Press Releases
(Bethlehem, 10 April 2026)
The first months of 2026 in Palestine have witnessed a sharp intensification of Israeli colonization, displacement, and oppression. The Israeli regime maintains its genocide in the Gaza Strip, while accelerating land confiscation, forced displacement, and suppression across the West Bank and Jerusalem. States’ inaction and complicity have enabled and sustained the Israeli regime’s crimes, permitting the acceleration of enclaving, which further undermines the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights to self-determination and return.
The Gaza Strip, under the continued absence of a true ceasefire, is undergoing an intensified process of Israeli enclavement. Israeli forces continue bombardment and drone strikes, targeting densely populated areas, tents, and shelters where more than 1.7 million forcibly displaced Palestinians have sought refuge. Since the announcement of the “ceasefire” in October 2025, 689 people have been killed and 1,860 injured, a pattern of sustained Israeli oppression that functions to eliminate and compress Palestinians into shrinking enclaves.
At the same time, the Israeli regime has deepened its siege as part of a process of “de-healthification,” marked by the blocking of food, fuel, and medical supplies, the collapse of hospitals, and severe restrictions on electricity and clean water. Humanitarian aid is severely restricted, with essential supplies blocked or allowed in only at minimal levels. Aid restrictions have tightened with the Israeli regime’s banning of UNRWA, the primary UN-mandated agency providing essential services to Palestinian refugees, from operating and delivering aid in Gaza since March 2025.
This combined Israeli policies of bombardment, siege, and aid restriction function as mechanisms of enclavement, through which Gaza itself is being restructured. Trump’s 20-point plan and its “Board of Peace” have further shielded the Israeli regime from accountability, removing what little international pressure remained and enabling the continuation of genocide in Gaza. Additionally, Israeli-imposed buffer zones inside the Gaza Strip, known as the “yellow line,” form an enclave within the enclave. This shifting “yellow line” places approximately 58% of Gaza under Israeli control, while Palestinians are confined to the remaining 42%. These areas are systematically emptied of Palestinians, converted into closed military zones, and structured to foreclose return.
In the West Bank and Jerusalem, colonization has accelerated at an unprecedented rate in accordance with the Israeli regime’s Decisive Plan, further advancing the enclavement. The Israeli regime demolished 312 Palestinian residential and agricultural structures in the first six weeks of 2026. During the same period, more than 1,700 Palestinians have been displaced due to Israeli policies and colonizer attacks, already surpassing the total displaced for all of 2025. In Jerusalem alone, the Israeli regime carried out 419 arrests and killed at least 6 Palestinians amid ongoing raids and intensified repression.
Alongside home demolitions and court-sanctioned colonizer takeovers, colonizer attacks constitute a central driver of Palestinian dispossession and displacement, supported and protected by the Israeli forces, which accelerates the processes of fragmentation and enclavement. Between late February and late March, more than 150 colonizer attacks have been recorded across approximately 90 Palestinian communities, an average of over six per day, resulting in killings, injuries, property destruction, and forced displacement. These attacks constitute an integral component of the Israeli regime’s ongoing colonization.
What is unfolding across Palestine is not a series of isolated crimes. It is a coordinated system of spatial apartheid, now further reinforced through escalating legislative, suppression, and administrative measures, designed to fragment Palestinian communities, sever territorial continuity, and confine populations into isolated and controlled enclaves. The Israeli enclaving of Palestinians serves to dismantle the foundations of Palestinian collective, political, economic, and social life, and ultimately dismantle the Palestinian people’s right to self- determination.
And yet states refuse to act, despite widespread condemnation of these actions and, more recently, the newly approved death penalty law for Palestinian prisoners. In order to be effective and deter Israeli crimes, condemnations such as those made by the European Union and several states, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada, must be accompanied by practical measures. Immediate action is required to end Israeli crimes and states’ complicity: comprehensive sanctions, including the immediate suspension of arms transfers and the severing of economic and diplomatic agreements.