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The UN Human Rights office for Palestine has warned that Israel is rapidly accelerating its campaign to annex the occupied West Bank, with settlers adding outposts at a pace 10 times higher than the previous average rate just in the past year.
Recent settler attacks on the olive harvest have underscored the danger faced by Palestinian communities, the office noted, with this season alone seeing 150 settler attacks so far.
This includes an attack caught on camera by a journalist last week, when a 53-year-old woman was beaten by settlers and sent to the hospital during the olive harvest; as well as an attack on a 58-year-old olive farmer in Nahalin, west of Bethlehem, on Thursday, the office said.
These attacks represent just a fraction of the settler violence faced by Palestinians as Israel escalates its annexation campaign amid its genocide in Gaza, the office said. UN officials, citing Israeli group Peace Now, said that there have been 757 settler attacks in the West Bank just in the first half of 2025, marking a 13 percent increase over the previous year.
Meanwhile, Israeli settlers have created 84 new illegal outposts in the West Bank, marking a “rapid escalation” of the previous pace of eight new settlements per year on average, the office said.
The violence is “making life impossible for Palestinians in many communities across the occupied West Bank and leaving them with no genuine choice but to leave their homes.”
“These actions advance Israel’s stated policy to consolidate annexation in clear violation of international law,” the office said.
The UN statement comes just days after the Trump administration repeated its supposed opposition to annexation.
“It won’t happen,” said President Donald Trump last week when asked about annexation. “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”
But as the UN statement and that of other experts has underscored, Israel is already in the process of annexing the West Bank, both in policy and in practice. Top Israeli ministers have spent recent months formalizing plans for annexation, vowing to annex the West Bank in all but name or, in some cases, outright calling for the illegal policy.
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