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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/02/how-israel-is-eroding-life-for-palestinians-in-the-west-bank/?ml_recipient=179384222058809296&ml_link=179384150696920575&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2026-02-14&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation+-+8am">mondoweiss.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">How Israel is eroding life for Palestinians in the West Bank</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Abdaljawad Omar</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">February 13, 2026</div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><img src="cid:ii_mlmjz0nb0" alt="image.png" width="408" height="272"><br><p><a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/israel-is-quietly-erasing-palestinian-refugee-camps-from-existence-in-the-west-bank/">
<font size="1">Settlers hang Israeli flags and banners in the Masoudiya neighborhood
near the town of Sebastia, north of Nablus, February 13, 2026. (Photo by
Mohammed Nasser/APA Images) </font></a></p><p><br></p><p><a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/israel-is-quietly-erasing-palestinian-refugee-camps-from-existence-in-the-west-bank/">Today, a </a><a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/israel-is-quietly-erasing-palestinian-refugee-camps-from-existence-in-the-west-bank/">quiet transf</a><a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/israel-is-quietly-erasing-palestinian-refugee-camps-from-existence-in-the-west-bank/">ormation is advancing</a>
in the West Bank. It isn\u2019t the same spectacular form of violence that
once commanded the global news cycle in Gaza, but it is more methodical
and durable \u2014 and more difficult to interrupt.</p>
<p>It unfolds in three seemingly unrelated processes: financial warfare
against Palestinian economic life, state-backed settler terror, and the
legalization of annexation. What binds these processes together isn\u2019t
simply their occurrence in the same territory at the same time, but
their shared architecture: they are part of a regime of compression that
doesn\u2019t outright destroy Palestinian life, but systematically
constrains it. </p>
<p>Each mechanism operates through a different register \u2014 one through
liquidity, one through violence, one through law \u2014 but all converge on
the same objective: to narrow the field for Palestinian life to
continue.</p>
<p>All of this takes place under the radar, as the world appears to be
moving away from Palestine. The global movements were, after all,
convoked by the horror of daily massacres, yet everything in the West
Bank appears unchanging on the surface. The daily passage through
checkpoints has hardened into a ritual. Over <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/the-humanitarian-crisis-facing-42000-forcibly-displaced-palestinians-in-the-west-bank/">42,000 Palestinian refugees</a> from the camps in Jenin and Tulkarem remain displaced, inhabiting a suspended tension that refuses resolution. </p>
<p>As the massacres in Gaza change form and lose their most spectacular
force, the movements protesting them falter, and solidarity reveals its
dependence on blood and catastrophe. When horror becomes less
televisable, attention disperses \u2014 a grim reflection of the state of the
global attention economy.</p>
<p>This endless churn has done more than exhaust attention: it is laying
the groundwork for other violence to proceed in the West Bank
unnoticed. </p>
<p>This is how the Israeli regime of compression continues to erode the conditions for Palestinian existence.</p>
<h2>Financial b<strong>lockages</strong></h2>
<p>The West Bank is facing a <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/09/israel-is-trying-to-collapse-the-palestinian-authority-the-first-step-is-destroying-the-palestinian-economy/">severe banking and liquidity crisis</a>
driven by long-standing Israeli limits on currency exchanges under the
1994 Paris Protocol. For nearly three decades, Israel has informally
capped the annual conversion of shekels from Palestinian banks at NIS 18
billion, a figure that has not kept pace with Palestinian economic
growth. The result is that Palestinian banks have accumulated large
surpluses of Israeli shekels they are unable to convert into foreign
currencies such as U.S. dollars or Jordanian dinars. In May of 2024, the
Palestinian Monetary Authority halted banks from accepting additional
shekels, leading to widespread disruptions: individuals have struggled
to deposit checks, businesses have been unable to deposit revenues, and
some residents have been pushed into overdraft.</p>
<p>The shortage of convertible currency has also fueled a black market
where shekels are exchanged at rates significantly below the official
rate. The crisis has been compounded by reduced Palestinian labor access
to Israel since October 2023, which has curtailed the flow of wages
that once provided a steady source of foreign currency. </p>
<p>In recent months, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has taken
additional steps that Palestinians view as attempts to further weaken
economic coordination: he has opposed increasing the shekel conversion
cap and ordered the cancellation of an Israeli government bank guarantee
(an \u201cindemnity\u201d letter of sorts) that protects Israeli banks when
working with Palestinian banking institutions. Although this revocation
has not yet formally taken effect, it reflects a broader shift in
Israeli policy aimed at limiting financial cooperation with the
Palestinian Authority and creating the conditions for a sustained crisis
in the Palestinian banking system.</p>
<p>What the manufactured banking crisis reveals is not an aberration but
a governing logic: blockage as method. The threatened withdrawal of
correspondent banking safeguards was not simply a financial maneuver; it
exposed the structural chokehold embedded in the Palestinian economy.
Because Palestinian banks rely on Israeli counterparts to clear shekels
and process cross-border transactions, the entire monetary system
remains externally mediated. The refusal to absorb surplus shekels, the
freezing or delay of clearance mechanisms, and the periodic threat to
sever indemnified banking ties together form a regime of controlled
interruption. Like physical checkpoints, this system establishes
financial ones.</p>
<p>Blockage operates by constricting the circulation of currency,
liquidity, and credit, until economic life slows to the edge of
asphyxiation. This is not a collapse in the dramatic sense, but
something more calculated. Financial systems depend on confidence: the
expectation that deposits are secure, that liquidity will be available,
that correspondent channels will remain open. By repeatedly threatening
to terminate safeguards and disrupt clearance processes, Israel injects
uncertainty into the bloodstream of Palestinian finance. Banks continue
operating, but under permanent duress. Depositors remain, but with
mounting anxiety. The Palestinian Monetary Authority reassures, yet
reassurance itself becomes part of the crisis management cycle.</p>
<p>Blockage thus produces chronic precarity rather than immediate
implosion. It hollows institutions from within, eroding trust while
maintaining the façade of normalcy. As a settler-colonial strategy,
blockage precedes demolition. It prepares the ground. The Palestinian
banking sector \u2014 once portrayed as a pillar of relative stability \u2014
becomes the site where sovereignty\u2019s absence is felt most acutely. </p>
<p>The capacity to restrict circulation transforms economic dependency
into political leverage. Blockage is the first movement in a sequence
aimed at dismantling the Palestinian world: not by spectacular
destruction alone, but by quietly closing the channels through which
that world sustains itself. It pushes Palestinians \u2014 traders, merchants,
businesses, and laborers alike \u2014 toward the brink, where economic life
narrows into mere survival and the edge becomes not an exception, but a
condition. </p>
<h2><strong>Settler terror </strong></h2>
<p>What began as the solitary steps of a settler descending from the
Nahal Adasha farm into Khirbet al-Halawa unfolded into a coordinated
spectacle of domination across Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank.
After an altercation with residents, the settler summoned
reinforcements; dozens arrived, some armed, soon joined by Israeli
soldiers. For hours, according to Palestinian eyewitnesses, settlers
beat residents, stole dozens of sheep, torched property and firewood
reserves, shattered windows and sprayed homes with pepper spray. Men
were detained and forced to sit on the ground, women and children
assaulted, and ambulances obstructed. </p>
<p>In nearby Khirbet al-Fakhit, a 48-year-old man was left hospitalized
with a fractured skull and cerebral hemorrhage as his elderly mother was
injured beside him. Sheep were driven toward outposts and settlements
as night fell, the violence stretching from one hamlet to the next in
what residents described as a pre-planned raid.</p>
<p>Throughout much of the six-hour episode, Israeli forces were present.
Villagers recount soldiers standing by as livestock were taken and, at
points, restricting the movement of medics attempting to reach the
wounded. Two Palestinian women were arrested and later released without
charge. What Palestinians experienced was not merely mob violence, but a
choreography of impunity in which the architecture of occupation \u2014
civilian outposts, armed settlers and uniformed soldiers \u2014 converged to
produce dispossession in real time.</p>
<p>This scene is not new. It is the grammar of life in Area C, the 60
percent of the West Bank under full Israeli control. In these marginal
expanses, Palestinian construction is reduced to the minimum, and
permanence is treated as provocation. Life follows seasonal rhythms: the
olive harvest, the tending of flocks, the slow movement across open
land. These are not empty spaces. They are lived geographies, sustained
by grazing routes, footpaths, and inherited care. Yet their openness
makes them vulnerable. They are <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/meet-the-palestinian-bedouin-community-that-no-longer-exists/">exposed to encroachment and choreographed intimidation</a>, to a regime that reads mobility itself as a claim.</p>
<p>The violence is multi-directional. The settler both mimics the
Palestinian and burns the land; he imitates the grazing even as he
slaughters the flock; he sets fire to the olive trees and tears up the
very soil from which they draw their stubborn life. The attack on
Masafer Yatta was not an isolated eruption. Similar incidents have been
documented across the West Bank with increasing frequency since October
2023: in <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2022/09/israeli-settlers-attacked-a-palestinian-man-breaking-both-his-arms-then-the-army-arrested-him/">al-Tuwani</a>,
where settlers blocked farmers from accessing their land during the
olive harvest; in Susiya, where outpost expansion has pushed families
off grazing areas they\u2019ve used for generations; in Jinba, where military
\u201cfiring zone\u201d designations have been weaponized to facilitate
displacement. The pattern is consistent: violence creates facts on the
ground that administrative measures then consolidate.</p>
<p>But more than anything, settler terror is meant to <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/how-israeli-colonization-disrupts-the-palestinian-social-fabric-in-the-west-bank/">confine, to demolish, and to render life unlivable</a>
\u2014 to compress existence into ever-narrower enclosures where departure
begins to appear as the only remaining horizon. What distinguishes the
current moment is not the invention of these tactics but their
intensification and coordination. </p>
<p>Settler terror has always been a feature of the occupation, but it
now operates with a brazenness that also means official sanction.
Israeli ministers openly celebrate attacks. Police investigations are
perfunctory or nonexistent. The message is clear: Palestinian presence
is provisional, subject to revocation through a combination of legal
restriction and physical intimidation.</p>
<h2><strong>Annexation and legalization</strong></h2>
<p>What has unfolded is not a dramatic proclamation of sovereignty, but
something far more insidious: a quiet tightening of the grip. In recent
months, the Israeli government has <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/02/israel-just-started-legalizing-its-annexation-of-the-west-bank-heres-what-that-means/">advanced a series of measures</a>
that function as instruments of territorial absorption. In January, the
Knesset passed legislation effectively legalizing dozens of settlement
outposts built on private Palestinian land, retroactively granting them
official status. The law allows settlers to claim ownership of land they
have occupied, often for years, by asserting that their presence was
authorized, even when no such authorization existed. Palestinian
landowners are entitled to compensation in theory, but the mechanism for
securing it is cumbersome, requires navigating Israeli courts, and
offers no guarantee of success.</p>
<p>Simultaneously, the government has moved to ease restrictions on
settlement expansion. Planning committees that once required
coordination with the Civil Administration \u2014 the Israeli military body
that governs Area C \u2014 can now approve construction more rapidly.
Environmental review processes have been streamlined. Archaeological
assessments, which previously delayed some projects, are now
fast-tracked or waived. The cumulative effect is to remove bureaucratic
friction that had, at times, slowed settlement growth. What was once
incremental becomes accelerated.</p>
<p>These measures are presented as administrative adjustments, yet they
function as instruments of territorial absorption. Annexation here is
not declared; it is sedimented \u2014 layer by layer, permit by permit,
registry by registry.</p>
<p>By opening land records and stripping away safeguards, the state
transforms the landscape into a marketplace in which power, capital, and
coercion converge. The violence is bureaucratic, its language
technical, but its effect unmistakably political: the steady erasure of
Palestinian spatial presence in favor of a sovereign claim that advances
without ever naming itself.</p>
<p>These measures also hollow out what remains of Palestinian
administrative autonomy. The Oslo framework \u2014 already fractured and
unequal \u2014 rested on the fiction of delegated authority in designated
areas of the West Bank, what are called Areas A and B. Now, even that
fiction is being methodically dismantled. </p>
<p>By extending Israeli enforcement powers into spheres once managed by
Palestinian institutions \u2014 planning, environmental regulation, heritage \u2014
the architecture of limited self-rule collapses inward. The Palestinian
Authority is not confronted in open rupture, but bypassed, rendered
irrelevant, and quietly displaced by a regime of direct oversight. What
appears to be governance reform is, in fact, the reconfiguration of
sovereignty on the ground.</p>
<p>The seriousness of these steps lies not only in their immediate
impact but in their temporal ambition. This is not policy as reaction,
but policy as permanence. It seeks to foreclose the future by reshaping
the present \u2014 embedding Israeli control so deeply into the territory\u2019s
legal and administrative fabric that reversal becomes unimaginable. </p>
<p>The Western backers of Israel may issue condemnations, but the
machinery of consolidation proceeds with procedural calm. Each
regulatory adjustment, each planning approval, each land registration
incrementally transforms the status quo into something international law
no longer has the vocabulary to challenge.</p>
<h2><strong>The logic of compression </strong></h2>
<p>Blockage constricts economic circulation. Terror renders physical
space dangerous and uncertain. Law forecloses legal recourse and
administrative autonomy. The banking crisis means that even those with
capital cannot reliably access it. Settler violence means that even
those with land cannot safely work it. Legal annexation means that even
those with title cannot defend it. </p>
<p>Together, they produce a condition in which protection recedes, and exposure becomes ordinary. </p>
<p>The aim here is not to eliminate the Palestinian population yet\u2014such a
project would invite international condemnation and organized
resistance\u2014but to manage it at the threshold of viability. Palestinians
remain, but their capacity for autonomous social, economic, and
political reproduction continues to contract. Businesses operate, but
under conditions that prevent expansion. Farmers cultivate, but on
ever-smaller parcels. Institutions function, but without the resources
or authority to serve their populations effectively. Life continues, but
in narrowed corridors. </p>
<p>What makes this regime particularly effective is its diffusion of
responsibility. No single actor bears sole accountability. The
correspondent bank cites regulatory compliance. The settler claims
self-defense or biblical entitlement. The planning committee invokes
zoning regulations. The soldier follows orders. Each decision is
defensible within its own domain, justified by precedent or necessity or
external pressure. Yet the pattern, invisible at the level of
individual actions, becomes legible in aggregate. What appears as
administrative friction, security imperative, or market risk reveals
itself, over time, as organized constriction.</p>
<p>The experiential reality for those subjected to this regime is one of
chronic adjustment. The merchant in Ramallah who once planned five
years ahead now calculates in quarters, uncertain whether his bank will
honor withdrawals or whether new restrictions will sever his supply
chain. The shepherd in Masafer Yatta who once grazed across hillsides
his family has worked for generations now confines his flock to valleys
within sight of the village, his children learning caution before they
learn confidence. The municipal planner in Bethlehem who once designed
expansions now spends his time navigating permit rejections and
negotiating demolition orders, his professional training reduced to
crisis management. Time becomes reactive rather than projective.
Planning extends only as far as the next permit. </p>
<p>This logic is not unique to the West Bank. Across disparate
geographies, we encounter similar patterns: the scaling down of rights,
the shrinking of public goods, the contraction of political possibility,
the normalization of emergency as structure. In Gaza, the blockade has
operated for nearly two decades as a laboratory of controlled
diminishment, maintaining a population above the threshold of
humanitarian catastrophe while preventing economic development or
political autonomy. And with the destruction of Gaza, life is
diminished into narrower space and managed calorie intakes. </p>
<p><a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/how-israel-and-the-u-s-are-using-the-shock-doctrine-to-impose-a-new-administration-in-gaza/">Shock politics</a>
and bureaucratic attrition are not opposites; they are complementary
tempos within a single order. Spectacle destabilizes perception,
announcing transformation and rupture, while administrative measures
quietly recalibrate what is livable. The Trump administration\u2019s
executive blitz\u2014orders issued in rapid succession, policies reversed and
reinstated, norms violated and defended in the same breath\u2014generates
disorientation. Attention scatters. What seemed outrageous yesterday
becomes backdrop today. Meanwhile, the less visible work proceeds:
regulations rewritten, courts reshaped, enforcement discretion expanded.
The spectacular and the procedural collaborate, one exhausting the
capacity for outrage, the other embedding constraint into institutional
architecture.</p>
<p>What is being constructed, then, is not a temporary crisis but a
durable condition. The banking blockage in the West Bank is not designed
to be resolved, but managed. Settler violence is not an aberration to
be corrected, but calibrated. Legal annexation is not a deviation from
international norms, but part of it is the new normal. </p>
<p>The question is not whether these processes will intensify\u2014they
already are intensifying\u2014but whether those subjected to them will
recognize the pattern in time to interrupt it, whether global attention
can be sustained in the absence of spectacular violence, whether
solidarity can attach itself to the slow grind of compression as
fiercely as it once responded to the sudden shock of massacre. </p>
<p>For now, the logic of compression proceeds with the confidence of a
project that has calculated the limits of resistance. It bets that
populations kept below the threshold of rupture will adapt rather than
revolt, will exhaust themselves in navigation rather than organize for
transformation. </p>
<p>Whether this wager holds depends not on the ingenuity of the
mechanisms \u2014 those are already operational \u2014 but on the capacity of
those subjected to it to refuse the terms, to find in the very condition
of compression the grounds for collective refusal.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Abdaljawad Omar</strong><br>Abdaljawad Omar is a writer and Assistant Professor at Birzeit University, Palestine. Follow him on X <a href="https://x.com/hhamayel2?s=21&t=kWr9Cxh8rnTkK4lRyrYujw">@HHamayel2</a>.</p>
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