Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, October 7, 2023 - present
Palestinians forced to flee central Khan Younis, on their way towards al-Mawasi, after the Israeli military issued expulsion orders, June 14, 2025 Photo Credit: Alameddine Sabbah
Introduction
Since Oct. 7th, Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians has accelerated at a rapid pace. From the river to the sea, Israeli forces have been uprooting Palestinians from their homes, crowding them into smaller and smaller areas of Palestine or forcing them out of it altogether. Israel has pushed more than 100,000 Palestinians out of Gaza and displaced nearly all of those survivors within it, in some cases more than a dozen times. Israel’s final solution for Gaza seems to be to kill or expel all Palestinians from the besieged enclave. In the West Bank, Israel has expelled more than 40,000 Palestinians from the Tulkarem, Nur Shams, and Jenin refugee camps in its ongoing attempt to wipe them off the map, while Israeli settlers and soldiers have violently uprooted more than 71 communities from the northern Jordan Valley, east of Ramallah, southeast of Bethlehem and the South Hebron Hills. Meanwhile, Israel has been demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem at the fastest rate in decades, displacing thousands, and they have completely destroyed multiple Palestinian Bedouin villages in Israel, with a dozen more at risk of annihilation. Palestinians are facing displacement and replacement by Jews everywhere between the river and the sea. This is a brief history of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, Oct. 7, 2023-present.
Gaza Strip
Since Oct. 7th, more than 100,000 Palestinians have been pushed out of Gaza. By May 2024, Egyptian authorities had put the figure at 103,769; the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said it was 100,000 while Human Rights Watch reported 110,000. [Awkwardly, Israel’s Channel 12 News stated only 36,000 had left by April 2025].
Most bought $7,000 exit permits from shadowy brokers linked to Egyptian intelligence services. A few thousand injured or sick people and their companions have been allowed to leave by Israel, a tiny fraction of the number that risk imminent death from injury or illness if they are not provided exit permits (1, 2, 3, 4), while a trickle have been permitted out under family reunification schemes.
The student Shahd Safi, who escaped Gaza on Mar. 3, 2024, described to me what it’s like to go from genocide survivor to Barnard College student. “I have to figure out how to cope with the feeling that I will never see Gaza again,” she said. “Every time I hear a plane in the sky I am shaken. My body is waiting for a bomb to drop. I survived the genocide, but not the occupation. My body and mind are still occupied.”
The journalist Abubaker Abed, forced out of Gaza in May 2025, described feelings of constant anguish. “I am a physical survivor, but not an emotional survivor,” he told Democracy Now!. “The images that I took with me from Gaza are still haunting me,” he added. “My whole family is still in Gaza, my friends, my colleagues. And all of them, I’m just thinking about them every single second all day.”
The surviving two million Palestinians who were not displaced out of Gaza have been displaced countless times within it. On Oct. 13, 2023 Israel issued its first mass expulsion order, and within a week, 1.4 million Palestinians had been forced out of their homes. Israel continued to issue expulsion orders for months, forcing out more Palestinians from north Gaza, Bureij, Nuseirat, Khan Yunis and the Netzarim corridor into an area just one third of the Strip. By December, 1.9 million people in Gaza had been forced out of their homes (1, 2, 3).
Palestinians ordered to evacuate Khan Yunis on January 22, 2024, without knowing where to find refuge. Photo Credit: Ghaydaa Kamal Alabadsaa
Then, in May 2024, Israel issued its second mass expulsion order. Just as all eyes were on Rafah, Israel compelled more than a million Palestinians to flee the city. Then Israel flattened it, destroying 90 percent of Rafah’s residential homes.
By August, nearly 90 percent of Gaza had become off-limits to Palestinians, now forced to crowd into tiny enclaves along the southern coast, as if Israel’s goal was to push them into the sea. Maximum land for Jews, minimum land for Palestinians. It was Israel’s strategy in Gaza, the same strategy pursued by nearly every Zionist leader and Israeli Prime Minister since the origins of the movement in the late 19th century.
Then, in the fall, Israel began to implement the so-called General’s Plan, an attempt to empty the north of Palestinians once again through death by starvation or expulsion. Israel had already tried to do this in Oct. 2023, but hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remained. Now the plan was to finish the job. Palestinians were ordered to evacuate Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, the Maghazi camp and elsewhere throughout the late summer and fall of 2024 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Those who remained faced heightened risk of death by starvation or disease, as Israel blocked aid from reaching the north of Gaza for months, starving dozens of children to death (1, 2) . It was “a genocide within a genocide.”
The laundry lists of evacuation orders and counts of displaced peoples do not capture the magnitude of the horror. Ibrahim Yaghi was uprooted in Dec. 2023 from Gaza City and forced to march south when blood splattered all over his face after occupation forces executed a dehydrated elderly man in front of his eyes. Ghaydaa Kamal Alabadsaa had to run for her life in Khan Yunis from tank shells in Jan. 2024 before she saw Wael Safi drop dead from a single Israeli gunshot while he was trying to protect her. Abdullah Hany Daher was displaced six times over the past twenty months and forced to drink salt water and subsist off bread crumbs for days at a time. For months, Abdul Karim Tawfiq woke every morning in Khan Yunis to the soundtrack of Israel’s scorched earth policy in Gaza: mass home demolitions.
Then Donald Trump won the US election and sent his golf buddy and acting Secretary of State, Steve Witkoff, to get a deal done between Israel and Hamas, which he did in Jan. 2025. This put Israel’s round-the-clock expulsions on pause for a few weeks and led to a partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. For the first time in fifteen months, Palestinians could freely roam most of the Gaza Strip in January and February 2025.
This gave Trump a few weeks to workshop a Gaza plan. He caught people off guard during a Feb. 4 press conference in which he said the US would “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip. When asked about who would be able to live in Gaza, Trump said, “I envision world people living there. The world's people. I think you'll make that into an international, unbelievable place."
No doubt, the phrases “world people” and “world’s people” were ambiguous, and so Trump clarified his position in a Feb. 10 Fox News interview when he was asked explicitly if “Palestinians would have the right to return.” “No, they wouldn’t,” he said, adding that Palestinians would be removed from Gaza to “beautiful areas of the Middle East,” including Jordan and Egypt. Meanwhile, the US would take over Gaza and partition it out to countries like Saudi Arabia for real estate development projects under Israeli military supervision.
In the following days, it was made known to the US President his proposal amounted to a crime against humanity, so Trump clarified on Feb. 21 that he would "recommend," but not enforce the plan, further walking back the idea in March, saying that “nobody is expelling Palestinians from Gaza.” But then, in May, Trump reiterated his desire to take over the Gaza Strip and "make it a freedom zone,” while his aides told the UK’s Independent in early July that “President Trump has made clear” the plan to ethnically cleanse two million Palestinians from Gaza “is most definitely still active.”
Meanwhile, Israel understood it had a green light from the White House to move forward on the final solution for Gaza. By March, Israel re-imposed a total blockade on Gaza, resumed its aerial onslaught and began issuing dozens more expulsion orders, including expulsion orders to areas which were themselves no-go zones. Since March, Israel has displaced over 714,000 people Palestinians again into an ever-shrinking space (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) with 85 percent of the Gaza Strip off limits to Palestinians at the time of writing.
Israel continues to ban nearly all aid from entering Gaza except that parceled out by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). This US-Israeli entity distributes boxes of snacks at what Haaretz has called “killing fields” that double as aid distribution sites. The installations act as mouse traps, forcing Palestinians to move south towards the sites to avert death by starvation, where they queue overnight for a box of snacks, waiting for the break of dawn. Then, as they approach the aid, they are slaughtered by the dozens nearly ever day with machine guns and tank shells. “Our form of communication is gunfire," as one soldier described the daily aid massacres.
Three of the four points are located close to the border with Egypt to crowd Palestinians in the south, where they shall await their eventual deportation orders if they are not killed by starvation, dehydration, disease or incineration beforehand.
All the while, Israeli leaders are working as fast as they can to make the Gaza Strip unlivable so, when the time is ripe, all of its Palestinians will have no choice but leave. To this end, Israeli authorities are paying $1,500 to “any private contractor working in Gaza with engineering equipment” for each home they demolish. Israel’s official policy seems to be to destroy every single structure, every home, every apartment building, every school and every hospital.
Indeed, this has been Israel’s plan since mid-Oct. 2023 when the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy—an Israeli think tank founded and led by former defense and security officials—urged the Israeli government to take advantage of the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip” and ethnically cleanse Palestinians to Egypt. A week later, Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence also recommended forcible expulsion for all of Gaza’s Palestinians to north Sinai. Israel would establish tent cities there and introduce “a sterile zone” stretching a few kilometers from the Gaza-Egypt border to the tent cities.
The plan to expel all Palestinians from Gaza could not move forward without a willing partner, though, and that’s what Israel got with Trump. Since his re-election, Israel has dusted off its failed depopulation scheme, establishing a “Voluntary Emigration Directorate” to empty Gaza of Palestinians by force and never allow them to return. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is branding the effort as the “Trump plan,” framing the forcible displacement as a gesture of benevolence. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich seemed convinced in February 2025 that “emigration from Gaza will begin within weeks,” although it’s still unclear what gave him so much optimism, since, at the time of writing, no credible reports have surfaced of a country willing to partner with Israel on the final solution.
Trump and Netanyahu are concocting another plan, according to unnamed sources, to hand Gaza over to four Arab states, including the UAE and Egypt, while exiling the Hamas leadership. Israel would then incentivize flight through “relocation packages” worth $9,000 per person, while those “wishing to emigrate” will be absorbed by several unnamed countries. Those who remain in the Gaza Strip will be forced into a concentration camp, what Israeli leaders are calling a “Humanitarian City,” built on top of the ruins of Rafah.
The Boston Consulting Group, hired to model out the cost of the crime against humanity, forecasted that some 500,000 people, or a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza, would leave, three-quarters of whom would never return. They also estimated the cost of forced expulsion of Palestinians to be $23,000 cheaper, per Palestinian, than the costs of providing support to them in Gaza during reconstruction.
Israel and the US seem to believe they can decide the fate of Gaza’s Palestinians without any Palestinians in the room, and they can plan to “resettle” them without figuring out which country will partner with Israel on Gaza’s final solution.
More recently, US and Israeli leaders seem to believe they can dictate the terms of a 60-day pause on the genocide for an exchange of prisoners of war, only to return to genocide in two months time. It’s unclear at the moment whether or not the Hamas leadership will agree to anything that doesn’t irreversibly lead to a permanent end to the genocidal war on Gaza, or whether they will be forced to capitulate to ensure millions of starving Palestinians get the food, water and medicine they desperately need to survive (1, 2 ). Starvation, so it seems, is Israel’s most effective weapon of war.
West Bank
Since Oct. 7th, 2023, Israel’s ethnic cleansing in the West Bank has proceeded at its fastest pace in decades and has been guided by two principles, both of which have been at the core of the Zionist project for the better part of a century. The first principle is maximum land, minimum Palestinians, what the Nazis called Lebensraum. To this end, in Areas C and B, which constitute some 80% of the West Bank, Israel has been crowding more and more Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas. The second principle is the elimination of the status of Palestinian refugees as refugees. To this end, Israel has sought to wipe the Palestinian refugee camps in Area A off the physical map and wipe the Palestinian refugee issue off the proverbial map. Let’s dive in.
Areas C and B
Since Oct. 7, Israeli settlers backed by the Israeli military have forcibly uprooted thousands of Palestinians in some 72 communities from the West Bank’s most sparsely populated areas, including the northern Jordan Valley, east of Ramallah, southeast of Bethlehem, and the South Hebron Hills (1, 2, 3), nearly all of which lie in Area C. The army and the settlers, who carry weapons, dress in military garb and feign status as soldiers, carry out violent raids together. They cut down trees, destroy property, steal livestock and conduct arrests. They push, punch, and shoot at Palestinians with live ammunition and with near total impunity. The result is that Palestinian communities flee for their lives and are forced into smaller and smaller areas of the West Bank.
The ethnic cleansing has been accompanied by the confiscation of large swaths of grazing and agricultural land and the establishment of 41 new frontier outposts, many built on or near the ruins of the communities uprooted. The settlers even boasted before a Knesset subcommittee they had taken over 700,000 dunams (173,000 acres) of land in the West Bank, celebrating theft and murder as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecies while invoking Jewish law as evidence of their righteousness.
Many even regard the ethnic cleansing of Palestine as a day job. I met one such setter on Sep. 30, 2023, Moshe Sharvit, while he was busy at work terrorizing his Palestinian neighbors. Every day, Moshe trespasses on their property, entering their garden with his morning coffee and taunting them with a grin. He dispatches his drone over their flocks to scare them into running away. He drives his tractor over their cultivated fields and sets his dogs against them. He also physically assaults his neighbors, as he did in Oct. 2023, prompting the Israeli military to arrest his neighbors. Moshe, like many other settlers, terrorizes Palestinians for a living until they abandon their homes.
Since Oct. 7, thousands of settlers like Moshe have gone on a criminal frenzy. Within just weeks of Oct. 7, Israeli settlers had already ethnically cleansed 545 Palestinians from 13 communities in the South Hebron Hills, the area east of Ramallah towards Jericho, the Jordan Valley, and Nablus.
In Wadi al-Siq, for example, east of Ramallah, the armed settlers and reservists fired one shot into the air and told the villagers that they would kill any Bedouins still around in an hour. Then they entered homes and assaulted people, injuring thirty. The villagers ran, according to Abu Bashar, a member of the community, fleeing with little more than the clothes on their back. “We have no food. No water. No electricity. Nowhere to sleep. We have nothing,” Abu Bashar told al-Jazeera.
The pogroms driving Palestinians from their homes have continued on a weekly if not daily basis throughout the West Bank for the better part of two years.
In al-Qanub, north of Hebron, Israeli settlers burned down the homes of the Palestinians. Abu Jamal told 972 Magazine the “the settlers came down to us, grabbed me, and said we had an hour to leave the village.” He added “about 10 settlers came, poured gasoline, and set my house on fire. Seven people lived there … everything caught fire. They also burned my son’s house and stole all my sheep and my livelihood.” Abu Jamal was 67 years old at the time and has had to rebuild his life from scratch.
In recent months, settlers have embraced a new strategy: erecting outposts inside Palestinian villages. In May 2025, settlers who had been harassing Palestinian Bedouins in Mughayyir al-Deir erected an outpost within 100 meters of the village, causing the entire community to flee out of fear for their lives. Some tried to return and were met with live ammunition. In July 2025, the hundreds of Palestinian Mu'arajat were uprooted after Israeli vigilantes, who had been violently harassing them for years, set up an outpost inside their village. A similar fate will likely await them if they try to return.
In other cases, expulsions are the gradual outcome of months or years of intimidation, harassment and violence. The 250 Palestinians of Zanuta, a traditional herding community in the Jordan Valley, gradually left their village due to the constant settler attacks and harassment, including the violent assault of a 77 year-old Palestinian shepherd.
The settler attacks are accompanied by ongoing home demolitions intended to crowd Palestinians into smaller areas to make way for Jewish development. More than 680 Palestinians have been displaced in 2025 to date through home demolitions in Area C, more than double the corresponding period in 2024. In Khalet al-Dabaa, in Masafer Yatta, for example, the Israeli military destroyed 80 percent of the village on May 5, 2025, and then it returned on June 11 to demolish everything that remained: tents, caves and homes. The residents were expelled again, left without shelter or water under the scorching sun.
Israel’s goal is to ethnically cleanse the 60 percent of the West Bank known as “Area C,” including the Jordan Valley and border with Jordan. Every Israeli leader since 1967 has insisted this land is part of Israel, and every Israeli leader has taken concrete steps to cement this area as part of Israel.
In the past twenty years, successive Israeli governments have doubled down on the policy, preventing Palestinians in Areas A and B from moving to Area C, demolishing Palestinian homes at an accelerating rate and encouraging settler violence. 70 percent of Area C is completely off limits to Palestinians, who have been allocated 1 percent of the area for development. That’s why Palestinians in Area C are 100 times more likely to have demolition orders on their homes than be granted permits to build them. A great leap forward was made in December 2022 when Israel’s most extreme settlers joined Netanyahu’s government, transforming the ethnic cleansing of Area C into unofficial government policy.
Israel is also expanding into the semi-rural areas constituting some 22 percent of the West Bank known as Area B. Israeli leaders are planning to build a “Samaria National Park” next to, or perhaps on top of, Sebastia's existing archeological site. In July 2024, The Israeli military seized land in the town to construct a military installation at the summit of an ancient hilltop in the area. “Now, soldiers enter the village daily – and with the clear intention of killing,” Sebastia Mayor Mohammed Azim told al-Jazeera. “The military is aiming to make life unbearable for the residents here,” he added. “We will resist construction – peacefully, of course. The landowners will not give up their land.”
Israeli leaders are also weaponizing nature reserves to confiscate Palestinian land and confine Palestinians into smaller and smaller zones within Area B. In December 2024, for example, Israeli security forces demolished eight residential buildings under construction in an area classified as a “natural reserve” near Bethlehem. This came after Israel issued a military order seizing control of the reserve from the Palestinian Authority (PA) last July. Israeli settlers have since moved in, pushing the front lines of the ethnic cleansing operations deeper into Palestine.
Israel is depopulating Area C and encroaching on Area B of the West Bank, house by house, village by village, a process that has been ongoing since Israel conquered the territory in 1967, but one which has accelerated at a rapid pace in the past few years.
Area A
This leaves us with the remaining 18 percent of the West Bank, known as Area A. These are mostly urban centers where Palestinians are already concentrated. Thus, Israel’s strategy is not just to concentrate them further but to ensure they’ll never return to their homes in what is now Israel. They are doing this by trying to destroy the idea of a Palestinian refugee.
Recall that, in the 1948 War, Zionist militias that evolved into the Israeli military expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in what became Israel. Thus the Palestinian refugees are a constant reminder of Israel’s original sin and the prospects of reckoning with it. More than 270,000 of them found refuge in the West Bank, where they settled into more than a dozen refugee camps. Today, about a third of the West Bank, or more than a million Palestinians are registered as refugees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). They have the right to return to Israel under international law and UN Resolution 194, but Israel has denied them that right for 77 years.
It’s that right that Israel is trying to crush in Area A, something they’ve been trying to do for 58 years ever since they occupied Gaza and the West Bank. Throughout the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Israeli leaders offered carrots and sticks to Palestinian refugees if they were to give up their refugee status and abandon the camps, including job offers to give up their refugee cards or home demolitions when they declined to do so.
In the past year, Israel has revived its efforts to erase the physical geography of the Palestinian refugee camps. In Aug. 2024, a large Israeli force raided Jenin and its refugee camp, bombing residential areas, besieging hospitals, and demolishing homes, roads and water, sewage and telecommunications infrastructure. At least 43 families were forced to flee, fearing for their lives. Meanwhile, 70 percent of the city's streets were torn apart and more than 80 percent of the city and camp, some 20,000 people, had been cut off from water. Israel’s aim was not precision but total devastation, a prelude to darker days to come.
In Jan. 2025, when Israel was compelled by the Trump administration to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, it got a green light to launch a massive military operation in the northern West Bank instead. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz declared: “40,000 Palestinians have so far evacuated from the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps, and are now empty of residents. UNRWA activity in the camps has also been stopped,” At the time of writing, none of them have been allowed to return home in what amounts to the largest expulsion order in the West Bank since 1967 (1, 2. 3).
In the Jenin Camp, for example, drones flew overhead, ordering residents out. “We weren’t allowed to take anything with us—not even our documents,” a resident of the Nur Shams camp named Issam told Doctors without Borders. The only warning received was: ‘Get out.' “Displacement is suffering, a silent anguish, a deep pain in the heart for everyone.”
Since January, Israeli forces have remained inside the refugee camps, demolishing homes, roads and civilian infrastructure. In July 2025, Al Jazeera reported Israeli occupation forces had completely demolished or were in the process of demolishing 1,030 homes in the Jenin camp, 685 in the Tulkarem Camp and 225 in the Nur Shams camp. Soldiers have been laying explosives in homes, roads, buildings and cars, while buldozers work round the clock, seeking to bring an end to human life in the camps by reducing everything to rubble.
Anyone who tries to return to their homes is shot at, according to a June 25 OCHA report. As Katz put it back in January, “I instructed the IDF to prepare for a long stay in the camps that were cleared, for the coming year, and not allow residents to return.” Israel’s goal is to wipe the camps off the map. It’s the Gaza strategy on full display in the West Bank.
If, in the 2000s and 2010s, Israel embraced the Dahiya doctrine, or mass murder and collective punishment of civilians as a method to deter armed resistance, in the 2020s, Israel has embraced a new military doctrine, not disproportionate harm to non-combatants but the total annihilation of everything sustaining human life.
In parallel, Israel has sought to dismantle UNRWA itself. Israeli politicians believe if UNRWA ceases to exist, then so do the Palestinian refugees, a belief grounded not in international law but in the figments of Israel’s genocidal imagination. Throughout 2024, Israeli leaders claimed UNRWA was infiltrated by Hamas and that its rank and file participated in the Oct. 7 attacks. It has promised the organization would not be part of the “morning after.” On Oct. 28, 2024, Israel’s parliament adopted legislation banning the agency in Israel and forbidding Israeli officials from having any contact with UNRWA representatives. And, ever since March 2, Israel has effectively banned UNRWA from distributing aid in Gaza.
Israel is trying to dissolve the refugee issue with brute force. But, if history is any guide, Palestinian refugees will not give up their right to return and they will not abandon the Palestine cause.
Jerusalem
If Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestinians by the city in Gaza and by the village in the West Bank, it’s doing so by the neighborhood and home in Jerusalem. The operations are not carried out with warplanes, tanks or drones, but through administrative decree, heavily armed security forces and armored bulldozers.
When Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, it annexed 70 square kilometers of it into Jerusalem, calling it “East Jerusalem.” Israel wanted the land but not the people living on it. Through kafkaesque zoning laws, round-the-clock home demolitions and settlement expansion, Israel has sought to push Palestinians out of the city to create, maintain and enlarge a Jewish supermajority.
Israel’s primary strategy for pushing Palestinians out of Jerusalem is its building permit regime. Since 1967, 99% of government-initiated housing units constructed in East Jerusalem have been built for Israelis, leaving about 1% for Palestinians even though they constituted 100% of the population when Israeli occupied the territory. From Nov. 2023 to Oct. 2024, Israeli authorities have been moving forward with plans to construct over 20,000 housing units in new or existing Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem alone.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Palestinian applications for building permits are rejected, compelling Palestinians to choose between forced displacement and “illegal” construction. And, every so often, the municipality passes new regulations, tightening the noose around the Palestinians even more. Last year, Israel approved the fewest Palestinian building plans in a decade.
The result is that a huge percentage of homes in East Jerusalem could be demolished with the stroke of a pen, and many hundreds are every year. In 2024, Israel destroyed 181 homes displacing many hundreds, including Abu Diab, a Palestinian researcher, community leader and advocate for Palestinian rights who had lived there for 35 years with 9 family members, including his spouse and married children. "I was born in this house in 1962, before the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem," Abu Diab told a European Commission representative. “In 1988 I asked Israeli authorities for a permit to expand the house as my family was growing. Instead, I got a demolition order.” His crime was that he was born in a neighborhood coveted by Jews.
Israel’s home demolition regime is complemented by hostile takeovers. In Aug. 2024, armed Israeli settlers associated with the 501(c)(3) charity organization Ateret Cohanim seized a Palestinian-owned five-floor residential building in East Jerusalem. The thieves were protected by Israeli security forces who brutally assaulted members of the Shehadeh family as they witnessed their own home taken over by criminals.
Israel
In Israel, Palestinian life is confined to areas constituting less than 7 percent of the land of the country. As for the remaining 93 percent of the land of Israel, 80 percent is under the control of Jewish regional councils and Jewish towns and villages that in effect do not sell property or land to Palestinian Arabs because they are deemed “an inappropriate fit” to live in such places, which is why 99.6 percent of the people living on this land are Jewish. 13 percent of the land of Israel, a majority of which was taken from Palestinian refugees, belongs to the The Jewish National Fund, whose mission is to acquire land in Israel and Palestine and develop it for Jews.
Meanwhile, Palestinian Arab municipal boundaries were drawn and Israel’s zoning laws were developed for the purpose of restricting Palestinian natural growth. Over half a million Palestinian citizens of Israel are denied permits to build houses on their own land, while 100,000 demolition and eviction orders have been issued to them in recent years. The state simultaneously invests in new Jewish towns and housing projects to block Palestinian growth, such as the Seven Star Settlements.
The native inhabitants of Israel’s southern desert, about 150,000 Palestinian Bedouins who live in so-called “unrecognized villages,” are not facing restrictions on their growth, they are facing total annihilation. In May 2024, Israeli forces expelled 300 residents of Wadi al-Khalil, an “unrecognized” Palestinian Bedouin village in the Negev or Naqab. They were forced to relocate to Um al-Batin, another Bedouin town where residents are already suffering from overcrowding. “This means pitting us […] against them,” Jabr Abu Assa told Amnesty International, whose home was demolished by Israel. “This means forcing us and them to have to fight over the scarce resources that are barely enough for them.” Abu Assa added that neither he nor any of the residents whose homes were demolished have received compensation.“We’ll do what the residents of al-Araqib did: we’ll set up a tent on the ruins of our bulldozed homes, we have no other choice,” another resident said.
In November 2024, Israel displaced the 400 residents of another Palestinian village in Israel’s southern desert, Umm al-Hiran. In the preceding week, residents were forced to dismantle their own homes to avoid paying exorbitant fees for the state to demolish them. When Israeli forces arrived, the only building left standing in the village was the mosque, which they destroyed, as Israeli drones and helicopters hovered overhead while seven bulldozers demolished all that remained.
The Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages in the Negev, a civil society organization elected by 150,000 citizens in 46 unrecognized Bedouin villages, said 14 villages, home to 9,000 Bedouin, are at risk of destruction.The Bedouin village of Ras Jrabah in the Naqab is one of them, where over 500 Palestinian citizens of Israel face expulsion to make way for the expansion of the Jewish city of Dimona.
From the River to the Sea, Israel is tightening the noose around the Palestinians, suffocating life until the situation becomes so unbearable they are forced out.
Conclusion
The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was not a historical event, or even two or three historical events. It’s been an ongoing process, a structure, part of the logic of “the elimination of the native,” as Patrick Wolfe famously put it, that is designed to drive Palestinians out of historic Palestine. The 1948 and 1967 expulsions are well known, but the process continued from 1949-1965, as we’ve documented here on Palestine Nexus, and it continued from 1968-1993, as we’ve documented here, and it’s been continuing since 1993 to the present day, the last 21 months of which we have documented here. The methods of expulsion, the nature of the violence and the weapons used to perpetrate it vary significantly by political geography. But the underlying objective does not: a Palestine without any Palestinians in it.