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israeli settlements
Smotrich Condemned for Plan to 'Illegally Seize' Gaza After Calling for Israel to ‘Complete the Conquest’ and Build Settlements
Palestinian resistance groups called it a "dangerous criminal escalation" and a "fully-fledged war crime."
Jun 30, 2026
Israel's far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "complete the conquest" of Gaza on Monday and send Israeli settlers to colonize the territory.
"We are prepared to establish three settlements in the northern perimeter immediately, the moment we receive the green light from the prime minister and the minister of defense," Smotrich said in a video filmed from the city of Sderot, which sits less than a mile from the wall separating the Gaza Strip from Israel.
Smotrich claimed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) currently "[hold] nearly 70% of the Gaza Strip."
“We must complete the conquest of the remaining 30%,” he said, adding that they need to “defeat Hamas and above all we need to establish a belt of Jewish settlements within the territory of the Strip as a protective border for Sderot and all the communities of the Gaza envelope.”
Smotrich, who has overseen the rapid, violent acceleration of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank—considered illegal under international law—has been quite blatant about his desire to expand settlements into Gaza as well, reversing Israel’s withdrawal of settlers from the territory in 2005.
At a settlements conference last year, he said that “Gaza will be totally destroyed" and that its residents would be "concentrated" in a narrow southern strip while the rest of the territory "will be empty." He celebrated that Gazans would become “totally despairing” and seek “relocation” elsewhere, allowing Jewish Israelis to move in.
As the movement of settlers into the West Bank has ramped up, along with the destruction of Palestinian homes, Smotrich has said that the use of settlements to carve up the West Bank was "killing the idea of the Palestinian state."
Netanyahu has never said explicitly that he wants to resettle Gaza, but he did say last month, during a speech at an illegal West Bank settlement, that he'd ordered the military to seize 70% of Gaza in violation of the boundaries drawn up under last year's ceasefire agreement, which put Israel in temporary control of about 53% of the territory.
The peace plan laid out by US President Donald Trump, backed by a United Nations Security Council resolution, which underpins the ceasefire signed in October, states explicitly that "Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza."
The Resistance Committees in Palestine, a collection of armed groups in Gaza working closely with Hamas, described Smotrich's call to build settlements in the strip a "dangerous criminal escalation" and a "fully-fledged war crime" in a statement on Tuesday.
They described it as "a scheme to settle the conflict and impose a fait accompli in the context of the genocidal war" and a "dangerous development aimed at sabotaging the efforts of mediators and guarantors to solidify the ceasefire agreement and liquidate the Palestinian cause and presence in Gaza."
Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington DC, emphasized that Smotrich was hardly a fringe figure.
"This isn’t a random person," she said. "He’s a high-ranking Israeli official declaring the intent to illegally seize Gaza."
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Israel Escalating Ethnic Cleansing in West Bank 'Before the Eyes of the Entire World': Amnesty
"This is not the work of rogue actors," said the human rights group's secretary general. "What we are witnessing is deliberate, state-led annexation."
Jun 10, 2026
The international community is allowing the Israeli government to carry out an explicit policy of "ethnic cleansing" against Palestinians in the West Bank that is rapidly accelerating, according to a report out Wednesday from Amnesty International.
The human rights group said the world must intervene to stop what it described as a campaign of forcible displacement, rampant state-backed violence by Israeli settlers, demolitions of Palestinian homes, and tightening restrictions on Palestinian access to land and water.
Using United Nations data, Amnesty determined that at least 117 predominantly Bedouin and herding communities faced full or partial displacement between January 2023 and April 2026, with about 45 communities totally depopulated.
Nearly 6,000 people were forced from their homes during that time, roughly 17% of the Palestinian population in the Israeli-controlled Area C's Bedouin and herding communities.
Amnesty found that Israeli authorities demolished more than 3,400 Palestinian homes and structures in Area C during that time, displacing more than 3,000 Palestinians.
The group describes this systematic displacement as explicit Israeli state policy. The government advanced plans for more than 50,000 settler housing units from 2023-25 and authorized 102 new settlements by April 2026, the largest number ever approved by an Israeli government.
This has coincided with a dramatic increase in violence by armed Israeli settlers, who have set fire to homes and farmlands, vandalized schools and agricultural equipment, cut electricity lines and dumped water tanks, and beaten and killed Palestinian residents.
The UN's Office on the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs calculated that four settler attacks have occurred per day on average in the roughly two years following October 7, 2023, and have only grown more frequent this year, particularly after Israel and the US's joint attack on Iran, which was followed by an invasion of Lebanon that has also entailed mass destruction of homes and the forced displacement of over a million residents.
In several documented cases, armed settler attackers have been escorted or accompanied by Israeli soldiers, who have at times taken part in the destruction.
“Over the past three and a half years, Israeli authorities have accelerated a state-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, uprooting, dispossessing, and forcibly transferring Palestinian communities," said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general.
"This is not the work of rogue actors or what the international community has repeatedly labeled as extremist settlers, organizations or one or two ministers," she said. "What we are witnessing is deliberate, state-led annexation, in complete violation of international law unfolding before the eyes of the entire world."
The report comes just a day after a group of Western nations—including the UK, Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway—announced coordinated sanctions against Israeli individuals and organizations accused of financing and enabling settler violence in the West Bank.
However, Amnesty argued that these measures were too narrow.
"These limited measures are woefully insufficient to address the state campaign of ethnic cleansing and the systemic violations that have been rapidly increasing before the eyes of the international community,” Callamard said.
She said states, "particularly those with influence over Israel," including the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, and other European Union and Arab States, needed to "ban all trade, investment, and any form of cooperation or financial assistance that contribute to Israel’s unlawful occupation, system of apartheid, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians."
Callamard added that states "must impose targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against Israeli officials directly implicated in these acts." She included Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right settler politicians like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, as well as settlers who have allegedly committed acts of murder, like Yinon Levi, who was filmed last year shooting and killing human rights activist Awda al-Hathaleen and was released from custody after a day.
Callamard said, "Without accountability, Palestinian communities across the West Bank will vanish before our eyes."
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Israel's Smotrich Responds to ICC Arrest Warrant by Announcing More War Crimes
The far-right finance minister announced that he'd respond to an arrest warrant request for his forced expulsion of Palestinians by ordering the evacuation of another West Bank village.
May 19, 2026
Israel's far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on Tuesday that the International Criminal Court prosecutor had requested an arrest warrant against him, reportedly in response to his illegal forced expulsion of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank.
He said he planned to "fight back" by issuing an order to forcibly evict hundreds more Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank.
During a news conference, Smotrich said he'd been informed Monday evening that the ICC prosecutor had secretly requested a warrant for his arrest in April. A formal warrant has not been announced by the court, and the official charges have not yet been publicized.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the prosecutor had been considering seeking an arrest warrant against Smotrich for his role in expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in July 2024 was a violation of the Geneva Conventions because it entailed the forced removal of residents in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The ICC prosecutor was also preparing to issue an arrest warrant against fellow far-right settler politician, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, though there is not yet any reporting to suggest that this warrant has been issued.
Already, the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
In response to the reported warrant request for what the ICC considers a war crime, Smotrich celebrated the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank. He boasted of creating “over 100 new settlements” in the occupied territory and “160 farming outposts,” which he said helped Israel to control 247,000 acres of land in the territory.
The United Nations reported in March that over the previous year, more than 36,000 Palestinians in the West Bank had been forcibly displaced by settlement expansion and by violence committed by Israeli settlers.
Smotrich said the court's issuing of arrest warrants against him and other Israeli leaders was a "declaration of war" and said that "we will respond with war."
"From today, every economic or other target within my authority to strike—whether as Finance Minister or as a minister in the Defense Ministry—will be attacked. Not with words or gimmicks, but with actions," he said.
"I announce here and now the first target that will be attacked: immediately after my remarks, we will sign an order for the evacuation of Khan al-Ahmar," he added.
He was referring to a Palestinian Bedouin village of about 200 people on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem, which has fought a yearslong legal battle against the Israeli government following orders by Ben-Gvir for it to be demolished to make room for a settlement.
The territory is especially significant because it would link two major settlements in East Jerusalem with the Jordan Valley as part of Israel's ongoing E1 settlement project, which is aimed at constructing settlements so that they cut the Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank in two.
Smotrich, who has led the E1 project, declared last year that the proposal “buries the idea of a Palestinian state because there is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize."
On Tuesday, Smotrich said his order for Palestinians to leave Khan al-Ahmar would be "only the beginning" of his response to the reported warrant request.
Jasper Nathaniel, an American journalist who reports from the West Bank, explained that "Smotrich just announced the official ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian village in response to the ICC warrant for his arrest."
Observers pointed out the brazenness of Smotrich's declaration in the face of an international tribunal.
Adil Haque, a professor of law at Rutgers University and the executive editor of Just Security, noted the remarkable irony: "The ICC office of the prosecutor reportedly requested an arrest warrant for his war crimes, so he announces a new one."
Along with Ben-Gvir, Smotrich was sanctioned last year by five countries—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom—which subjected them to travel bans and asset freezes.
Ori Goldberg, an Israeli expert on Middle Eastern studies, said international punishments against Smotrich needed to be even stronger after he announced "as stark a violation of international law as possible."
"Make the warrants public. Sanction this man and everybody else who foots the bill. EU Leadership—stop making fools of yourselves as the world is torn asunder," he said. "Show Israelis... the jig is up."
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