West Bank & Jerusalem
Israeli army admits it left 13 new settler outposts standing
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Military sources acknowledged that the Israeli army refrained in recent days from enforcing the law against far-right activists who have put up roughly one hundred unauthorized outposts across the occupied West Bank, thirteen of them in the past week alone, the Israeli daily Maariv reported Thursday.
Officers told the paper they plan to move on the new outposts within days while conceding the effort is futile. In their words: we evacuate, and a day later they come back.
The army also said the evacuations strain forces it wants focused elsewhere, a plain admission that settlers building without permits now set the limits of enforcement in the territory Israel has occupied since 1967.
The report revived figures published weeks earlier by the Israeli movement Peace Now: 185 new outposts rose between 2023 and 2025, while 102 were legalized or upgraded to independent settlement status.
Over the same three years, planning advanced for more than 40,000 settlement housing units, 223 kilometers of new roads were cut, and farm outposts extended their control to more than 1.1 million dunams of Palestinian land, with 25,959 dunams declared state land.
