In a further step reflecting the ongoing policy of creeping annexation and settlement expansion, the Israeli occupation army has seized approximately 70 dunams of land belonging to three Palestinian villages in Nablus Governorate, northern West Bank. The seizure, under the pretext of “military and security purposes,” once again demonstrates the systematic mechanism of gradually expropriating Palestinian land under a fabricated legal cover.
The military order, issued on 21 September but only disclosed after the legal objection period had passed, targets land from the villages of Qaryut, Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya, and Al-Sawiya, to establish a buffer zone around the illegal settlement of Eli, which is built on Palestinian land.
Under international humanitarian law, the confiscation or demographic alteration of occupied territory is a flagrant violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the occupying power from transferring its civilian population into the territories it occupies or seizing land except for narrowly defined and temporary military necessity.
However, Israeli occupation continues to exploit the “military necessity” clause to justify systematic and permanent land grabs, flagrantly breaching the United Nations Charter and Security Council resolutions, especially Resolutions 242 and 2334, which affirm the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force.
What is taking place in the West Bank now transcends the traditional concept of military occupation; it has evolved into a full-fledged apartheid regime based on spatial control, demographic fragmentation, and the transformation of Palestinian villages into isolated enclaves trapped between settlements and military zones. The buffer zone to be created around the Eli settlement is a form of demographic engineering aimed at expanding the settlement and preventing Palestinian urban development.
This decision coincides with an unprecedented surge in Israeli occupation’s violations in the West Bank since the genocidal war erupted in Gaza. Over 1,050 Palestinians have been killed, more than 10,000 injured, and over 20,000 arrested, including children. This synchronised repression reveals the unified nature of Israeli occupation’s colonial project: mass killings in Gaza, and spatial eradication in the West Bank.
Land seizures under the guise of “security” are no more than a false legal pretext for orchestrated plunder by an occupying power intent on depopulating the land and transforming it into a purely settler space. In light of the ongoing implementation of such policies, there is an urgent moral and humanitarian need for meaningful international action to activate universal jurisdiction mechanisms and hold Israeli occupation leaders accountable for crimes of forced displacement and settlement expansion, this is not just a human rights demand, but an ethical imperative.
