Israeli Ministers Turn West Bank Occupation Into Election Campaign Material

Ahead of an October election in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc is behind in the polls, far-right Israeli ministers have turned the machinery of occupation into campaign material over the last week – not merely as policy, but as the message itself.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose face already appears on campaign billboards across the occupied West Bank, released an AI-generated ad warning that he would do to the Negev and Galilee – areas with large Palestinian populations inside Israel – what he has done to the occupied West Bank by building Jewish settlements there under the slogan “Ahmed is right to be afraid”.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir responded with his own AI video depicting overweight Palestinian prisoners entering Israeli jails on an assembly line and emerging emaciated and crying. He also published a video of himself berating Palestinian women prisoners and separately planted an Israeli flag on seized United Nations agency for Palestinian refugee (UNRWA) facilities in occupied East Jerusalem.

These were not rhetorical excesses divorced from policy; each echoed recent broader government actions or pressure this week – from seizing a UN facility to a hardening right-wing push for a post-election ground operation to reoccupy Gaza City rather than proceed with Hamas’s disarmament. As the campaign rhetoric intensified, illegal outposts multiplied, demolitions and evictions continued across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Gaza’s death toll widened again beyond the narrower “targeted assassination” framing to include farmers, delivery workers, fishermen and children.

Gaza’s killings returns to its old shape

Following a brief lull leading up to talks with the Trump-appointed Board of Peace, Israel had framed a return to Gaza strikes around targeting individually named “commanders” of Hamas, though this in practice also included figures from Gaza’s police force.

This week, such pretenses were set aside as the toll widened again to Gaza’s general population. A drone killed three members of the Abdin family while they farmed land in al-Qarara on August 28. Another man was reportedly killed the next day, August 29, near Deir el-Balah. Separate strikes killed at least four people working as delivery drivers or riding electric bikes, and a quadcopter dropped a bomb on children collecting water near a road junction in Gaza City’s historic Tuffah neighborhood.

On August 30, a strike near a bakery west of Deir el-Balah killed Husam Osama Nasir and three-year-old Tim Said Mahmoud Hamdan. On August 31, two Palestinians were killed and several wounded following an Israeli airstrike targeting the entrance of a residential building near the Municipality Park in Gaza City.

Hospitals were hit as well. A drone struck a medicine warehouse inside al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah on August 29, wounding three. Hospital officials also reported that cancer medicines had run out entirely after a strike damaged the hospital’s water tanks and laboratory equipment.

Beyond the daily strikes, Israeli journalist Amir Bohbot reported in Walla News that Israel’s military leadership now views a ground operation to reoccupy Gaza City as “unavoidable”. The plan, presented by the chief of the Israeli miltary’s Southern Command which oversees military operations on the Gaza border, would involve evacuating residents to new “humanitarian zones” but is timed for after the October election.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported 32 additional deaths last week, bringing the toll since the October “ceasefire” to at least 1,320 by August 31, and the cumulative death toll since October 2023 to 73,456. Some 58 percent of Gaza’s population still faces “critical or catastrophic” shelter conditions, according to the latest humanitarian situation report from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

A widening map of settler violence

In the West Bank, meanwhile, settlers’ efforts to forcefully remove Palestinians from their own homes as part of the ongoing pogrom there continued, including in al-Mughayyir, a village northeast of Ramallah, which soldiers and masked settlers jointly raided on the evening of August 30.

Soldiers shot four residents, sealing the village’s only entrance while settlers besieged a home and loaded stolen property onto a pickup truck.

Beyond al-Mughayyir and Qusra – where Israeli authorities erected three new metal roadblocks encircling the Ras al-Ain hilltop on August 27 – settler violence spanned dozens of incidents this week, according to reports by the Palestinian news agency Wafa and OCHA. In al-Karmel, south of Hebron, soldiers opened fire on a vehicle carrying women home from a wedding on August 27, wounding Sanaa Abu Aram, Doaa al-Hroush and 14-year-old Lana al-Hroush.

In Beita, south of Nablus, settlers attacked and ransacked homes on August 30; Israeli NGO B’Tselem said such vandalism is “routine” and “carried out with the full backing of the Israeli authorities”, with soldiers sometimes participating and other times simply standing by.

Late on August 30, two Palestinians were killed and one detained in an Israeli raid on Nablus city. Elsewhere, among a litany of other incidents in the occupied West Bank, settlers set fire to a grove in Turmus Ayya north of Ramallah, assaulted a former Bethlehem governor, beat two elderly sisters picking figs in Silwad, abducted a British protective-presence activist in Masafer Yatta and stripped gates from Palestinian farmland southeast of Bethlehem, according to Wafa and reports from local activists.

Land seizures, outposts and demolitions

All the while, the Israeli state accelerated the land seizures that Smotrich is now campaigning on. Israel issued a military order seizing land around al-Bireh on the outskirts of Ramallah to encircle the nearby Psagot settlement – illegal under international law – with a “security route”. This is one of 46 such buffer-zone orders issued since October 2023, according to maps and documents shared by the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission.

In Nahalin, west of Bethlehem, settlers leveled land to expand Beitar Illit under what a local source said was the direct supervision of the settlement administration. Similar work began near al-Minya to convert an outpost into a full settlement, according to Wafa.

Separately, the Israeli monitoring group Peace Now reported that settlers have established at least 26 new outposts specifically within Area B – nominally under full or partial Palestinian civil administration – over the past two and a half years, with more than 100sq km (39sq miles) now under settler control across Areas A and B combined.

As illegal Israeli outposts were built or expanded, demolitions of Palestinian homes continued. On August 31, Israeli forces demolished two homes in Nablus city and began large-scale demolitions in the al-Saqi area of Birzeit, north of Ramallah, according to Wafa. The commission reported 80 Israeli demolition operations in July alone.