Israel reopens West Bank settlement as expansion accelerates despite international opposition

Thirty families arrived at Kadim on a Thursday morning in late August, their cars flying blue and white flags as they wound through the occupied West Bank toward a hilltop settlement that had sat empty for two decades. Some towed trailers stacked with furniture and building materials. They came under military escort, riding what Israeli officials described as a wave of Jewish nationalism—a deliberate reversal of a 2005 government decision to evacuate the settlement as part of a broader disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank.

Kadim's reopening marks the final chapter of a larger reversal. Three other settlements evacuated in 2005—Ganim, Sanur, and Homesh—have already been formally reopened and populated. But these four are merely the visible tip of a much larger expansion. Since taking power in late 2022, Israel's government has approved more than one hundred new settlements across the West Bank, including nineteen in the northern region around Jenin. The pace has accelerated sharply as October elections approach, with settlement advocates racing to establish facts on the ground before voters decide the government's future.

At the opening ceremony, Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, flanked by the Justice Minister, the Speaker of the Knesset, and regional settler leaders, framed the return as a historical correction. Using the Biblical term for the northern West Bank, he declared the expulsion from two decades prior a crime now remedied. One settler council head vowed that families would one day return to Gaza as well. Journalists were barred from entering the settlement to witness the event or speak to the new arrivals.

But the story unfolding on the ground tells a different narrative. A Palestinian vegetable farmer, born fifty-three years earlier in the house where he still lives, watched Kadim being built as a boy, then watched it emptied by government order two decades later. He remembered coexistence—settlers and Palestinians living separate but adjacent lives. Now, as the settlement returns, his fear is palpable. He spoke of bypass roads where Israeli forces demolished Palestinian shops and businesses, of nephews driven from their citrus and vegetable plots with warnings never to return. His family had already been displaced once, fleeing Haifa during the 1948 war. "There's no more displacement left in me," he said, his voice carrying the weight of accumulated loss. "We're living with a sense of resignation. It's a life of fear."

Nearby, at a new settlement called Emek Dotan opened just days before Kadim's reopening, a teacher named Samer Jaber watched the transformation from his home in an adjacent Palestinian hamlet. First came the bulldozers, then the caravans lifted into place. But the harassment began before most families had even moved in. Groups of settlers stood outside his house filming him, his wife, his children—sometimes at two or three in the morning, shining powerful floodlights through every window. They attempted to enter homes. They filmed residents going about ordinary life. Samer, partially blind and injured, began stacking concrete blocks to seal one side of his house. "Fear dominates everything," he said. "We are completely defenceless."

The physical transformation of the landscape has been equally swift and brutal. A café where the journalist had sat drinking coffee weeks earlier now stood as rubble, demolished along with dozens of Palestinian shops and businesses along the main road. Simultaneously, two new Israeli military bases are under rapid construction around Jenin, their concrete walls topped with watchtowers and barbed wire. Most significantly, a military outpost is being built on seized Palestinian land beside Jenin Refugee Camp—the first Israeli military installation constructed on land under full Palestinian Authority control since the Oslo Accords of 1993. The Israeli military evacuated thousands of residents from the refugee camp before occupying it in 2025.

The Palestinian Authority Governor for Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Rub, expressed alarm that the land seizures around the refugee camp signal a plan to house settlers there, fragmenting the Palestinian city much as has happened in Hebron and Jerusalem. He described the two decades without settlers as "bliss." Now, he said, residents live in what he called a hell of restricted movement, severed roads, bulldozed land, and felled trees. The speed of change defies the pace of normal governance—it reads instead as a deliberate race against time, each new settlement caravan and demolished building a countdown to elections that will determine whether this expansion continues or reverses.