In 2022 alone, 28,208 units were built in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, compared to 22,030 in 2021, an increase of almost 30%. In particular, the advancement of settlement units in East Jerusalem contributed to this unprecedented figure. In 2022, 23,5861 housing units were advanced in East Jerusalem, compared to 4,427 in the West Bank. The advancement, in 2022, in particular of settlements and settlement plans in East Jerusalem is a cause for serious concern. If built, they would disconnect East Jerusalemites from major urban areas in the West Bank, such as Bethlehem and Ramallah, which would have serious implications for Palestinian urban contiguity and pose a grave threat to a viable two-state solution.
As of January 2023, there are 144 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including 12 in East Jerusalem. In total, there are an estimated 622,670 settlers in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, and an additional 220,000 Jewish settlers reside in East Jerusalem. Israeli outposts, which are illegal even under Israeli law, number more than 100 in the West Bank, and their population is difficult to establish. In 2021, settlers constituted 14% of the West Bank population (465,400), while Palestinians constituted 86% (2,814,000). Settlers constitute 4.91TTP3T of the Israeli population.
Since occupying the West Bank in 1967, Israel has misappropriated more than 2 million dunams (200,000 hectares) of land for its own purposes, including building and expanding settlements and paving roads for settlers. Some areas have been officially taken over by the state, others through daily acts of settler violence. These two seemingly unrelated avenues are forms of state violence: the Israeli apartheid regime and its proxies actively aid and abet settler violence as part of a strategy to cement the takeover of Palestinian land. Violent acts include beatings, stone throwing, threats, burning of fields, destruction of trees and crops, theft of crops, damage to houses and cars, blocking of roads, use of live fire and, in rare cases, assassinations. Settlers on so-called farms violently expel Palestinian farmers and herders from their fields and from the pastures and water sources they have used for generations. They initiate violent altercations on a daily basis and use drones to scare flocks of Palestinians into dispersing. State violence - official and otherwise - is part and parcel of Israel's apartheid regime, which aims to create an exclusively Jewish space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Settler attacks against Palestinians are generally not investigated, mainly due to the unwillingness of law enforcement to deter or criminalise such incidents. As Yesh Din reports, between 2005 and 2022, 93% of police investigations into such attacks were closed without indictments. Pogroms in the West Bank in recent years have been carried out with the cooperation of the army and the government.