Israeli authorities have seized 70,000 square meters 70 dunams of Palestinian land in the Nablus governorate of the occupied West Bank, according to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission. The confiscation, carried out under a military and security order, targets villages surrounding the Eli settlement and aims to establish a permanent buffer zone. The order was published only after the one-week objection period expired, leaving local communities with no legal recourse to challenge the takeover. This latest seizure is part of a broader pattern: since January 2025, Israel has issued 53 such military orders to expand its control across the West Bank.
The land, located in the northern West Bank, is fertile and historically cultivated by Palestinian families for generations. Now, it will be fenced off, patrolled, and integrated into Israel’s expanding settlement infrastructure. The move comes amid heightened tensions following two years of intensified military raids, mass arrests, and settler violence since the Gaza war began in late 2023. According to Palestinian authorities, more than 1,051 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank during this period, with over 10,300 wounded and 20,000 detained including 1,600 children.
The international community has long deemed Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory. The United Nations has repeatedly warned that continued settlement growth now averaging one new outpost every 8 square kilometers since 1967 undermines the viability of a two-state solution. As of 2025, Israel has constructed at least 710 settlements and military outposts across the territory.
In July 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel’s entire occupation of Palestinian territories including East Jerusalem and the West Bank as illegal. The court called for the evacuation of all settlements and an end to discriminatory practices. Yet enforcement remains absent. With no binding mechanism to compel compliance, Israel continues to act unilaterally, using military orders as legal instruments to normalize land annexation.
For Palestinians in Nablus, the seizure is not abstract it is personal. Olive groves, wells, and access roads are now behind barbed wire. Farmers who once walked their fields at dawn now face arrest if they cross invisible new boundaries. Over the weekend, Israeli forces conducted raids across multiple West Bank towns. In Ramallah, a 37-year-old man was shot in the thigh with a live round during a confrontation; the Palestinian Red Crescent transferred him to hospital, though his condition remains unknown. These incidents are not isolated they are systemic, woven into the fabric of an occupation that tightens with each passing month.
Palestinian civil society groups like the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission continue to document every seizure, every raid, every demolished home not just for legal archives, but for collective memory. Their work ensures that statistics like “70,000 square meters” are never reduced to mere numbers. Each dunam represents a family’s livelihood, a child’s inheritance, a village’s future. In the absence of political resolution, this documentation becomes a form of quiet resistance a refusal to let erasure go unchallenged.
As bulldozers clear the newly seized land near Eli, the world watches but rarely acts. Diplomatic condemnations are issued, then forgotten. Resolutions are drafted, then shelved. Meanwhile, the map of Palestine shrinks, not through war alone, but through paperwork, fences, and silence. The seizure of 70,000 square meters is not an anomaly; it is the rule. When Occupation Becomes Routine, Injustice Becomes Invisible.
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