Israel has always had plans to annex more land in the occupied West Bank, and its actions prove that.
This week, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to claim Palestinian land in the West Bank as “state land.” The proposal, promoted by far-right Israeli leaders including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Defense Minister Israel Katz, emphasizes Israel’s superiority over the Palestinians.
The Israeli government has created 35 new positions and allocated 244.1 million shekels (approximately $79 million) for land registration projects from 2026 to 2030.
The process outlined in this proposal is not new. This is a process that has been frozen since 1967, and its recent restart is a continuation of Israel’s long-standing plan to occupy Palestinian land. Although Israel suspended land registration procedures in 1967, acts of ethnic cleansing, colonial violence, and de facto land annexation did not cease.
For the Palestinians, this decision does not mean a new escalation, but a strengthening of Israel’s presence in the West Bank. While this may seem like mere red tape, it is actually a milestone in Israel’s gradual occupation of the West Bank, the last remaining territorial hurdle to completing Israel’s colonial project in Palestine.
Bureaucracy as annexation
This change cannot be understood without revisiting the Oslo Accords. Under the 1993 and 1995 agreements, the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B, and C as an “interim” arrangement, but it was never made permanent. Area C, the largest and containing the most land and resources, remained under full Israeli control, while Areas A and B were left as fragmented Palestinian islands with limited Palestinian authority.
Area C has now become a real battlefield.
As part of the new policy, land registration in Area C, which covers more than 62 percent of the West Bank, will be conducted through the Land Title Settlement Authority, part of the Israeli Ministry of Justice. This would effectively transition Area C from military rule to direct Israeli civilian rule.
These measures should not be taken lightly. They are talking about Israel’s latest annexation strategy: governance.
On February 8, a week before the Israeli cabinet approved the registration of West Bank land as state land, Israeli authorities adopted new measures opening up land purchase mechanisms to settlers while reducing oversight. On the same day, Israeli authorities also moved to further erode the Palestinian Authority’s authority in Areas A and B, which should be under full Palestinian administrative control under international agreements signed by Israel.
Taken together, these measures mark a new phase of Zionist territorial conquest in the 21st century, one that relies on administrative consolidation rather than open warfare.
In 1948, Zionist militias pursued territorial conquest through large-scale wars, mass displacement, and border redrawing. Today, conquest is increasingly carried out through bureaucratic mechanisms.
It is no coincidence that a minister as vocally racist as Mr. Smotrich described the plan as an attempt to end “the current turmoil that is bad for everyone, Jews and Arabs alike.” While Israel’s goal of occupying Palestinian land remains unchanged, the post-Oslo era and the reputational damage Israel suffered during its genocidal war in Gaza mean that visible large-scale violence is unsustainable for long-term results in the West Bank.
So rather than tanks, bombs, or dramatic declarations of territorial conquest, Israel is weakening both regional and international vigilance by consolidating its land with a perceived bureaucracy.
From document creation to disposal
Israel promotes its West Bank policy as a cleansing of neutral cadastral land, but in reality it is a large-scale land grab carried out through administrative means. This is an act of state-building that allows Zionist Israelis to decide whose claims to Palestinian land are legitimate and whose claims are extinguished.
This is exactly why land registration is important. Once land is registered in Israel’s registry as “state land,” revoking it becomes a much more difficult legal reality than a temporary military seizure.
For Palestinians, this policy represents serious danger. Because we’ve all experienced it before. After the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land in 1948, approximately 150,000 Palestinians remained in the country that became Israel.
Although these Palestinians retain Israeli citizenship, they were under military rule until the 1960s. This was not done for security. It was done to ensure territorial reorganization. Land without a physical Palestinian presence was absorbed through absentee property law.
A similar movement is unfolding today in the West Bank, where physical displacement and access restrictions are once again giving way to legal deprivation. Over the past two years, settler violence has occurred at an alarming rate in the West Bank, forcing thousands of Palestinians from their land while other areas have been occupied and declared closed military zones. This denied Palestinians access to their homes, farmland, and property. Under Israeli law, all of this can be considered absentee land, even if the rightful owner is only a few meters away and cannot reach the land due to Israeli hostilities.
Through this, Israel has created a system in which the default legal outcome is territorial absorption. This bureaucratic aspect means that the annexation will be irreversible. It is no longer a temporary military seizure operation. It seeks to transform territory into property that functions within a state system, in this case the Israeli legal system.
Even more dangerously, historical evidence shows that Israel not only absorbed Palestinian land through its bureaucracy, but also forced Palestinians to engage with Israel’s legal structures as a last resort.
Even now, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship continue to fight legal battles over land in areas such as Ein Hod. Not only were they expelled from the village, which now serves as a colony for Jewish artists, but there are also Palestinians with Israeli citizenship just a few kilometers away. Decades later, they continue to fight legal battles to obtain building permits to live on the land they were forced to relocate to.
Why does the world allow administrative conquest?
It is important to recognize that all of this has been made possible by the international community’s refusal to address the criminality of the entire Israeli regime.
Condemnation of attacks on individual Israeli settlers over the past two years, and refusal to disarm Israel despite committing genocide, is precisely what allows Israel to continue its colonial expansion. Palestinians and international human rights organizations have long warned not only of increased violence by Israeli settlers, but also of the apparent synchronization of efforts by the military and Israeli armed militias in the West Bank.
Palestinians shared reports and tried to tell stories of trees uprooted by thousands, water pipes destroyed by Israelis, large-scale arson and pogroms in various cities and towns, and settlers armed with military weapons and military training in illegal settlements.
But the world defines violence only in the form of bullets and bombs, which allowed Israel to change its strategy in the West Bank. Palestinians in the West Bank have been disarmed, leaving only voices of protest and demands for media coverage. The violence enacted against Palestinians has been reduced to random and exceptional acts of hostility.
But in the West Bank, Israel did not choose a dramatic war. It chose delicacy. Over the past two years, the battlefields of the West Bank have diffused into our daily lives and relocated into our nervous systems. Violence no longer depends on continued lethal force, but on the constant anticipation of settler attacks, military raids, and court orders for destruction. Bodies are restrained through constant surveillance, drones in the sky, constant home invasions, arrests and checks every few meters.
All these acts paved the way for the ongoing displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their lands. More importantly, these are the reasons why Israel can pursue new policies that register the land as state-owned and allow Israelis to buy it with little oversight.
What this should teach us is that sometimes war exists in subtle ways, and just because there is no relentless bombing doesn’t mean there is no war.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
