Around 18% of the occupied West Bank is under the control of settler farming outposts [Mosab Shawer / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images]
Israeli settlers now control nearly a fifth of the occupied West Bank, according to a new report that details Israel’s accelerating de facto annexation of Palestinian land.
In a report titled Annus Mirabilis, released on Sunday, Israeli watchdog Peace Now said the Israeli government had annexed large swathes of the occupied West Bank at an “unprecedented pace” between 2023 and 2025, with settlers playing a central role.
The surge in land seizures, settlement approvals and settler activity has been driven by the transfer of governing powers from the military to a civilian administration headed by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has repeatedly called for the full annexation of the occupied territory.
“The findings published by Peace Now confirm what Palestinian institutions have been documenting on the ground for years: Israel is steadily transforming its occupation into a system of permanent territorial control across the occupied West Bank,” Ameer Dawood, director of Publishing and Documentation at the Colonisation & Wall Resistance Commission, told The New Arab.
“Settlement expansion, agricultural outposts, military orders, land declarations, and discriminatory planning policies are all being used to reshape the landscape in ways that make annexation increasingly irreversible.”
Peace Now said the changes “enable rapid and systematic advancement of annexation objectives while bypassing the limited checks previously in place within the military and legal systems”.
According to the report, the administrative overhaul has paved the way for plans to build 40,064 settlement housing units, enough to accommodate between 160,000 and 200,000 additional settlers.
Dawood said agricultural and pastoral outposts have become one of the most effective instruments of land seizure.
“While many were initially established without formal authorization, they have gradually been incorporated into the state’s settlement enterprise through infrastructure, public funding, security protection, and political support,” he said.
The director added that with only a small number of settlers, these outposts are able to dominate vast areas of Palestinian land, forcing herding and farming communities from their livelihoods and restricting Palestinian access to land and natural resources.
There are currently an estimated 700,000 Israeli settlers living across the occupied West Bank in settlements considered illegal under international law.
“The pace of establishment increased from year to year, indicating an increasingly professionalised mechanism of land takeover that exploits the war [in Gaza] and the fact that, in practice, there is no enforcement against Israeli construction, in order to create new facts on the ground,” the report said.
Nearly one million dunams of land, equivalent to around 1,000 square kilometres, is now under the control of settler farm outposts.
The report found that settlers now control around 18 percent of the occupied West Bank, with approximately 300,000 dunams coming under their control in 2025 alone. Around 40 percent of that land is classified by Israel as “state land”.
Peace Now said the expansion has forced 118 Palestinian shepherding communities from their land between 2023 and 2025, with a further nine communities displaced during the first two months of 2026.
Amnesty International has described the forced displacement of Palestinian shepherding communities in the occupied West Bank as part of an Israeli state-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing.
“This trajectory represents a grave breach of international law and further undermines the prospects for a just and viable political solution,” Dawood said. “It also demands a far more decisive international response than we have seen to date.”
Alongside the expansion of settlements and the transfer of powers to civilian authorities, the report said Israel has increasingly restricted the Palestinian Authority’s ability to govern in Areas A and B, undermining the framework established under the 1994 Oslo Accords.
“In practice, the government is working to dismantle this framework,” the Peace Now report said.
