Press Releases
(Bethlehem, 30 July 2026)
The Israeli regime and its armed colonizers are intensifying their campaign of violence, displacement, and colonial expansion across the West Bank. The actions of individual colonizers, or groups, are a continuum of the Israeli regime’s efforts to impose the Decisive Plan: land confiscation, ethnic cleansing and enclavement of the West Bank. Colonizers’ attacks, killing and destruction are an integral part of the Israeli regime’s colonial expansion and not the extremist actions of a radical few. As such, comprehensive sanctions against the Israeli regime - not just the sanctioning of individuals - are required to end these ongoing crimes.
In September 2025, 455 dunams, including the land of the village of Tell, were declared “Israeli state land.” Last Friday, colonizers raided the village of Tell, southwest of Nablus, opening fire, killing four Palestinians. Two colonizers were also killed. After these colonizer attacks, Smotrich declared that the colonizers “are the protective wall of the State of Israel. We will continue to strengthen and honor them for their steadfast stand for our existence in the Land of Israel against Arab terrorism.” Echoing Smotrich and other Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the “security” minister, demanded that the Israeli forces “erase from the air and through D9 [bulldozers] the homes” of Palestinians and exact whatever “price” they saw fit.
In the following days, Israeli forces and hundreds of colonizers were mobilized under the call and systematic pogroms were launched against Palestinian communities across the West Bank; carrying out coordinated raids, shootings, assaults, mass detentions, and widespread destruction of Palestinian property, including homes, mosques, vehicles, agricultural equipment, and farmland. Over the past weekend alone, Israeli forces detained approximately 130 Palestinians as part of an ongoing campaign of mass arrests targeting Palestinian communities. The village of Tell and the city of Nablus remain under Israeli siege and closure.
Recent decisions to initiate large-scale land registration in Area C in order to declare it “Israeli state land” and to permit Israeli colonizers to purchase land in Areas A and B pave the way for colonizers to actualize the land confiscation through force, raids and killing. The Israeli regime then steps in under the pretense of responding to “terrorism,” thereby implementing the Decisive Plan to expand their colonial control of ethnically cleansed Palestinian land. With the green light from the Israeli regime, colonizers have established at least six new colonial outposts while expanding several existing ones in the last week, after Netanyahu ordered the establishment and “legalization” of colonies across the West Bank.
Since the beginning of 2026, 76 Palestinians, including 18 children, were killed in attacks by Israeli forces and colonizers, already surpassing the total killings recorded during all of 2025. According to OCHA, between January 2025 and June 2026, 2,402 structures, including Palestinian property, livelihoods and essential infrastructure, were damaged or destroyed. More than 2,300 Palestinians were displaced from colonizer attacks and access restrictions alone. Framing these attacks as the work of individual rogue actors obscures the reality in which the regime and colonizers' actions are deliberate, mutually reinforcing and working towards the long-standing goal of “maximum land with minimum Palestinians."
Statements of condemnation are meaningless as long as states remain complicit in the ongoing genocide and colonization of Palestine through the political, economic, and military relations that sustain Israeli settler colonialism. The imposition of individual sanctions against specific colonizers or their affiliated entities, as well as measures banning imports from so-called "illegal settlements only," fail to confront the colonial system that produces and sustains this goal. Such measures reinforce the misleading justification that these crimes are committed by isolated extremists acting independently of the Israeli regime.
Genuine accountability requires measures directed at the entire apparatus responsible for dispossession, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and colonial expansion, not merely its most visible perpetrators. The international community and especially states must move beyond symbolic measures and uphold their legal obligations by imposing sanctions on the Israeli regime as a whole. Without confronting the structures that enable colonization and displacement, the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime’s crimes – fortified by its colonizer population – will continue to escalate with impunity.