Bethlehem/PNN /

Across the West Bank,  Palestinians are facing forced mass displacement by Israeli forces and settlers, significantly heightening the risk of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territory, warns Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). This comes amid recent calls by Israeli authorities for the country to annex the West Bank.

More than at any point in its 36-year history of providing medical and psychological care in Palestine, MSF sees how the suffering wrought by the Israeli occupation has become normalized. 

In 2025, MSF teams witnessed policies and practices that are blatantly designed to remove Palestinians from their land and prevent any possibility of return. MSF urges states with close political, military, or economic ties to Israel—including the US and European Union member states—to apply meaningful pressure to halt practices that harm and forcibly displace Palestinians, and to ensure an end to the occupation that is illegal under international law.

 

We asked them if we could retrieve our belongings and take some things out of the houses before they demolished them, but they refused. They took our things out of our home, they drove over them with the bulldozer and destroyed them.

 

WARDA*, A COMMUNITY MEMBER IN HEBRON

“Over the past few years, we have seen the impact of the Israeli forces and settlers exerting increased force and control over the Palestinian people—culminating in a genocide in Gaza, and military repression and settler violence escalating across the West Bank,” says Simona Onidi, MSF project coordinator in Jenin and Tulkarem.

“These actions are entrenched in the broader settler-colonial process, where the risk of ethnic cleansing—through the forced removal of Palestinian communities—will cement permanent demographic change,” says Onidi. 

Tactics of displacement are expanding and intensifying 

The recently approved E1 settlement plan would completely bisect the West Bank, block off the north from the south, and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. This is one of the clearest recent attempts by the Israeli authorities to kill any prospect of a Palestinian future.