Escalating Violence and Settlement Expansion in Israel/Palestine Ahead of Elections

On July 17, hours after Israel’s parliament formally dissolved itself and set an October 27 election date, an Israeli drone struck a funeral procession outside Ahmad Yassin Mosque in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least eight mourners as they buried a man killed hours earlier.

The UN human rights office said Israeli attacks have killed at least 57 Palestinians, including six children and eight women, between July 13 and 20, warning that the pattern “raises concerns of continuing violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and other possible atrocity crimes in Gaza”.

In the same week, Israel’s military carried out daily killings, ministers raced to pass legislation before parliament dissolved, the Civil Administration issued demolition and land-seizure orders, and settlers attacked Palestinians with near-total impunity.

All of this points towards an unrelenting few months of violence and dispossession before elections take place.

A mass-casualty week in Gaza

Beyond the Nuseirat funeral strike, the week’s Gaza toll included a string of air attacks on homes and displaced families.

On July 15, an Israeli helicopter attack killed Omar Sami Abu Qassem, his wife Asmaa Ghazi and their six-year-old daughter Habiba in Deir el-Balah; their three-year-old son was the only survivor. On July 18, an Israeli warplane struck a residential building in Gaza City’s Nassr neighbourhood without warning, killing Adham Nasman, his wife Marwa and three of their children; a third child survived only because he was not home. Israel claimed that Nasman was a Hamas commander – the group has not issued a statement confirming that.

A day later, Rida Abu Asr was killed by Israeli artillery shelling in Zeitoun, one of several people killed in the neighbourhood that day as tanks advanced towards Dawla Junction, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa. Israeli strikes also killed seven police officers, including the director of Jabalia’s police station, in an attack on a checkpoint on July 14, and repeatedly hit tents sheltering displaced families in al-Mawasi throughout the week, according to Wafa.

Then, an overnight Israeli air attack on July 21 killed Firas al-Masri, his wife Salsabeel and their four children as they slept in Gaza City, according to medical officials.

Amid this string of mass-casualty attacks, Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz told Channel 14, while touring northern Gaza, he felt satisfaction from the scenes of destruction, which he said resulted from a deliberate Israeli policy. He added that Israel was studying the establishment of three military-style settlement outposts in northern Gaza.

Katz’s statements coincided with a march on Sunday by the Nachala settler movement to the Gaza border fence, in which right-wing Israelis – accompanied by more than a dozen ministers and legislators, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and endorsed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party – called for the re-establishment of settlements inside Gaza.

On the other side of the fence, the Israeli-controlled “Yellow Line” has continued expanding westward, with new blocks placed near al-Qarara and reaching the Abu Miri roundabout east of Deir el-Balah, forcing hundreds more families to flee Israel’s advance, according to local sources.

Amid such developments, the humanitarian picture in Gaza, laid out in the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ (OCHA) July 16 situation report, continues to deteriorate.

Sixty-three percent of households in Gaza now access less than six litres of drinking water a day, while 60 percent live within 10 metres of exposed sewage. Livestock feed imports have been blocked for more than a month, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) confirmed, tripling barley prices and threatening a die-off in August that would reverse the modest herd recovery recorded between October 2025 and May 2026.

Israeli settler roads open – and Palestinian gates close

The escalation in Gaza parallelled a sharpening campaign to create “facts on the ground” across the occupied West Bank. This past week, the Israeli security cabinet approved 1.3 billion shekels ($426.3m) to establish 34 new illegal settlements. On July 15, it approved an additional 1.075 billion shekels ($352.5m) for settler road infrastructure, Wafa reported, which will support much of the new settlements and outposts reaching far-flung areas of the West Bank. Smotrich called the decision a “settlement and security revolution”, aiming to establish more than 100 settlements and 160 agricultural and pastoral outposts.

That funding framework provided the context for this week’s wave of demolitions, whose stated purpose has moved beyond permit enforcement to clearing land for the proliferating settlement infrastructure campaign.

Israel’s Crimson Thread barrier project continued with the systematic destruction of Palestinian water infrastructure in the northern Jordan Valley, with Israeli forces and settlers destroying three artesian wells near Atuf, confiscating pumps and generators, and severing roughly 800 metres of pipeline serving 4,500 dunams (4.5 square kilometres) of farmland, according to the Atuf Village Council.

In Masafer Yatta, the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission has tied a wave of demolition and stop-work orders in Ad-Deirat and Ar Rifaiyya directly to a planned settlement road to run alongside Route 356 – a project that puts three of five local schools serving 700 children at risk, including Ar Rifaiyya’s, which lost a court appeal against demolition on July 8.

Israeli authorities also issued a military order seizing land in Jaba, north of occupied East Jerusalem, for what Palestinian officials say is another settlement road linking Route 60 to the Nabi Yaqub settlement – the latest in a string of military seizure orders used to facilitate settlement infrastructure.

The same infrastructure drive has increasingly shaped the geography of violence in the occupied West Bank, including in al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, where 17-year-old national youth football player Fadi al-Naasan died on July 18 of wounds from a settler-and-army raid on July 11 – the seventh al-Mughayyir resident killed since October 2023, including four minors. Israeli activist Jonathan Pollack has tied the repeated killings there to a deliberate campaign to carve a settlement corridor linking the Shilo bloc to the Jordan Valley.

Likewise, the West Bank saw a number of entire towns sealed behind military gates. Sinjil, north of Ramallah, bore the full brunt of this campaign. Israeli forces sealed Sinjil’s entrances with earth mounds and a barbed-wire fence that has swallowed farmland, and then raided the town nightly, according to Wafa and local activist Ayed Jafry. On the night of July 16, more than 100 armed settlers attacked the town’s outskirts; residents confronted them at close range and forced them to flee amid what Jafry described as gunfire “from every direction”. Settlers returned at dawn under army protection to burn crops.

In addition, Israeli forces sealed the western entrance to Bethlehem’s countryside with a new iron gate at al-Shouli, cutting off Husan, Battir, Nahhalin and Wadi Fukin; closed the Atara and Ein Siniya checkpoints – the latter one of the last reliable open routes for Ramallah residents – simultaneously for hours; and reinforced a three-year-old gate closure at Idhna, west of Hebron, with concrete blocks, according to Wafa.

Deir Jarir, east of Ramallah, saw its own lethal raid the night of July 19, when a large military raid combined with an attempted settler theft of roughly 70 sheep left two men, Ahmad Abu Makhou, 26, and Odeh Farakhna, 53, dead from gunshot wounds; Pollack said witnesses gave conflicting accounts of whether soldiers or settlers fired the fatal shots.

Livestock theft under military escort recurred so often this week, including the seizure of more than 180 sheep from a single family in Khirbet Emneizal and repeated raids on flocks in nearby Wadi al-Rakheem, that it has become an expected condition of life in Masafer Yatta, in the words of local activist Osama Makhamreh.

In at-Tawani, also in Masafer Yatta, settlers burned the village mosque, with one assailant boasting in graffiti that “I’m under house arrest”, two homes and a dairy factory on July 18 and 19, according to Makhamreh, Murad Samara and Wafa.

Red meat for the base

Meanwhile, on July 20, Hamas elected Khalil al-Hayya as head of its political bureau, ending nearly two years of collective leadership following Yahya Sinwar’s killing.

In its final hours before the Israeli government’s dissolution, Netanyahu’s outgoing coalition pushed through a legislative blitz, including a Communications Law handing the government control over broadcast media and protections shielding ultra-Orthodox men from conscription.