As Israel’s war in Gaza continues to devastate Palestinian lives, those living in the occupied West Bank are facing intensifying hardships. From Israeli settler violence and army restrictions on movement to demolitions of homes and property, daily life has become increasingly uncertain and unsafe.
This PBS NewsHour report takes a closer look at how the conflict’s ripple effects are tightening Israel’s grip on the West Bank — and how Palestinians are striving to survive under growing pressure and fear.
🔹 Daily struggles of Palestinian families
🔹 Expanding settler presence and checkpoints
🔹 The human cost of ongoing conflict
📺 Watch this in-depth report for on-the-ground perspectives rarely seen in global headlines.#Palestine #Israel #WestBank #GazaWar #PBSNewsHour #MiddleEast #HumanRights #Occupation #SettlerViolence #PalestinianLives #WorldNews #Geopolitics #WarAndPeace #NewsDocumentary #BreakingNews
This PBS NewsHour report takes a closer look at how the conflict’s ripple effects are tightening Israel’s grip on the West Bank — and how Palestinians are striving to survive under growing pressure and fear.
🔹 Daily struggles of Palestinian families
🔹 Expanding settler presence and checkpoints
🔹 The human cost of ongoing conflict
📺 Watch this in-depth report for on-the-ground perspectives rarely seen in global headlines.#Palestine #Israel #WestBank #GazaWar #PBSNewsHour #MiddleEast #HumanRights #Occupation #SettlerViolence #PalestinianLives #WorldNews #Geopolitics #WarAndPeace #NewsDocumentary #BreakingNews
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm Margaret Evans. Over the next half hour, we're going to take a look at what
00:10life is like for Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank since Israel began
00:16its war against Hamas in Gaza in October 2023. First up, the increasingly aggressive tactics
00:24being used by Jewish hard-line settlers to push Palestinians from the land.
00:37Give me a passport, please.
00:38I'd really like to see your ID saying you're a soldier.
00:41This is not the law in Israel. Give me a passport.
00:46These are the foot soldiers of Israel's settlement enterprise in the occupied West Bank at work.
00:53You know, you know everything here.
00:54Give me, please.
00:55Give me, please.
00:56Don't touch me.
00:57Hey, hey, hey!
01:01They're now actually putting handcuffs on him.
01:06Their tactics are increasingly hard-line, say the Palestinians enduring them.
01:12I want to keep my eye on him.
01:24The Palestinian village of Tawani lies south of Hebron, a small farming community that,
01:29like most of the West Bank, is under complete Israeli control.
01:35Shaped by the land and circumstance, 20-year-old Mohamed Horeini has taken to fighting the occupation
01:42through social media.
01:43Every week, there is a home demolition in Masafriata.
01:46Meanwhile, in my back, there, the settlements have the right to exist,
01:51while according to the national law, are illegal.
01:54Hebron Horeini was born and raised in these hills in the shadow of an Israeli settlement
02:02called Ma'on and its outpost, Havot Ma'on.
02:06As you see, they have just established this military tower which is for watching
02:10our land after October 7th.
02:12And if they saw us here, they will come.
02:14And they did come, just after the interview.
02:17Armed men in military fatigues unable or unwilling to formally identify themselves.
02:25Ma'on and its outpost are notorious for the extremist settlers who live there.
02:30Palestinian children walking by on their way to school have had to have an Israeli army
02:36escort to protect them from attack for nearly two decades.
02:39Horeini says Tuwani's residents are used to harassment.
02:45But since the deadly Hamas attack on October 7th last year,
02:50violence by extremist settlers against Palestinians has spiked.
02:56This video shows an encounter between an armed settler
03:00and Palestinian residents of Tuwani in the same month.
03:03Horeini's cousin, Zachariah Adra, was shot in the stomach.
03:10An armed person in military fatigues looking on.
03:14Adra survived, but his attacker was never charged.
03:19Everything happens in a moment and maybe it will cost you your life.
03:28The land in the South Hebron hills can shift in and out of focus
03:32when the sand slips loose from the hard desert floor.
03:36A little like the dream of a Palestinian state.
03:39Since Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in 1967,
03:45successive governments have allowed settlements to expand and flourish on Palestinian land.
03:51Today, there are half a million Jewish settlers in the West Bank alone.
03:56Many in large settlement blocks, others in smaller remote ones.
04:01Some for economic reasons, some because they believe the land is theirs by divine right.
04:10Horeini is taking us to a village called Zanuta.
04:14Its Palestinian residents having just returned for the first time in almost a year
04:19since fleeing in the weeks after October 7th threatened, they say, by settlers at a nearby outpost.
04:26Right here?
04:27Yes, yes, go, go, go, go.
04:28Another motor.
04:28Yeah, this is the, after the people were personally displaced, the settlers came here,
04:34they start to draw, they put lots of Israeli flags and destroyed most of the houses.
04:45The school, built with European Union funding, is in ruins.
04:50A few childhood memories clinging to the walls that still stand.
04:55You can see there's a settlement outpost that's close to the village.
05:00The outpost in question is called the Meta Ream farm, established by a man named Inon Levy,
05:06one of 11 extremist settlers sanctioned by Canada, accused of perpetrating violence against Palestinians.
05:14We find the men of the village trying to clear up. They say it's still not fit for women or small children.
05:27Shafiq Suleiman, born here 52 years ago, he tells us, shows us his house, now without a roof.
05:34The farmers and herders who live here only returned after an Israeli Supreme Court decision said they could.
05:48But they've come with solidarity activists from Israel and abroad for added security.
05:54And they're not allowed to rebuild their homes destroyed in their absence
05:59because the area has been dubbed an archaeological zone.
06:06The residents show us video, they say, is of Levy and others harassing them as soon as they returned,
06:13driving quads through their herds.
06:15You're always afraid, says Suleiman. If you'd come an hour ago, you would have seen settlers here.
06:27Calling the Israeli police or army, they say, is pointless.
06:32Shepherd Hassan Batat tells us he was arrested a day earlier after one of Levy's men accused him of stealing a sheep.
06:40When the police came, he says, they took a sheep out of his flock and issued him with a fine of nearly $400.
06:50Israeli settlements are considered illegal under international law.
06:54Obviously, Israel disputes that.
06:57But even Israel considers settlement outposts like the one behind me illegal, at least technically.
07:03Most Palestinians will tell you the Israeli government is actually encouraging them
07:07and will one day support them with electricity, water, even their own access roads.
07:16Rights groups say it's an old pattern, but one that's accelerated dramatically
07:21since Israel's far-right government came to power two years ago,
07:25with pro-settler cabinet ministers describing settlements as facts on the ground
07:31that will thwart any possibility of a Palestinian state.
07:35Nearly 70 outposts have been greenlit for government funding over the past year,
07:41according to settlement watch groups, and 43 new outposts have been established.
07:47Part of the settlers' strategy with the outposts is to start on one hilltop
07:53and then take another hilltop nearby, and then another,
07:56and that way they're linking the territory in between and expanding the territory they control.
08:06We return to Zanuta a week later, only to find it deserted, save for the mayor of the village council.
08:13Unfortunately, the settlers still attacked us.
08:17Fayez Tella says October 7th and the war in Gaza that followed has given cover to those in Israel
08:24determined to annex the whole of the West Bank.
08:27The settlers have a permission to do anything, to do all kinds of the violence,
08:33but I'm not with what happened in 7 October.
08:37We decided to try and speak to Inon Levi.
08:49He's happy to do it on the phone in the evening around 6-7.
08:53He says he's not there.
09:01When we call him later at the appointed time, he tells us to call back in an hour,
09:06and when we do, he stops answering his phone.
09:09An occupation now in its 57th year has never been a stagnant thing,
09:23but the lines between the Israeli army and militant Jewish settlers are increasingly blurred.
09:32The encounter between our crew and the armed men who arrived from behind settlement walls
09:38to demand our passports is a mild example.
09:43You're not answering my question, how do we know that you're a soldier?
09:48In the end, they arrested our Palestinian Israeli colleague, falsely accusing him of assault.
09:56They then put him in the car and have driven him towards this settlement or the outpost
10:03that you can see just in the distance.
10:06He was eventually released, but ordered to appear at a police station the next day.
10:13Later, the Israel Defense Forces told us the man demanding passports was an army reservist.
10:20Asked about the IDF relationship with settlements and outposts,
10:24they said the IDF trains and equips what it called local community defense forces.
10:31Critics say they're militia-like, often made up of hardline settlers volunteering as reservists
10:37to replace Israeli troops normally stationed in the West Bank, now fighting in Gaza or Lebanon.
10:44Mohammed Hurini's chosen path, he says, is one of activism, non-violent resistance to the theft of Palestinian land.
10:57The teachings, he says, of his father.
11:00And what do you think about the sanctions that some countries, including my own, put on individual settlers?
11:07Is that helpful?
11:08Do you see any change after all of this?
11:10Do you see settlers stop their crimes against the Palestinians? No.
11:15If anything, he says, they're emboldened.
11:18What happened to his cousin has shaken him.
11:21That's the point, he says.
11:23To scare you, to intimidate you, and to put an end for what you are doing,
11:27for fighting for our liberation, for our rights, for our land.
11:33The part of Hurini's routine now is to make sure his father is rarely alone when grazing their animals.
11:40The settlers and their guards watching in the distance,
11:44one more constraint on an already restricted horizon.
11:47Tens of thousands of Palestinians have also been displaced by Israeli military raids,
12:00taking place in villages and towns across the West Bank,
12:04especially in the decades-old refugee camps of cities like Janine in the north.
12:11An evisceration.
12:12This is the Israeli military at work in the Janine refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
12:21Out of sight, save for glimpses of the mechanical excavators scraping out the innards.
12:29The Israeli military, or IDF, says it is destroying Palestinian terrorist networks and infrastructure
12:37that have burrowed into the camp's narrow streets for decades.
12:42Residents say there are no more militants left.
12:46This was what the defense minister Israel Katz had to say.
12:52The Janine refugee camp will not return to what it was.
12:56The IDF forces will remain in the camp to make sure that terrorism does not return.
13:03Palestinians say the occupation's imprint is deepening even further,
13:08with hundreds of barriers or checkpoints now stretching across the occupied territories.
13:15Dr. Dalal Irekat teaches international diplomacy in Ramallah.
13:20Students don't reach their classrooms.
13:22Doctors don't reach the hospitals to give treatments to patients,
13:26to tell on the patients who die on checkpoints waiting for three or four hours.
13:29So this policy of segregation, this policy of suffocation, of apartheid, is documented in 2025.
13:39Especially new, the arrival of iron barricades like this one in the village of Sinjil, north of Ramallah.
13:45Residents afraid to speak to us on camera for fear of repercussions by Israeli soldiers.
13:54They want to choke us.
13:56They've taken authority on all the lands. Sinjil's lands are all gone.
14:06Much of the international community, including Canada,
14:09back the idea of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
14:14But the current Israeli government has pledged to make sure that never happens.
14:19Welcome to the funeral and to the desert lands east of Jerusalem that will serve as a burial ground
14:29for the fated dream of a Palestinian state.
14:34That's what Israel says it will do.
14:37Bury it beneath thousands of new housing units slated for more Jewish settlers on illegally occupied
14:45Palestinian land.
14:46It's called E1, a patch of 12 square kilometres between Jerusalem and a settlement called Malayadoumim.
14:56And many Palestinians fear Israel is right, that it will be a final nail in the coffin.
15:08The party marking the end of summer in Malayadoumim.
15:12One of the largest Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
15:16The mayor, Guy Yifrak, gets a rock star greeting.
15:22Making time for a Facebook Live and a shout out for E1, which will become part of the settlement.
15:34Yifrak was beside the hardline Israeli cabinet minister, Bezalel Smotrich, when he announced building will go ahead
15:42and delivered his pledge to thwart a Palestinian state.
15:48Malayadoumim rises out of the desert like a fortress, imposing itself on the horizon.
15:54The mayor says they've been waiting to build an E1 for 30 years, that the settlement needs more room for growing Israeli families.
16:05I think it's correct that at a strategic level Malayadoumim be connected to Jerusalem.
16:14Jerusalem is our capital city.
16:16The Palestinians say building an E1 will sever their physical connection to Jerusalem and split the West Bank in two,
16:27making a contiguous Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital impossible.
16:33Yifrak isn't bothered.
16:39I say openly, I don't want a Palestinian state.
16:42Still, I think that building an E1 is not what will prevent it.
16:46Because I know the area and I know from living here that Palestinians have excellent movement from south to north.
16:51Israel severely restricts Palestinian movement, it says for security reasons, with more than 800 barriers,
17:01from military checkpoints to metal gates that can lock Palestinians in or out of their own towns.
17:10Marouf Al-Rafai is with the Palestinian Authority, an advisor on Jerusalem.
17:15He's on his way to visit Palestinians, afraid they're about to lose their livelihoods or their homes to E1.
17:29We lose everything. We lose our jobs. We lose our homes. We are losing our land. We are losing everything.
17:41They live in Al-Aizaria, a Palestinian town next to Malay Adumim and the E1 area due to be developed.
17:55Dozens of small businesses here have been issued with demolition orders by the Israeli military,
18:03leaving people both angry and afraid.
18:05Anas Samir is one of the few willing to speak to us on camera.
18:12Nobody cares about us. Nobody asking about us.
18:18They've already begun clearing their shelves.
18:21I don't believe anybody can stop this.
18:24Actually, nobody. Only by God he can help us.
18:28Now we are going to Jabal al-Baba.
18:37Al-Rafai's sense of frustration and helplessness isn't far from the surface.
18:44I'm going with you and I know we cannot make any difference.
18:51It's very sad to see.
18:53Jabal al-Baba is home to about 80 Bedouin families, more than 400 people, along with the animals they keep.
19:05It's an outcrop of land next to Al-Aizaria and across the valley from Malay Adumim.
19:14Community leader Atala al-Jahalan has a quiet presence.
19:18His life is perched on a precipice.
19:23He tells Al-Rafai they've also been told they've got to leave.
19:27We sat down with him later.
19:29Israel don't want Palestinians here in the land.
19:33You want the land in Palestine, but no one see people Palestinian here.
19:41You want to transfer into Palestinians.
19:42All across the West Bank, Palestinians say Gaza first.
19:51A way of making clear their own problems can't possibly compare.
19:56But while the world watches the destruction of Gaza, Israel's de facto annexation of the West Bank has gone into overdrive.
20:06It's an onslaught on everything that is Palestinian or could give us a viable Palestinian state.
20:17Lawyer Hiba Hussaini was part of the Palestinian negotiating team during the 1990s Oslo peace process,
20:25before it broke down.
20:27Back then, there were an estimated 115,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank.
20:34Today, there are more than half a million, and that doesn't include those in East Jerusalem.
20:42Hussaini says the resurrection of E1, blocked by the international community for decades,
20:48could indeed be a fatal blow for Palestinian statehood.
20:52Already, the West Bank is divided into separate cantons, if you will,
20:58by virtue of the checkpoints and the military checkpoints.
21:03She also says it shouldn't overshadow what else is happening in the West Bank,
21:08like recent Israeli military operations, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians
21:15from decades-old refugee camps like those in Janine and Tolkara.
21:20It's a quiet tsunami happening in the West Bank, moving people slowly away from their homes,
21:30their livelihood, and then the Jordan Valley. I mean, the armed settlers that have full protection
21:37by the Israeli military.
21:43Violence against Palestinians by ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers who say the land is theirs by God-given
21:50right has increased dramatically since October 2023, along with the number of outposts
21:57that can serve as precursors to permanent settlements.
22:00They begin as small camps, usually manned by young men to be approached with caution.
22:15Our crew was quickly turned around when we tried.
22:20They just said go.
22:22We left without a fight, but they followed us.
22:28Why are you following us?
22:29A clear attempt to intimidate, especially our videographer.
22:36I don't know if we should just hit the road.
22:42You see settler outposts everywhere across the West Bank these days.
22:48We're trying to go down to the Jordan Valley.
22:51The Jordan Valley is part of the Fertile Crescent,
22:54and so a valuable agricultural asset for any future Palestinian state.
23:00The city of Jericho lies at the southern end, one of the oldest cities in the world and one of the hottest.
23:08Fans working overtime here to keep new calves cool at a dairy farm run by the Arab Development Society.
23:15It dates back to the 1940s, a gift from Arab governments to help Palestinians improve farming techniques.
23:27Its biggest operation is the dairy with 200 milking cows.
23:31They pasteurize and package on site milk, yogurt, labneh, and deliver it, not just in Jericho, but to clients from Ramallah to Hebron.
23:42But there are fears the E1 development will change that.
23:48Hassan Al-Ashkar is an agricultural development expert with the Palestinian Authority.
23:53It will put a block on all eastern slopes and Jordan Valley, and we will have to use alternative roads to reach our main cities.
24:05Making them less competitive.
24:07One more constraint, he says, on farming communities already choked by the occupation.
24:14Without accessing the import market or export market, we will not be able to develop.
24:19This is a Palestinian neighborhood near Jerusalem, severed years ago by what Israelis call a security barrier,
24:30and Palestinians an apartheid wall.
24:35We've come to see Khalil Tufakci, an expert on Israeli settlements, who says even without E1,
24:42the viability of a Palestinian state is in doubt.
24:45That's despite the lip service countries like Canada have paid to it over the years.
24:51They recognize Palestinians, but if you go to the field, you can't, there is no state.
24:58So if I asked you, is there a point in Canada recognizing Palestine, what is your answer?
25:05The point, now it's very late, but something is better than nothing.
25:10On the other side of the wall, in Ramallah, Hiba Hussaini agrees.
25:19Not only do we appreciate it after such a long time, but it also demonstrates a shift
25:26in policy and in the treatment of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
25:33But both say the jester must move beyond symbolism and fast, with enough pressure on Israel to convince
25:42it to change course, because the sun is setting and the gravediggers began their work long ago.
25:50This has been a CBC News special. Thanks so much for watching.
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