The Israeli occupation authorities continue to implement systematic settlement policies rooted in the colonial logic of annexation and dispossession. Recently, they approved a new settlement plan aimed at seizing 35 dunums of land from the village of Kafr Qaddum, east of Qalqilya in the occupied West Bank.
According to reports in Hebrew media, the plan involves the confiscation of land in Basin No. 10 in the area known as Wadi Burin, north of the village, to establish 58 new settlement units for the benefit of the Kedumim settlement bloc.
This project is part of an ongoing policy in which settlement is used as a colonial tool designed to entrench Israeli control over Palestinian geography and to alter its demographic character. The plan constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law, which prohibits the occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory or confiscating private property except for temporary and imperative military necessity.
The approval of this new plan is a continuation of a broader policy that amounts to a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Settlement expansion embodies a permanent system of colonisation that operates at the expense of the indigenous population, enforcing an apartheid regime that institutionalises racial segregation, land appropriation, and the denial of access to resources and development.
The new plan specifically targets the village of Kafr Qaddum, whose residents have long resisted settlement expansion through continuous popular protests against land confiscation and settler violence. The move exposes a deliberate intent to eradicate all forms of independent Palestinian existence in the area.
Through such measures, the occupation continues to expand the map of its settlements at the expense of Palestinian villages across the West Bank, in flagrant violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, which obliges the occupying power to preserve the land, its resources, and its demographic character.
The approval of this plan demonstrates that the settlement enterprise is no longer an internal policy issue but part of an integrated colonial structure designed to dispossess Palestinians permanently of their land and rights. It underscores that confronting settlement expansion today has become a struggle over the very survival of the Palestinian people and humanity itself.
