Communities face forced displacement as Israel opens West Bank settlement tenders

On 1 June, Israeli authorities will invite bids from private companies to construct 3,400 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank.

This would effectively cut off occupied East Jerusalem from the rest of the occupied West Bank. It would further fragment Palestinian territory, forcibly displace communities including Khan al-Ahmar and restrict access to essential healthcare.

This step would consolidate Israeli control over the corridor linking East Jerusalem to the Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc. Governments have widely recognised this outcome as undermining the viability of a contiguous Palestinian state and violating international law.

Some pushback from UK

In a joint statement on 22 May, the UK and partner governments warned that companies involved in such settlement activity may face “legal and reputational consequences.”

Palestinian families in Khan Al-Ahmar now face imminent forced displacement after Israeli authorities moved last week to revive long-standing demolition orders against the community.

Khan Al-Ahmar is one of 18 Bedouin and herding communities in the path of the plan. Around 4,000 Palestinians across the 18 communities could lose their homes and land.

Abu Khamees, a community leader in Khan Al-Ahmar, has lived under the shadow of demolition orders for years. Nothing, he says, prepared him for this:

Families here are not prepared to leave. We had been living in limbo for years given a temporary halt on the demolition order.

The decision for imminent forced displacement was like an electric shock to us. People are anxious about where to go with their children as well as how to access essential services like health and education.

Advertisement

People here have already been suffering because reaching healthcare has been extremely difficult, with interrupted services due to movement restrictions and checkpoints.

This is a nail in the coffin of the so-called two-state solution; with the forced displacement of our community Khan Al-Ahmar, and the completion of the E1 settlement project, which has been considered a redline by Western governments for decades.

This also jeopardises regional peace and stability. What is the international community willing to do after all these empty promises?

Medical Aid For Palestinians’ (MAP) mobile clinics have delivered essential healthcare to over 33,000 Palestinians across 22 communities since 2025. Many of these communities are in “Area C”, which covers approximately 60% of the West Bank and is under full Israeli military control.

Access to permanent health services here is denied due to Israel’s apartheid policies. In these areas, mobile care is often the only lifeline, reaching isolated communities that are cut off from hospitals and clinics due to movement restrictions and settlement expansion.

Israel’s illegal settlement expansion across the West Bank has systematically fragmented Palestinian communities, severing patients from hospitals and clinics through settler-only roads, checkpoints and the separation wall.

Settler violence has further deterred patients and healthcare workers from travelling. The result is a population denied timely, consistent access to the healthcare they urgently need.

West Bank settlement expansion and violence

Khan al-Ahmar is not an isolated case. A parallel E2 project south of Bethlehem would see around 2,500 new settlement units built in a corridor designed to sever the southern West Bank in half. Israeli authorities have already approved 3,401 new settlement units in the E1 area alone.

Israeli settlement expansion is compounded by escalating settler violence, which forms part of a broader coercive environment driving the displacement of Palestinians and entrenching de facto annexation.

In a single week (12-18 May 2026), settlers carried out more than 50 attacks, including arson targeting homes, farmland and a mosque.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) , 870 attacks have been recorded across more than 220 communities so far this year – an average of six per day.

Since January 2025, settler violence and related access restrictions have displaced thousands of Palestinians across the West Bank, with at least 38-45 rural and herding communities fully or largely emptied.

Aseel Baidoun, MAP’s deputy director of advocacy and communications based in the West Bank, said:

The threatened destruction of Khan al-Ahmar exposes the hollowness of years of international handwringing over illegal settlements. Governments have spent decades calling E1 a red line, warning it would shatter any prospects of a viable Palestinian state, while doing virtually nothing to curb Israel’s impunity.

If Khan al-Ahmar is erased from the map, it will not happen quietly or accidentally. It will happen after years of empty statements, diplomatic theatre, and deliberate political cowardice from governments that claim to support international law while allowing Israel to carve apart the West Bank piece by piece.

Empty condemnation while illegal settlements expand in plain sight is not diplomacy – it’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing.

MAP calls on the UK government to follow in the footsteps of the Netherlands, Spain, Slovenia, and Ireland and end trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

This move, which 119 MPs have backed, is consistent with the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 ruling that Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank is unlawful.

Nearly two years on from the ICJ’s advisory opinion, the UK government has still not published its legal review or set out any concrete steps to implement it.

Featured image via Tamir Kalifa / Getty Images

By The Canary

Source link