Settlement & Annexation Report: September 18, 2026

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September 18, 2026

  1. WEST BANK: Second E-1 Tender Set to Open, Court Freezes WB Land Registraiton Tender, Update from Qusra, New B’Tselem Report: “The Elimination Project”
  2. BONUS READS

NEW FROM FMEP

  • PODCAST: What Will Sanctions on Israel do? ft. FMEP Fellow Peter Beinart in conversation with international lawyer Itay Epshtain about the recent decision by 12 countries, led by the UK and France and including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, to UK, to impose sanctions on Israel, including import bans on goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

WEST BANK

Second  E-1 Tender Set to Open

On September 16th, the Israeli government announced it will soon open a bidding period for a second tender for the construction of the E-1 settlement area. This new tender provides for the construction of 2,167 new settlement units, adding to the 1,234 units attached to the first tender for E-1 which was published less than one month ago, The new tender is set to open on October 25th, just two days before the Israeli elections. Together, the two tenders provide for the construction of the entire E-1 settlement as planned.

Ir Amim also reports the Israeli government updated the publication date for a third tender related to the E-1 area to provide for the construction of an employment and commercial zone. This tender is now set to open on November 2nd.

Peace Now said in a statement:

“The Israeli government is making a deliberate effort to tie the hands of the next government and make it as difficult as possible to halt the E1 project, even if the next government wants to do so. It is seeking to create facts on the ground that will make any future political agreement guaranteeing peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians even harder to achieve.

Following the UK announcement last week, should Israeli companies and institutions choose to participate in and cooperate with these tenders, they risk being subjected to UK sanctions, potentially causing further damage to the Israeli economy as a whole.

Beyond the direct damage to the possibility of ever reaching a two-state solution, and thus to Israel’s security, it seems that nothing in this world could cause greater collateral damage to Israel’s economy and our foreign relations than the actions of the Israeli government itself, particularly its actions regarding E1.”

Court Freezes Tender for West Bank Land Registration

The Times of Israel reports the Jerusalem District Court has issued an order temporarily freezing a tender that was issued for the job of managing land registration across the West Bank. The tender was challenged by a petition filed by a trio of Israeli human rights groups – Yesh Din, ACRI, and Bimkom

Qusra Update

Palestinians in Qusra remain trapped in their homes and their village as the IDF has failed to keep settlers freely roaming the hillsides of Qusra, threatening violence against any Palestinians who venture out. In the month since the IDF dismantled two outposts settlers had built outside the two homes, the military has failed to enforce a close military zone order to keep the settlers away from the village – though the order has been enforced to keep Palestinians from leaving their homes. Settles have also taken up residence in buildings inside of Qusra, including a multistory building under construction – using the village’s own buildings as outposts inside Area B.

Rather than removing the settlers, the IDF soldiers are regularly seen speaking cordially with the settlers, and were filmed celebrating Rosh Hashanah with the settlers.

In addition, the IDF arrested a Palestinian American reporter (a young mother of three) whose coverage had focused on the ongoing siege on Qusra. Israel has said the reporter, Naqaa Hamed, has been placed under administrative detention (so, imprisoned with no charge) for at least six days.

B’Tselem Report: Israel Is Carrying Out Systematic Ethnic Cleansing in West Bank

B’Tselem has published a new report calling Israel’s policies and actions in the West Bank ethnic cleansing. The report, entitled “The Elimination Project” documents and explains what B’Tselem identifies as five mutually reinforcing mechanisms that Israeli is using to dismantle Palestinian collective existence in the West Bank and to establish a permanent, contiguous Jewish-Israeli presence and sovereignty. Those five mechanisms are:

  1. Violence and intimidation: Israel is using military forces and armed settler militias to impose violence, fear and coercion. From 7 October 2023 through 31 August 2026, Israel killed 1,107 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 245 children.
  2. Ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover: Israel is using military operations, demolitions and state-backed settler farms and outposts to drive Palestinians from their land and expand Jewish presence there. To date, 75 Palestinian communities have been forcibly displaced; settler farms and outposts have taken control of 1.07 million dunams of land (18% of the West Bank); and about 33,000 Palestinians have been displaced from refugee camps in the northern West Bank.
  3. Movement restrictions: Israel is fragmenting Palestinian space through checkpoints, gates and roadblocks. By the end of 2025, OCHA documented 925 movement obstacles throughout the West Bank.
  4. Economic strangulation: Israel is using its control over employment, Palestinian revenues, finance and infrastructure to deepen economic crisis and dependence. Unemployment rose from 13.1% in 2022 to over 31% in 2024, amid mass permit revocations and intensified withholding of revenues.
  5. Social and political destruction: Israel criminalizes political organizing, raids and shuts down civil society offices, suppresses protests and arrests activists, students and journalists. Since October 2023, Israel has arrested at least 60 Palestinian journalists from the West Bank.

In the New York Times, B’Tselem’s Executive Director Yuli Novak writes: 

“The word we settled on to describe what these seemingly separate acts add up to is “elimination.” The logic of elimination does not require every Palestinian to disappear. It seeks to make Palestinian collective life increasingly impossible while securing permanent Israeli Jewish control. In Gaza, the logic of elimination has taken its most extreme form: genocide. In the West Bank, it dismantles the conditions that allow Palestinians to remain on their land and live as a society and a people.

And yet, even as Israel states its goals openly, international governments and institutions keep recasting those aims in conventional political language: a conflict to be managed, an occupation expected to end, an extremist government that needs to be restrained. That reframing lets governments condemn violence without confronting the system behind it. It lets them remain within a reassuring political story, rather than facing their obligations under international law and exerting the sustained pressure it would take to reverse it. It obscures the larger reality: a new phase of the political project to make Israeli Jewish control permanent while dismantling the conditions for Palestinian collective life.”

BONUS READS

  1. “A West Bank-style settler outpost comes to northern Israel” (+972 Magazine, 9/17/2026)
  2. “From Hilltops to Houses: A New Phase of Israeli Settlement Expansion” (Arab Center DC, 9/18/2026)
  3. “Israel merges two settler outposts near Jerusalem, furthering the fragmentation of the West Bank” (Mondowess, 9/14/2026)
  4. ““Mishmar Yehuda”: From an Outpost to a Massive Settlement, Linking E1 and E2 Settlement Projects While Marking the Largest Land Seizure in Bethlehem in Decades” (Balasan Initiative, 9/9/2026)
  5. “Besieging Palestinian Communities: Escalated Pattern of Settler Terror and Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank” (Balasan Initiative, 9/17/2026)
  6. “Israel Razes Homes in Three West Bank Villages Inside Firing Zone, Displacing Over 100 Palestinians” (Haaretz, 9/14/2026)
  7. “Israeli Soldier on Leave Arrested After Firing Toward West Bank Village” (Haaretz, 9/13/2026)
  8. “Police Officer Tied to Illegal West Bank Antiquities Thefts Also Visited Area B Cave” (Haaretz, 9/15/2026)