Israel Is Preparing To Annex The Whole Of The West Bank Right Now
Yesterday, Netanyahu flew to Hebron in a flak jacket and promised to destroy entire neighbourhoods and build settlements on the ruins in a military operation larger than we’ve seen in decades.
Good day, Aontacht readers,
And the spectacle is back to where we started…Palestine.
You’ve probably already seen what happened yesterday morning at a checkpoint near the Yehuda Junction in Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Two Palestinian men, both locals in their twenties, opened fire on Israeli soldiers. Two Israeli Genocide Force soldiers were killed and five others were injured. The two Palestinians were shot dead. Within hours, before the bodies had been moved and before any investigation had concluded anything, Benjamin Netanyahu had flown to Hebron wearing a flak jacket and was standing in front of cameras making promises that had nothing to do with what had just happened and everything to do with what he has wanted to do for a very long time.
Watch: Netanyahu announces that after Gaza he will transfer the war to the West Bank.
He ordered Hebron sealed immediately. He instructed the IGF to prepare for a full lockdown across the entire West Bank. He promised to destroy the neighbourhoods where the attackers lived, to go house by house, to demolish homes, to evacuate residents, and to conduct a military operation ‘unlike any seen since the Six-Day War.’ And then, in case anyone was still in any doubt about what any of this was actually about, he said the quiet part out loud: ‘We are going to destroy the terror infrastructures, and we are going to build the settlement infrastructures.’
There it is. A shooting as pretext. Annexation as policy. Netanyahu has been waiting for a moment like this, and now that it has arrived, he is moving with the speed of a man who has had the plan ready for some time.
resistance is not terrorism.
Before we go any further, let us be precise about the legal and moral framework here, because the Western media will not be. Under international law, an occupied people has the right to armed resistance occupation. The UN General Assembly has affirmed this principle repeatedly, and the right of self-determination explicitly includes the right to struggle against colonial and foreign domination by all necessary means. The two men who died at that checkpoint were members of a population living under a military regime that has stolen their land, restricted their movement, demolished their homes, and subjected them and their families to daily violence for generations. They attacked soldiers manning a checkpoint that is itself an instrument of the occupation. Whether you approve of their tactics or not, the legal position is unambiguous: resistance to occupation is not terrorism. It is a recognised right under international law, and calling it terrorism is a political choice, not a legal description.
Israel calls everyone it kills a terrorist. It called the protesters in Gaza terrorists. It called the journalists it shot dead terrorists. It called the aid workers it bombed terrorists. It called the activists on the Freedom Flotilla terrorists. Ben-Gvir, who is currently sitting as National Security Minister in the Israeli government and who last week called for thirty to forty Palestinians to be killed every night, was quick to respond to yesterday’s shooting by calling for Israel to take full control of the West Bank entirely. This is the man Israel calls a nationalist. The rest of the world should be clearer about what he is.
Last night, while Netanyahu was still making his televised promises, the IGF began operations in Hebron under cover of darkness. Bulldozers demolished a Palestinian building. Raids were conducted across multiple neighbourhoods. Residents were dragged from their homes. The Ibrahimi Mosque was shut and its staff expelled, leaving worshippers unable to perform Friday prayers. I will include video. The footage does not require commentary, only distribution.
Watch: Last night in Hebron and across the West Bank, residents were forcibly removed from their homes. This is what Israeli terror looks like.
the annexation hiding in plain sight.
The lockdown of the West Bank is not a security measure in any meaningful sense. It is a step in a process that has been unfolding for years and accelerating under the cover of the genocide in Gaza, and it has been coordinated, openly and without embarrassment, with the United States. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has confirmed that settlement expansion in the West Bank is being carried out with, in his own words, ‘full coordination and full backing’ from the Trump administration, and that all actions in the West Bank have been cleared with Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Ambassador Mike Huckabee. This is not a rogue government acting unilaterally. This is a client state implementing a policy with the explicit approval of its patron.
The logic of what Israel is doing is not complicated once you accept what it is actually trying to achieve. If you can declare a full closure of the entire West Bank in response to a single shooting, you can do so whenever the political conditions make it useful. You can strangle the Palestinian economy on demand. You can prevent farmers from reaching their land, students from reaching their schools, patients from reaching hospitals. You can make life so unbearable, so relentlessly, systematically unbearable, that people leave. It has happened in other parts of Palestine already, look at Gaza.
This is ethnic cleansing carried out not with gas chambers but with checkpoints, closures, and bulldozers, and it has been underway in one form or another since 1948, and it is now, in 2026, in its most accelerated and least disguised phase.
The UN described yesterday’s lockdown as ‘yet another episode in a never-ending stream of suffocating measures making life more and more unbearable for Palestinians.’ The OHCHR noted that the closures ‘severely restrict Palestinians’ freedom of movement, access to basic services and livelihoods.’ The Secretary-General expressed being ‘extremely alarmed.’ These are the same formulations the UN has been using for three years, and they will produce the same result they have always produced, which is nothing, because the United States will veto any resolution with teeth and the arms will keep flowing regardless of what any statement says.
Since October 2023, over 75,000 Palestinians have been killed across Gaza and the West Bank. In the West Bank alone, 2,060 settler attacks have been recorded in 2026. The world knows. It has always known. And it has chosen, with great consistency and complete deliberateness, to do nothing that would actually interrupt the process, because interrupting the process would mean interrupting the relationship with Israel, and the relationship with Israel is worth more to Washington and its allies than Palestinian lives have ever been. It’s that simple and it’s that obvious.
Netanyahu stood in Hebron yesterday in a flak jacket and told the world that he is going to destroy the terror infrastructure and build the settlement infrastructure. This is the Israeli prime minister, indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, announcing in public that he intends to use a shooting as the pretext for accelerating the annexation of occupied territory. The Western governments that claim to support a two-state solution, the ones that have been supporting it rhetorically for thirty years while doing nothing to prevent the settlement expansion that makes it impossible, will issue their statements of concern. The EU will convene an emergency meeting. The UN will add another entry to the record. And tomorrow the bulldozers will still be in Hebron.
This is not a failure of the international community to respond to a crisis. It is the international community responding exactly as it was designed to respond, which is to say: with words, and without consequences, and on behalf of the people with the power to ensure there are none.
And on that thought, I will let you go.
