An Amnesty International report called attention to Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Bedouin and herding communities in the occupied West Bank, saying the measures were designed to accelerate the annexation of the Palestinian territory.
“Israeli authorities are accelerating annexation through a state-driven campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities” of the occupied West Bank, said the report released on Wednesday.
Amnesty said its research showed that 27 Bedouin and herding communities comprising hundreds of Palestinians were forcibly displaced between 2023 and 2025 or were at risk of displacement in the West Bank’s Area C, which encompasses 60 percent of the territory and is under Israeli control under the Oslo agreements.
In the report titled “Erasing anything Palestinian: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of West Bank Bedouin and herding communities”, Amnesty accused Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of catering to the settler movement’s religious nationalist agenda.
“It has accelerated settlement expansion and land grabs, increased financial and logistical support to settlements, and it has armed settlers, thereby enabling a brutal state-sanctioned campaign of settler violence,” the report said.
The “ethnic cleansing campaign is state-led, and state-sponsored, not driven by rogue settlers or so-called extremist ministers”, the report concluded.
