By Sania Al-Hussein english.ahram.org.eg
Israeli policies in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and in Gaza form part of an integrated strategic vision intended to fundamentally alter the situation in Palestine in a way that will be difficult to reverse.
Official and unofficial Israeli actions, alongside a steady stream of statements that have been unprecedented in their frequency since the war in Gaza began nearly two and a half years ago, point to a coherent Israeli strategy towards the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza and towards the Palestinian cause as a whole.
By tracing these actions and declarations, which together lay bare underlying intentions, it is possible to lift the veil on Israel’s integrated approach to the Palestinians. The Israeli policies in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and in Gaza cannot be dismissed as temporary or episodic. They form part of an integrated strategic vision directed at the Palestinians and at the future of their presence on their land in both territories.
Developments in the West Bank cannot be read in isolation from what is unfolding in Gaza. Together, these developments aim to entrench a reality that will be difficult to reverse, while clearing the path for plans that Israeli officials have articulated with unusual openness.
The rapid shifts under the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are unfolding through tools deployed on a wide scale and with an unprecedented degree of simultaneity. Chief among them is the extensive destruction of infrastructure in Palestinian cities and villages, not only in Gaza, but also increasingly in the West Bank, including in Areas A and B which fall under Palestinian Authority (PA) administration.
Amid Israel’s deepening internal crisis, driven by disputes over the budget and the military draft exemption law, and by threats from parties in the coalition to bring down the government, Netanyahu is fighting to keep his government intact. If the budget fails to pass or the Knesset is dissolved, elections will be brought forward. Under Israeli law, they will have to be held by the end of October this year.
Netanyahu is therefore working to shape the conditions that will allow him to remain in office. At the same time, he is pressing on with conflicts on multiple fronts, most notably with Lebanon, where he continues to threaten to disarm Hizbullah, with Iran, where he insists that Israel will not allow it to regroup, and with the Palestinians, against whom he is waging an open-ended campaign in Gaza and the West Bank.
It has become clear that Netanyahu and his right-wing government are seeking to leverage their current alignment with the administration of US President Donald Trump, which strongly backs Israeli policies, to cement a reality in Palestine that will be difficult to reverse in the future.
Netanyahu’s Likud Party continues to lead in all the major Israeli opinion polls, with projected support ranging between 26 and 31 seats, positioning it as the single largest party and the most viable anchor for the next governing coalition. While recent surveys show a modest decline in Likud’s support, and a more pronounced drop in the popularity of the Religious Zionism Party led by Bezalel Smotrich, the ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, along with the far-right Jewish Power Party led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, have maintained relative stability.
These trends are unfolding against a broader current within Israeli public opinion. Multiple polls suggest that between 57 and 59 per cent of the Israeli Jewish public oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state under any circumstances. Between 58 and 70 per cent support expanding Israeli sovereignty and control over the West Bank, while 42 per cent favour annexing the territory without granting equal rights to Palestinians.
AGENDA FOR GAZA: The hostage crisis in Gaza has effectively drawn to a close after the return of the final body of an Israeli hostage, bringing the first phase of Trump’s ceasefire plan for Gaza to an end.
According to the plan, this new stage is meant to address the future governance of the Gaza Strip and lay the groundwork for its reconstruction. Netanyahu has made it clear that any move towards rebuilding Gaza is conditional on its disarmament, presenting what he described as two paths: an “easier” route, through voluntary compliance, or a “harder” one, by force.
He has also insisted that Israel will not allow the PA to operate in Gaza and that Israel will retain full security control over the territory stretching “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” explicitly including the Gaza Strip. He has framed this control as a guarantee of Israel’s security. These positions are coupled with Netanyahu’s repeated insistence on blocking the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Israel’s government has previously stated that it will neither fund nor carry out the rebuilding itself, a position that deliberately sidesteps responsibility for the devastation inflicted on the enclave. At the same time, Israeli forces have spent the past two months flattening and sweeping land in the southern Gaza Strip and continuing large-scale debris removal, particularly in eastern Rafah.
Last July, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz confirmed that he had instructed the military to prepare a camp in Rafah to house Gaza’s population. These moves come amid growing discussion of Israeli plans to establish a large camp for Palestinians in the south of the Strip equipped with advanced surveillance technologies, alongside repeated Israeli statements signalling a desire to see as many Palestinians as possible leave Gaza.
Netanyahu recently addressed the issue of the Rafah Crossing, saying that it would be “open in both directions” and stressing that there would be no intention to prevent any Gazan from leaving the enclave. At the same time, he made it clear that there would be no “open access” into Gaza. Palestinians would be subjected to stringent Israeli screening, while the Israeli military maintains full security control over Rafah.
As for conditions on the ground in Gaza, despite a ceasefire that took effect in October last year, bombardments, assaults, killings, and destruction have continued across the Strip, most of which remains under Israeli control. The Palestinians in Gaza, already devastated by two years of Israeli attacks, are facing severe restrictions on their movement, alongside surveillance of their online activity and phone communications by Israeli intelligence services.
Israeli forces are deployed across both the northern and southern parts of the Gaza Strip, in areas including Beit Hanoun and Rafah, as well as along its eastern zones, forcing civilians to abandon their homes and concentrate in western areas towards the coastline. This has occurred either under sustained bombardment and destruction or through evacuation orders. The Trump administration is seeking to disarm Gaza. Trump himself has warned of “severe consequences” should Hamas fighters and other factions fail to lay down their arms.
Gaza is thus bracing for a period of profound hardship and complex schemes. The push to funnel Gaza’s population into a narrow western part of the enclave and confine them there, the continued paralysis of any return to normal life, the completion of land leveling in Rafah in preparation for receiving displaced Palestinians, and the steadily emerging conditions governing the reopening of the Rafah Crossing all suggest that a decisive phase may be unfolding, one aimed at determining the future of Gaza’s Palestinian population.
This is taking place amid the expanding territorial control of Israeli forces and efforts to lock in future security.
What is unfolding in Gaza thus amounts to a comprehensive re-engineering of the Strip, both in terms of its security and demography, in ways designed to preclude any meaningful form of Palestinian sovereignty. This is evident in the conditioning of the reconstruction on the disarmament of Gaza, coupled with the rejection of any political or administrative role for either the PA or Hamas.
In their place, what is being advanced is a technocratic Palestinian administrative body confined to service provision and structured according to American and Israeli parameters. In this context, the promise of reconstruction functions less as a humanitarian commitment and more as an instrument of political and security leverage. The daily human suffering produced by the war is being folded into a broader strategy, one that seeks to secure Israel’s stated objectives by reshaping the political and territorial realities on the ground.
Israel’s objectives in Gaza also extend beyond territorial control and security dominance. They also encompass the reordering of the Strip’s geographic and demographic reality. Plans to empty densely populated areas, confine residents to limited zones, and construct monitored encampments in the far south of the Strip near the Egyptian border point to a strategy that goes well beyond managing a civilian population.
AGENDA FOR THE WEST BANK: Israeli policies and measures directed at the Palestinians in the West Bank have steadily intensified since the current right-wing government led by Netanyahu came to power at the end of 2022.
These policies became more explicit in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attacks the following year and increasingly actionable with Trump’s return to the US presidency in a shift openly welcomed and endorsed by Netanyahu, members of his government, and their political base.
While these measures are not detached from the structural policies that the Israeli authorities have gradually entrenched in the West Bank over past decades, their recent evolution has brought them together into a coherent system. Taken as a whole, they outline Israel’s emerging vision for the future of the West Bank, one that is in no way separable from how it envisages the future of Gaza.
The Israeli authorities appear to be pursuing a calibrated policy aimed at eroding the standing of the PA, weakening it economically while steadily stripping it of administrative prerogatives in areas nominally under its control. This is also visible in the sustained military incursions into Palestinian cities and towns, whether for arrests, demolition operations, or displays of force, alongside the accelerating pace of settler attacks on Palestinian lives and property.
In such circumstances, the PA’s ability to respond, let alone assert control, has been steadily diminished.
In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Israeli authorities have moved to suffocate the work of the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA. Its headquarters in Jerusalem have been demolished, its presence there effectively erased, and its privileges in the West Bank revoked.
Refugee camps have come under direct attack. Schools, health clinics, and homes have been destroyed. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from these camps. These measures strike at the heart of the Palestinian refugee issue and the rights attached to it. They form part of a broader effort to bring a decades-long struggle to a close on terms dictated by the occupier and to deny the rights of the indigenous population.
The escalation is particularly grave in refugee camps located in areas classified as Area A, nominally administered by the PA. The mass demolitions and collective displacement carried out there mark a dangerous shift, one that points to even harsher measures ahead.
The sharp and unprecedented rise in the number of Palestinians killed, wounded, detained, and imprisoned during this period signals a new Israeli policy. It reflects a profound disregard for Palestinian lives and for their future, a reality that cannot be separated from the crimes committed against hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Gaza Strip during the latest war.
ERODING THE PA: The recent deployment of checkpoints and iron gates that sever the territorial continuity of towns and villages across the West Bank and paralyse daily life for the Palestinians cannot be separated from a broader policy aimed squarely at undermining the standing of the PA itself and complicating the life of the people.
The West Bank economy now stands on the brink. These barriers, and the chronic congestion they produce, have imposed severe economic disruption on the population. This has unfolded alongside the cancellation of most work permits for Palestinians employed inside the Green Line, a workforce exceeding one hundred thousand. The result has been the loss of nearly one fifth of the West Bank’s income.
At the same time, Israel has deliberately targeted the PA through economic pressure. It continues to withhold clearance revenues, which account for more than two thirds of the authority’s budget. The latest phase of this policy began gradually in 2019, then escalated sharply after 7 October 2023, justified by shifting and unconvincing pretexts. Accordingly, debts have mounted, and public employees and retirees, whose numbers exceed one hundred thousand, have for years been denied their full salaries.
The picture becomes even clearer with Israel’s flooding of Palestinian banks with excess shekels, while denying them the ability to transfer or dispose of the surplus. By imposing tight restrictions on financial transfers within areas under PA control, the Israeli authorities are effectively choking the entire financial system. These measures also obstruct the authority’s ability to meet its financial obligations to Israeli energy, electricity, and utility companies, helping to explain the recurring shortages in the supply of these essential services to Palestinians.
The current Israeli government thus appears to be exerting sustained pressure to weaken the PA, guided by two competing visions held by different factions within the ruling coalition. The first is embraced by Netanyahu and the military establishment. It does not oppose the continued existence of the authority, but only in a sharply curtailed form and stripped of powers even within the limits set by the Oslo framework. Such an arrangement would deprive the authority of meaningful popular representation, a core component of statehood, in a process that is already unfolding step by step.
The second vision is championed by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who rejects the PA outright and calls for the termination of its role altogether. In its place, he advances a model based on allowing a form of limited self-rule for the Palestinians confined to densely populated areas of the West Bank. Despite their differences, the two approaches converge on a shared objective, one that closely mirrors what Israel is seeking to impose in Gaza.
The core idea is to permit the Palestinians to manage their daily affairs, but only within rules and conditions dictated by the occupation.
SETTLEMENT EXPANSION: These developments are unfolding against a clear Israeli trajectory towards the full annexation of the West Bank, a course through which Israel seeks to settle, in practice, the question of imposing sovereignty over the land even without a formal declaration.
Over the past two years, settlement expansion in the West Bank has accelerated at a pace surpassing earlier phases, marking a qualitative shift rather than a continuation of the status quo. From its outset, the settlement project in the West Bank was designed as a gradual, structural process. Over decades, it engineered a new reality that privileges incoming Jewish settlers at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population.
The Oslo Accords failed to reverse this trajectory. On the contrary, they entrenched it by dividing the West Bank into three administrative categories, with most of the territory designated as Area C and placed under full Israeli control. Although these arrangements were meant to be temporary, limited to a five-year transitional period ending in 1999, Israeli control not only persisted but expanded and deepened in the years that followed.
Over the past two years, the Israeli authorities have not issued a single building permit to Palestinians in areas designated as Area C. At the same time, they are systematically demolishing homes and institutions built without permits – which in any case are effectively impossible for Palestinians to obtain in these areas.
Annual demolition orders targeting Palestinian structures in Area C now exceed one thousand. A similar pattern is unfolding in East Jerusalem, where land confiscations and demolitions are intensifying in ways that pose a serious threat to the city’s Palestinian demographic fabric.
In Jerusalem as well, the Israeli authorities have begun implementing the long-stalled E1 Project, a plan frozen for two decades due to American and international opposition. The project effectively splits the West Bank in two, severs the city from its Palestinian hinterland, and places vast stretches of Palestinian land under Israeli control.
BEYOND OSLO: Decisions issued some days ago by Israel’s Security and Political Cabinet signal a qualitative shift in the management of the West Bank. What had long been framed as a model of “temporary military administration” is giving way to one of entrenched civil-legal control.
The implications of these decisions are far-reaching: the status of land and property, the scope of the PA’s powers, the viability of the two-state framework, and even the legal character of the occupation itself all stand to be affected. But for all their gravity, these decisions do not emerge in isolation. They reflect a continuum, from the military and settlement-driven policies that predated Oslo, to the security-centred and expansionist approach that followed it, and, more recently, to the sharp escalation since the end of 2022 with the rise of Netanyahu’s right-wing government.
The trajectory points towards the imposition of a decisive reality in the Palestinian Territories and one increasingly difficult to reverse.
The Israeli decisions focus in particular on annulling the Jordanian law in force prior to 1967 that prohibited the sale of land in the West Bank to non-Palestinians. Its cancellation now opens the door for Israelis to acquire Palestinian land in the territory. The measures also authorise the opening and publication of Palestinian land registries, which had previously been closed to Israeli access. This step facilitates sales, purchases, and the systematic monitoring of ownership procedures by Israeli authorities.
In effect, Palestinian land can now be drawn into Israel’s own legal framework governing property and land registration, integrating it into the Israeli land registry system. At the same time, the decisions expand the Israeli authorities’ powers to apply Israeli law in areas populated by Palestinians. Planning and building powers in certain Palestinian zones have been transferred to Israeli bodies, including in Hebron and the area surrounding the Ibrahimi Mosque. This shift enables Israel to determine the scope and limits of Palestinian urban development, while opening the way for settlement expansion in locations where such expansion had previously not been authorised.
The decisions also broaden Israel’s authority to regulate environmental matters, antiquities, water resources, and even building violations in areas A and B, zones that under the Oslo framework fall under the administration of the PA. In practice, this strips the authority of core administrative powers in territories that were formally designated as being under its jurisdiction.
These steps come against the backdrop of an established Israeli trajectory: reducing the overt military character of governance in the Occupied West Bank while strengthening a system of civil and administrative control over the Palestinians. Israeli law had already been extended to settlers residing in the West Bank; what is now unfolding suggests a gradual institutionalisation of Israeli governance structures across the territory, moving towards a more permanent and systematised form of rule.
The measures amount to a unilateral alteration of the Oslo framework. As a bilateral agreement, Oslo rests on reciprocal obligations, and a fundamental change imposed by one party raises the legal question of whether the other party retains the right to withdraw from the agreement.
Paradoxically, the Israeli decisions may reinforce the Palestinian legal argument that the transitional framework established by Oslo has effectively run its course. But they do not alter the underlying condition of curtailed sovereignty imposed by occupation. Sovereignty, in the Palestinian case, derives in essence from popular representation, from a people living under occupation, rather than from the limited administrative competences defined by interim arrangements.
What these measures affect are the functional boundaries of governance that were granted to the PA under the Oslo understandings. They do not extinguish the broader legal foundation upon which Palestinian legitimacy rests.
The writer is a professor of Political Science and International Relations in Ramallah, Palestine.
