The Unending Occupation: Israel’s War by Another Name

It has been an even more brutal season in the West Bank. Since that October in 2023, the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem have faced a relentless and grinding escalation, a campaign of incursions, demolitions, land seizures, arrests, beatings and killings carried out by Israeli forces. It feels less like security work and more like a steady stripping away of a people. Reports from the United Nations and humanitarian agencies describe a staggering tempo of violence, with thousands of raids across towns and refugee camps. Estimates place the total between six thousand and seven thousand operations. Let that number settle for a moment. It is a rhythm of fear so constant that it risks becoming background noise, which may well be the point. One tally from Middle East Eye states that Israeli forces have carried out near daily raids across the West Bank since the start of the war on Gaza, killing five hundred and eighty two Palestinians and detaining more than ten thousand.

All of this unfolds in a landscape where international law is not some abstract principle but a daily, concrete obligation, one Israel, as the occupying power, is required to uphold. Under the law of occupation, Israel must protect the civilians whose homes it now destroys. It must ensure their safety, not endanger it. It must maintain public order, not shatter it. It is obligated to preserve existing legal systems, not hollow them out. It must ensure access to food, water, electricity, healthcare and education, not sever them. It must keep public services functioning, allow humanitarian agencies safe passage, and permit the population the freedom to move, work, study and worship. It must respect property, economic life and cultural life. It must treat detainees with dignity. Above all, it must act as a temporary administrator, a custodian bound to care for a population that does not belong to it, not as a sovereign remaking the land according to its own will.

The contrast between these obligations and the lived reality on the ground is devastating. The landscape itself is being erased. More than one thousand one hundred structures have been demolished or seized, leaving thousands of people displaced from the rubble they once called home. A United Nations report notes that in 2023 a total of one thousand one hundred and seventy seven structures were demolished or seized across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the highest figure since 2016. The numbers, as shocking as they are, tell only part of the story. The rest is written on the land. Confiscations have surged to a new level. Two thousand three hundred and seventy hectares have been taken in 2024 alone, and more than three thousand one hundred acres in the Jordan Valley have been declared state land on the grounds of archaeology. The justification is thin enough to be farcical, a cover for the oldest colonial tactic there is. The human toll is worse still. Around one thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, one in five of them children. A statistic like that should stop the world in its tracks, yet here we are.

As if state violence were not enough, it has an unofficial twin. Settler attacks have risen to record levels and now move in grim harmony with the operations of the army. A report last year noted that 2024 was the worst year yet for settler violence in the occupied West Bank, with attacks rising from an average of two a day in 2022 to four a day in 2024. Since October 2023 there have been between six thousand five hundred and seven thousand five hundred recorded incidents. This catalogue of assaults, shootings and arson attacks has been met with near complete impunity. The Israeli human rights group B Tselem has highlighted the truth of the matter. There have been twenty one cases of settlers killing Palestinians since October 2023, yet not a single perpetrator has been convicted. Not one. These attacks have emptied more than thirty Palestinian communities, tearing families away from their land and their means of survival. United Nations experts captured the scale of the disaster, warning of widespread intimidation, violence, dispossession and the forcible displacement of entire communities. People are not only being removed. They are being unmade.

Here, too, international law speaks plainly. An occupying power must protect the population from violence, whether the threat comes from its own soldiers or its own civilians. It must act against those who commit attacks, not stand by as villages are razed and families driven out. It must prevent displacement, not enable it. Yet the displacement spirals; the protection evaporates. The obligations remain on paper; the people disappear from the land. The reason they can continue to disappear is woven through the occupation itself. The structures that should halt these violations are blunted, avoided, or rendered symbolic. International law relies on enforcement that powerful states often refuse to apply. States with influence shield Israel from consequences, watering down resolutions, delaying investigations, or blocking sanctions. Without enforcement, violations become habits. Every policy, from home demolitions to settlement expansion to mass arrests, is framed as necessary for Israel’s security, a narrative that functions as an all-purpose override, rendering legal obligations subordinate to the state’s own definitions of threat. Fragmentation of Palestinian territory, dividing the West Bank into administrative zones and separating Gaza physically and politically, diffuses visibility. Israel remains the occupying power yet presents parts of the territory as autonomous or contested, muddying accountability. Even where investigations occur, outcomes are exculpatory. Crimes become incidents. Violations become operations. Accountability becomes a press release. Starvation is reframed as a logistical problem. Medical collapse is a failure of local governance. Displacement becomes a security precaution. The language rearranges reality, turning deliberate acts into unfortunate circumstances. Legal obligations are treated as negotiable rather than binding, humanitarian duties cast as gestures of goodwill. Ceasefire terms become suggestions. International rulings are declared irrelevant. Shock fades. Emergencies normalize. Violations recur until they feel like weather rather than policy. The occupation survives because it outlives the outrage.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, the world was told there was a ceasefire. The word conjures an image of quiet, of guns falling silent, of a population finally able to breathe. It was a lie. The ceasefire announced in October 2025 has been treated by the Israeli military as a suggestion rather than an instruction. The figures tell the story. Since the ceasefire was announced on eleven October, Israel has reportedly committed at least three hundred and ninety three violations, killing three hundred and thirty nine Palestinians, including more than seventy children, and injuring more than eight hundred and seventy others. Some tallies are even higher, reporting four hundred and ninety seven violations in forty four days. This is a bleak arithmetic in which a ceasefire results in more death, not less. UNICEF offered one of the clearest warnings, stating that at least sixty seven Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza since the agreement came into effect. And then came the deadliest night of all. On the twenty eighth of October, at least one hundred and four Palestinians were killed. One hundred and four lives lost during a supposed period of peace. If this is the observance of a ceasefire, one must ask what its violation would look like.

A ceasefire should allow for humanitarian relief. It should allow wounds to be treated and the starving to be fed. Instead, aid has been restricted and drip fed into Gaza with a degree of control that makes a mockery of the idea of a truce. The World Food Programme reported bringing in more than six thousand seven hundred metric tonnes of food since the ceasefire, averaging around seven hundred and fifty tonnes a day. It sounds hopeful until set against the scale of the need. Even this limited flow has been sabotaged. Israeli authorities have blocked most requests for aid. The United Nations states plainly that Israel has rejected more than one hundred requests since the ceasefire, almost ninety per cent of them from more than thirty local and international organisations. Between ten and twenty one October 2025, seventeen international groups had urgent shipments denied. Ninety four per cent of all rejections were given to international organisations. This is starvation carried out through paperwork. Under the law of occupation, Israel must ensure the population’s access to food, water, healthcare and essential supplies, and where it cannot meet these needs itself, it must allow impartial humanitarian agencies to do so freely, safely and without obstruction. It is obligated to facilitate relief, not ration it into desperation. It must maintain public health systems, not preside over their collapse. These duties are not optional. They are not conditional. They are absolute. Yet Gaza’s hunger deepens. Its hospitals fail. Its people die waiting for shipments that sit, rejected, on the other side of a checkpoint.

The collapse of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a case study in this catastrophe. This United States backed body was, for a long period, the only organisation permitted to deliver aid. It became a single point of failure, and the failure was fatal. A timeline of its work reads like a nightmare. More than two thousand Palestinians were killed in and around its distribution sites according to United Nations figures. Another report noted that hundreds of Palestinians were killed while trying to access aid, and hundreds more died of starvation related conditions during the period when the Foundation was the only group allowed to operate. It is bitterly ironic that such an organisation carried the word humanitarian in its name. It became a trap that the international community allowed to exist.

Step back from all this and the pattern is clear. The numbers reveal a system of dispossession and violence that is both deliberate and escalating. Tens of thousands have been uprooted. Thousands have been imprisoned. Hundreds of communities have been attacked or erased. Land grabs have reached their highest levels in decades, carried out in the name of security or archaeology. In Gaza, the ceasefire has been an illusion, its violations killing hundreds, including scores of children, while aid restrictions have driven a man made famine. United Nations experts noted that attacks continued across all five governorates of Gaza despite the ceasefire, with reports of gunfire, artillery fire and airstrikes. The structure of the occupation remains intact. It may even be stronger. Agreements are signed. The world looks away. Land is taken. Homes fall to dust. Children die. The clock keeps moving and we are all watching