Settler Violence: A State-Sponsered Land and Space Domination

[Dr Mais Qandeel is an Associate Professor of International Law at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway, Ireland, and Örebro University, Sweden. She holds a Ph.D. in international humanitarian law from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.]

Introduction 

In addition to the genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israel since October 2023, Israeli settlers and military have been escalating their deadly attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. In the West Bank, Israeli military and settlers killed 1,181 and injured 13,664 Palestinians, damaging and burning Palestinian property and livestock and leading to a hostile land theft, only since October 2023. This is not a new phenomenon, but in the last three years, while supported and protected by the Israeli army, settlers have conducted extensive and widespread acts of terrorism which led to forcibly displace thousands of Palestinians. In the first half of 2026, it has been reported that Israeli settlers conducting these acts have forcibly displaced more than 90 Palestinians and damaged homes, water and sanitation infrastructure, schools and livelihood assets, especially affecting the Bedouin communities. Some are forcibly removed by Israeli military and armed setters from their homes and are prevented from returning. Such Israeli attacks have become a systematic routine of violence and terror (see here, here, here and here). On 24 July 2026, Human Rights Watch released an urgent warning as the surge in military and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is paving the way to mass atrocities, calling for an urgent international action to end the Israeli government’s role in escalating, supporting and shielding these acts. Settler violence, as a matter of fact, has been an Israeli central mechanism to systemically dispossess and forcibly transfer Palestinians. 

This post focuses on settler violence, part of the systematic state-attributed violence, as a tool of land grabbing and provides a brief legal assessment of the relevant provisions of the law of occupation. This post builds on the studies: Violence and State Attribution: The Case of Occupied Palestine and Settler Violence as State Wrongful Act and Third State Obligations, in relation to the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion of July 2024 on Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. I briefly discuss the legal basis on which all forms of violence against protected persons and their property in the Occupied Territory is prohibited, arguing that these acts of settler and military violence are a form of State atrocities. 

Of particular significance, this post establishes the nexus between settler violence and State’s territorial annexation in the West Bank. It demonstrates that settler violence is an integral modality of the State’s exercise of territorial acquisition. It further critiques  the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion of July 2024, arguing that the Court’s analysis does not fully capture the legal characterisation of settler violence, nor its relationship to the broader structure of dispossession and annexation. This post therefore argues that a proper legal classification requires situating settler violence as the means to the systematic policies, by Israeli authorities and settlers, of forcible transfer, dispossession and territorial annexation. Thus, I establish how this violence is part and parcel of the Israeli State systematic land control and territorial annexation of the West Bank.  

Settler Violence as a Mechanism to Land Domination 

Israeli settlements are illegal under International Law, whether with or without an approval by the Israeli government. As such, they violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Amounting to serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, Israeli settlements and their associated regime constitute a war crime under the Rome Statute (8)(1)(b)(viii). 

Since 1967, Israel has started building settlements and transferring its own population to the OPT, approving thousands of housing units that accommodates more than 700,000 Israeli settlers. Israeli settlements and their associated regime, including the infrastructure attached to them, are built on illegally confiscated Palestinian land. Israeli settlers, with the support of their government, attack Palestinians, steal Palestinian land and establish their outposts, to be later legalised under Israeli law and included the settlement infrastructure regime.  

As of May 2026, there are more than 600, and 360 outposts. Since 2017, Israeli settlers have established 308 outposts across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. These settlements and outposts bred systematic violence to seize extensive areas of Palestinian land. Following October 2023, settler attacks escalated sharply, resulting in the theft of hundreds of thousands of additional dunams of privately owned Palestinian land. This practice aligns with the long-standing State objective often summarized as “maximum land, minimum Arabs,” later refined into “maximum land through minimum settlers,” encouraging and supporting violence and land theft. Despite their illegality under Israeli domestic law, authorities have provided outposts with services and subsequently “legalized” many through cabinet decisions or judicial rulings.

Between June 2022 and March 2025 alone, over 70 new grazing outposts were created, bringing the total area under settler control to roughly 786,000 dunams—approximately 14% of the West Bank. Seventy percent of this expansion occurred in less than three years, displacing dozens of Bedouin and herding communities in the process. This is orchestrated in addition to the Israeli government’s continuous approval of new settlements, as only in April 2026, the Israeli Security Cabinet secretly decided to establish 34 new settlements. 

Since October 2023, settler violence, often conducted in coordination with or under the protection of Israeli security forces, has forcibly displaced thousands of Palestinians in at least seven areas of the West Bank. By May 2025, it has been reported that Israeli settlers have forced more than 30 Bedouin communities, comprising 323 families, from their homes, land, and livestock. Reports indicate that many were forcibly removed by armed settlers or the Israeli military and prevented from returning, a pattern amounting to “forcible transfer” under international law, constituting a war crime.

Alongside outposts and grazing, settlers have adopted new methods to consolidate territorial control. Between mid-2023 and mid-2024, they illegally constructed 139 roads, totaling 116.4 kilometres, approximately two-thirds of which cut through privately owned Palestinian land. In June 2025, after Israeli settlers set out an outpost on the Palestinian land belonging to the village of al-Mu’arrajat, dozens of Palestinian families were forcibly displaced. Thus, Palestinians are forced out of their homes and land, and Israeli settlers are supported by the Israeli government to control and dominate Palestinian land through violence and terror. 

Settler Violence and the ICJ’s 2024 Advisory Opinion

The ICJ dedicated paragraphs 148-154 to assess the issue of violence against Palestinians. The Court discussion on settler and security forces violence against Palestinians fails to answer the fundamental question of the coupled connection between Israeli violence and state violence. Additionally, the Court does not look at the issue as a means to land domination. The Court concluded that “the violence by settlers against Palestinians, Israel’s failure to prevent or to punish it effectively and its excessive use of force against Palestinians contribute to the creation and maintenance of a coercive environment against Palestinians. (para 154). The Court continues by concluding that “Israel’s systematic failure to prevent or to punish attacks by settlers against the life or bodily integrity of Palestinians, as well as Israel’s excessive use of force against Palestinians, is inconsistent with [its obligations under Article 46 of the Hague Regulations, Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 6, paragraph 1, and Article 7 of the ICCPR]” (para 154). Article 46 of the Hague Regulations mandates the protection of family honour, the lives of persons and private property. Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention asserts that protected persons, including civilians in occupied territory, “are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs” and that “they shall at all times be humanely treated, and protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof”. Whereas Article 6.1 of ICCPR safeguards the right to live, Article 7 protects against torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.  

As discussed in my previous post, Settler Violence as State Wrongful Act and Third State Obligations, the ICJ focuses on Israel’s failure to protect Palestinian victims and punish Israeli attackers, not as a systematic conduct of the Israeli State and as a central tool that serves Israel’s systematic dispossession and forcibly transfer of Palestinians. The ICJ recalls, however, in paras 142-143, that “Israel’s settlement policy contributed to the departure of Palestinian populations from areas of the West Bank and East Jerusalem… [where] large-scale confiscation of land and the deprivation of access to natural resources divest the local population of their basic means of subsistence, thus inducing their departure”. This observation does not provide for an understanding of the crucial connection between state-backed settler violence and land dispossession and territorial annexation by force. Given such violence has resulted in forcible displacement and destroying and confiscation of private land and the absence of this connection, the Court does not conclude that settler violence as such violates Articles 53 and 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. 

Israeli authorities have facilitated settler violence and subsequently entrenched the resulting dispossession through military orders, administrative measures, and judicial decisions. This institutional framework has served as a central mechanism for the expansion of Israeli settlements, through settler violence, whose establishment and maintenance are unlawful. The outposts, established by settlers after violently forcing Palestinians out of their lands, are one of the main techniques for the Israeli authorities to dispossess Palestinians of their homes and land. This systematic violence has fragmented Palestinian communities, forcibly displaced protected persons in the OPT, altering the territorial and demographic composition of the occupied territory, and advanced the de facto annexation of all or parts of the West Bank in contravention of the principles of international humanitarian law and the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force. Territorial annexation by force, whether de facto or de jure, is unlawful (ICJ 2024 Advisory Opinion, paras 158-160). De facto annexation and de jure annexation are types of annexation that share the same objective — the assertion of permanent control over the occupied territory. Thus, both are unlawful, whether conducted by the agents of the state itself or by individuals under the auspices of the state. In fact, cases of settler violence, frequently in the presence of Israeli soldiers and security forces, that has led the killing, torture, injuries, sexual violence, damaging and burning property and talking land, and has been accompanied with full impunity. Settler violence is a state strategy to forcibly transfer Palestinians to advance territorial annexation of Palestine.  

Finally, the terminology of “settler violence” is becoming problematic. The designation of such conducts as “settler violence” risks reducing a sustained and organised pattern of coercion to a series of ostensibly private acts committed by individuals, rather than state-attributed conducts. One legal question that might arise concerning the status of Israeli settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The terminology may obscure the collective, organised and territorial character of the violence, particularly where settlers are armed and supported by the State. In circumstances where such violence is organised and directed towards territorial objectives, the conventional category of the “settler violence” may therefore be legally and analytically incorrect. This distinction is significant because the violence cannot be understood in isolation from the broader system of unlawful occupation and a wider pattern of territorial expansion. As I argued, in Violence and State Attribution: The Case of Occupied Palestine, these actions are state-attributed international crimes. The legal significance of this phenomenon accordingly extends beyond individual acts of violence, rather, it contributes to the unlawful acquisition and annexation of occupied territory. Reconsidering the category of “settler violence” through this lens makes visible its broader function in producing territorial annexation. 

Photo attribution: “On the road from Jenin to Nablus, West Bank, Palestine” by Almonroth is licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0