The Tightening Grip of the Jews on the West Bank Is a Systematic Policy of Displacement
(Translated)

Al-Rayah Newspaper - Issue 587 - 18/02/2026

Ustad Abdullah Al-Nabali

The lands of the West Bank are no longer taken secretly. They are being taken openly, in front of the whole world, while there is a heavy silence from an Ummah that is supposed to stand as a witness for humanity—not as a witness to its own destruction.

Today, the Jewish entity is tightening its grip more and more on the people of the West Bank. It demolishes their homes, takes their land, erases their identity, and surrounds their cities and villages until they can barely breathe.

This scene is not surprising. It is only a new chapter in a long story of removing the people of Palestine from their land—of taking the soul out of the place and turning history into rubble.

What the Jewish entity is doing today is not just a temporary security escalation. It is a move into a new “legal and administrative” phase of a project aimed at displacing the people of the West Bank.

As for the approval by the Jewish entity security cabinet of decisions that speed up settlement expansion in the West Bank, remove restrictions on selling Palestinian property to Jews, allow demolitions inside areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and transfer planning powers in Al-Khalil (Hebron), around the Ibrahimi Masjid, and in Bayt Lahm  (Bethlehem) to the control of the Jewish entity;  all these steps practically break apart what little independence was left. They turn the Palestinian Authority into an administrative cover, without real sovereignty, preparing the ground for a new demographic reality.

These decisions do not target the land alone. They target its people in order to pressure them into slowly leaving. When a person’s house is demolished, his land is taken, building becomes nearly impossible, and his livelihood is strangled, staying becomes a heavy burden on his very existence. Here, displacement changes from direct expulsion into a policy of slow suffocation.

In Al-Khalil (Hebron), where the Ibrahimi Masjid stands, the Jewish entity strengthens its control through planning, construction, and settlement, not as simple organization of space, but as a sovereign act that touches the heart of the struggle over the land.

In Bayt Lahm (Bethlehem), the Jewish entity lays siege upon the city with settlements and checkpoints, completing a policy of separating it from its natural surroundings, turning it into an isolated area cut off from normal life.

In the villages spread across the hills of the West Bank, roads are closed, hearts are besieged, and people are expected to get used to oppression, as they get used to breathing air.

What the Jewish entity is doing is not just administrative decisions or security arrangements. It is a comprehensive project of uprooting: uprooting land, uprooting memory, uprooting rights, uprooting hope. It is a project that says to the people of Palestine: either leave, or live as strangers on your own land, without shade, without a roof, without a future.

At the same time, the people of Palestine face pressure not only from occupation, but also from the domestic authority. The Palestinian Authority, which sees the cause of Palestine as a financial project to fill the bank accounts of its officials, continues to burden the people with taxes and fees. Despite the war on Gaza over the past two years and the tightening grip on the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority exhausts the people financially while lacking real independent authority, or the ability to protect the people, and shows little effort in confronting the settlement project.

In this sense, the pressure on the people of Palestine becomes a doubled pressure: a Jewish occupation that takes their land and sanctities, and a Palestinian Authority that takes their money through customs, taxes, bribes, and fees.

The overall picture becomes clear: we are facing an organized policy of demographic emptying, managed through planning and economics, not only through tanks. The goal is not just to manage the West Bank, but to change its demographic identity, to empty it of its people, and push them to leave or to shrink into suffocating enclaves with no horizon.

After all, what the Jewish entity is doing in the West Bank is not an isolated local event. It is part of a long-term project of occupation and expansion at the expense of Muslim lands, on a Blessed Land that holds the first Qiblah and the site of the Isra’a (Night Journey) of the Prophet (saw), Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa.

Confronting this project does not come through emotional speeches alone. It requires a deep understanding of its nature and rebuilding the awareness of the Ummah, so it realizes that the struggle is not about one house here, or one road there, but about a land whose soil was watered by the blood of the noble Companions (ra) and is mentioned in an Ayah written in the Qur’an. When the Ummah truly understands this, no occupation or settlement will remain, and the Blessed Land will become the heartland of the Abode of Islam.