JERUSALEM: Over the past six decades, Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank have been a steady tenet of successive Israeli governments — but nothing compares to their exploding pace over the past few years.

Almost half of the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory — all illegal under international law — were established since 2023, according to an AFP analysis of data from the Israeli rights group Peace Now, the International Crisis Group (ICG) and the UN humanitarian office (OCHA).

Including east Jerusalem, which Israel took over in 1967 and later formally annexed, more than 550 settlements in total were built in the past 60 years, Peace Now reported.

These include so-called settlements outposts, set up by settlers without formal government approval.

More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank — 700,000 when including east Jerusalem — as well as over three million Palestinians.

The Israeli population in the territory has increased by nearly 50 percent since 2012, while the Palestinian population has grown by 30 percent, according to the ICG.

OUTPOST-DRIVEN

Since Hamas’s unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack that triggered the war in Gaza, settlement expansion in the West Bank has largely been driven by a surge in the number of outposts, particularly farms.

Often consisting of a few caravans of prefabricated homes occupied by a handful of settler families, settlement outposts have multiplied, encouraged by Israel’s increasing legalization of such outfits in recent years.

According to Peace Now, around 90 farms and other outposts have been established in the West Bank since the beginning of 2026, already reaching the level recorded throughout 2025 and almost three times the number established in 2023.

Outposts began appearing in the 1990s, around the time Benjamin Netanyahu first came to power. As their numbers increased, the establishment of new conventional settlements slowed.

The appearance of settler farms began in 2012, during Netanyahu’s second stint in office, and have since become the driving force behind Israeli expansion in the territory, accounting for more than two-thirds of the total since 2023.

These farms, which offer Israelis the advantage of occupying more land with fewer settlers, are primarily used for livestock farming rather than crop cultivation as in other settlements.

They often control vast areas, located mainly in the eastern West Bank along the Jordan River or in the hilltops near Ramallah, where previous Palestinian communities have been driven off the land to make way for outposts.

GOVERNMENT-BACKED

Since Netanyahu’s latest return to power, and particularly since October 7, 2023, the number of construction permits issued by the Israeli authorities in the West Bank has soared.

More than 23,000 permits were issued in 2025, over three times the 2012 figure, according to the ICG.

In a symbolic development during this election year, four northern West Bank settlements evacuated in 2005 as part of a disengagement plan that also covered the Gaza Strip have been officially re-established at the government’s initiative.

A tender has also been issued for the construction of more than 1,200 housing units, the first phase of the so-called E1 project adjoining the settlement of Maale Adumim, near Jerusalem.

The project has been condemned by the United Nations and foreign countries, amid warnings it would complete the isolation of east Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, further jeopardizing the possibility of a future Palestinian state.

SUCCESSIVE WAVES

Settlement expansion has been a constant fixture of every Israeli government, right or left, since Israel began occupying the West Bank in 1967.

Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem, was the first to be authorized by the Labour government that year.

A first wave of settlement creation took place in the early 1980s under former prime minister Menachem Begin’s government.

Settlers established increasing numbers of unauthorized outposts in 1998-2002 and then again in 2019-2021.