In First Since Oslo, Israel Seizing Land for Army Base Inside West Bank City
PALESTINE ISRAEL GAZA GENOCIDE, 1 Jun 2026
Shatha Yaish | +972Magazine - TRANSCEND Media Service
Israeli tanks seen during an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin, 19 Feb 2025. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)
The seizure order, near Jenin refugee camp, is the latest move aimed at expanding military and settler presence in the north of the occupied territory.
27 May 2026 – After the Israeli army demolished his home inside the Jenin refugee camp, Khaled Safouri took solace in the fact that he still owned a small plot of land in the adjacent city of Jenin, where he hoped to build a new house. But even that may soon be taken from him.
Earlier this month, Israeli authorities issued a seizure order for Safouri’s land and more than seven additional dunams in Jenin’s Al-Jabariyat neighborhood, a hilltop area overlooking Jenin refugee camp. The order comes amid Israel’s more than year-long military campaign in the northern West Bank — dubbed “Operation Iron Wall” — during which the army has occupied refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams, displaced up to 45,000 Palestinians, and carried out vast destruction of civilian infrastructure.
For 50-year-old Safouri, a third-generation Nakba refugee whose family was originally displaced from Saffurriya, near Nazareth, in 1948, the seizure order feels like “a bad omen.”
While Israeli land seizure orders are certainly not uncommon in the occupied West Bank, this case has alarmed residents and human rights organizations because the plots are located in Area A. This is the section of the West Bank where, under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority officially maintains full civil and security control; in Area B, the PA must coordinate security with Israel, while Area C, which comprises more than 60 percent of the territory, remains under full Israeli control.
The PA relayed the military seizure order to landowners in Al-Jabariyat via WhatsApp, with an Arabic-language PDF signed by the Israeli army’s Central Command chief Avi Bluth. According to the document and attached map, the designated plots are being confiscated for “military purposes” and transferred to the relevant defense authorities. The order states that the seizure will remain in effect until the end of 2028, though residents fear the confiscation could become permanent.
Dror Etkes, founder of the anti-settlement watchdog group Kerem Navot, told +972 Magazine that the seizure order and newly-paved military roads clearly indicate Israel’s plans to establish a large military base adjacent to Jenin refugee camp.
While Israel has previously issued a small number of seizure orders affecting Area A, such as for the construction of the separation wall in the early 2000s, Etkes sees the new order as marking a significant escalation. “This is the first time since Oslo that I have seen a seizure order for a military base in Area A,” he said.
Safouri, who now lives with his family of eight in a small rented apartment elsewhere in Jenin, is pained by the prospect of losing yet another piece of property. “This decision is shocking — my land is in Area A,” he lamented. “No one ever imagined this. Our house was demolished, now our land is being seized. How am I supposed to feel?
“Jenin will just be the beginning, and they will take more land in the West Bank,” he warned. “I hope their plans fail.”
Isolating Jenin
Israeli forces have long conducted frequent incursions into every administrative area of the West Bank. “The military is there all the time: They enter houses, stay for a few days or longer, and leave,” Etkes explained. “But what we may see now is something different: more permanent structures and initiatives.”
Etkes said ongoing construction around key junctions and former settlement sites suggests a broader military and infrastructural redeployment across the northern West Bank. In addition to the planned military base in Al-Jabariyat, Israel is “now building a large military base at the junction of Arraba, near Route 60 coming from Ya’bad,” he said. “This will likely become the main base in the area between Jenin and [the Israeli settlement of] Sa-Nur.”
According to Etkes, these military installations signal a major policy shift in the region. “This is [Israel] reestablishing a military presence in the Jenin area,” he said. “The only reasonable interpretation is that it is directly related to the biggest settlement boom in the West Bank.”
In 2005, as part of then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” plan, Israel evacuated all 21 of its settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank: Homesh, Sa-Nur, Ganim, and Kadim. For nearly two decades, this region had remained relatively insulated from direct settlement expansion.
But in the past 3 years, amendments to the Disengagement Law by the current Israeli government removed earlier restrictions on an Israeli presence in parts of the northern West Bank. In April 2026, Israeli ministers celebrated the re-establishment of Sa-Nur — what Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called a “historic correction.”
These developments, as the PA’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission (CWRC) has warned, signal a rapidly changing dynamic. In a recent statement, the commission noted that the approval of new settlement plans, alongside the latest seizure orders, appear aimed at “re-rengineer[ing] the geographical landscape of the northern West Bank, particularly in the Jenin governorate.”
Etkes agreed with that assessment. “There are more than 100 new settlements [including outposts] in the West Bank, and 15 in the Jenin area alone,” he said. “This is not just going back to the four settlements dismantled in 2005. It is something much larger.
“What we are seeing is the construction of settlements between Jenin and the villages around it,” Etkes continued. “One planned settlement, southeast of Jenin, is called ‘Noa.’ There are also two settlements east of Jenin — Ganim and Kadim — that were previously dismantled.
“Just last week, a new outpost called ‘Emek Dotan’ was established west of Arraba [a village southwest of Jenin], in what is expected to become a major blow to the village,” he continued. “Such outposts have some of the worst histories in terms of bringing ultra-violent settlers into an area in order to terrorize local residents — and this is what we are likely to see in Jenin as well.”
According to Etkes, new infrastructure projects are also reshaping the area around Jenin. “They are creating roads toward Silat Al-Harithiya and Al-Yamun, northwest of Jenin,” he said, where several settlements are being planned. “These roads are being built as access routes for equipment and infrastructure — most likely future routes for settlers.
“The aim is to strengthen the settlements that already exist along these routes, effectively surrounding Jenin and disconnecting it from its immediate rural surroundings,” Etkes concluded. “These are methods that we recognize from settlement expansion patterns elsewhere.”
‘This plot is the only thing we have left’
Jihad Qabha, who owns a 750-square-meter plot in the area of Al-Jabariyat affected by the seizure order, described the move as part of a wider Israeli crackdown on the West Bank under the cover of the war in Gaza. “Checkpoints are fragmenting the West Bank,” he told +972. “There are land confiscations and settlement expansion everywhere.” In Silat Al-Harithiya and Al-Yamoun, as well as in Arraba, he said, residents see Israeli bulldozers operating.
Military seizure orders are notoriously difficult to challenge in Israeli courts. According to Amir Daoud, a senior official at the CWRC, the appeals process largely serves as a procedural formality.
“The objection to military seizure orders takes place within the same legal system that issued the order, rather than before an independent and impartial body,” Daoud told +972. “The military commander is the authority empowered to issue seizure orders under the pretext of ‘security needs,’ while the military courts and even the Israeli Supreme Court generally examine these orders from the perspective of the ‘security interest’ as defined by the army itself, rather than from the perspective of the rights of the population living under occupation.”
Israeli authorities are granted broad discretion to rely on classified material or security claims that, as Daoud explained, Palestinians are unable to effectively contest.
“In most cases, courts do not examine the fundamental legality of the land seizure under occupation,” he said. “They limit themselves to reviewing the ‘reasonableness’ of the measure and its administrative form. This makes the annulment of such orders very rare and turns the objection process into a tool for providing legal cover to decisions that have effectively already been made.”
In the seizure order affecting Al-Jabariyat, Israeli authorities gave landowners only one week to file objections. “They said we have the right to protest and file a complaint,” Qabaha said. “So they are prepared to resort to legal procedures, and they may listen, but the whole matter is outrageous. What does it mean to give us just one week to object?
“We, as landowners, did not personally submit an objection, but the Palestinian civil coordination said it would file a complaint regarding these lands,” he added. “We hope there is some legal provision we can rely on.”
For many residents, land is the last meaningful asset they have left — after losing their homes and livelihoods in Israel’s takeover of the Jenin refugee camp, or amid the broader economic and political hardship.
Mahmoud Abu Eita, 24, inherited part of the land in Al-Jabariyat with his siblings after their father died. His family also lost their home in Jenin refugee camp. “We are shocked,” he said. “This plot is the only thing we have left after our house was demolished in the camp. We can’t afford to keep renting [in Jenin]; we wanted to build.”
Alia Mohammad Mahmoud Yahya, a 56-year-old widow from the village of Kafr Ra’i, owns an 829-square-meter plot that is also affected by the seizure order. “After my husband died, this land was the only thing I held onto for my children,” she told +972 near her plot. “Now we feel we may lose that too. Who is going to compensate us?”
In response to +972’s request for comment, the IDF Spokesperson sent the following statement: “As part of the IDF’s spatial organization in northern Samaria and in accordance with operational considerations, it was decided to establish a military outpost in Jenin. The establishment of the outpost is being carried out in accordance with the binding legal provisions in this matter, and has passed all the required approvals within and outside the IDF.”
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Shatha Yaish is a journalist covering East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Tags: Anti Zionism, Collective Punishment, Colonialism, Colonization, Crimes against Humanity, Cultural violence, Direct violence, Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, Israel, Israeli occupation, Palestine, Palestinian Holocaust, Sociocide, State Terrorism, Structural violence, USA, War crimes, West Bank
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