a systematic policy practiced under the protection of the army and police, and sometimes with their direct participation. This transforms settlers into an unofficial executive arm of the state's project, creating a reality of organized daily terror against Palestinians, based on arson, vandalism, assault, and murder, without accountability or prosecution.
The most dangerous aspect of what the report presents is its emphasis that this trajectory aims not only to tighten control but to redefine the conflict itself, from a solvable political conflict to a permanent reality of domination and separation, where the lives of Palestinians are managed as residents without political rights, without a national horizon, and without any effective legal or international tool to defend their existence on their land.
In this sense, what is happening in the West Bank today cannot be separated from the war on Gaza, nor from the project of dismantling the Palestinian cause into isolated arenas, each managed by different policies, but within a single goal: to end any possibility of a unified Palestinian entity, and to transform the Palestinian Authority into a de-sovereignized administrative apparatus, while leaving large Palestinian population blocs besieged and emptied of their political content.
The importance of this report lies not only in its origin from Israeli organizations but in its revelation that Israel has practically moved from the stage of managing the occupation to the stage of entrenching and perpetuating it, from the stage of temporary control to the stage of creeping annexation, and from the logic of settlement to the logic of decisive action, benefiting from imbalanced international power dynamics, international silence, Palestinian division, and an incapacitated or complicit Arab reality.
What these organizations warn against, explicitly or implicitly, is that the continuation of this path will lead to a fully-fledged apartheid reality, where the lives of millions of Palestinians are managed under a permanent discriminatory system, without rights, without representation, and without a political horizon. This reality will not be stable or sustainable, no matter how protected by force it may seem today.
Ultimately, this report does not merely provide a human rights diagnosis; it places a historical warning sign, indicating that the West Bank stands before the most dangerous transformation since 1967, and that what is being imposed today quietly and bureaucratically will be paid for politically, security-wise, and humanely in the near future, not only by Palestinians but by the entire region, and by Israel itself, which is steadily moving towards a system of domination that cannot be justified or defended.