Israeli outpost settlers rapidly seizing West Bank land

Last October, Palestinian grandmother Ayesha Shtayyeh says a man pointed a gun at her head and told her to leave the place she had called home for 50 years.

She told the BBC the armed threat was the culmination of an increasingly violent campaign of harassment and intimidation that began in 2021, after an illegal settler outpost was established close to her home in the occupied West Bank.

The number of these outposts has risen rapidly in recent years, new BBC analysis shows. There are currently at least 196 across the West Bank, and 29 were set up last year – more than in any previous year.

The outposts – which can be farms, clusters of houses, or even groups of caravans – often lack defined boundaries and are illegal under both Israeli and international law.

But the BBC World Service has seen documents showing that organisations with close ties to the Israeli government have provided money and land used to establish new illegal outposts.

The BBC has also analysed open source intelligence to examine their proliferation, and has investigated the settler who Ayesha Shtayyeh says threatened her.

Experts say outposts are able to seize large swathes of land more rapidly than settlements, and are increasingly linked to violence and harassment towards Palestinian communities.

Official figures for the number of outposts do not exist. But BBC Eye reviewed lists of them and their locations gathered by Israeli anti-settlement watchdogs Peace Now and Kerem Navot – as well as the Palestinian Authority, which runs part of the occupied West Bank.

We analysed hundreds of satellite images to verify that outposts had been constructed at these locations and to confirm the year they were set up. The BBC also checked social media posts, Israeli government publications and news sources to corroborate this and to show that outposts were still in use.

Our analysis suggests almost half (89) of the 196 outposts we verified have been built since 2019.

Some of these are linked to growing violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Earlier this year, the British government sanctioned eight extremist settlers for inciting or perpetrating violence against Palestinians. At least six had established, or are living on, illegal outposts.

A former commander of the Israeli army in the West Bank, Avi Mizrahi, says most settlers are law-abiding Israeli citizens, but he does admit the existence of outposts makes violence more likely.

“Whenever you put outposts illegally in the area, it brings tensions with the Palestinians… living in the same area,” he says.

One of the extremist settlers sanctioned by the UK was Moshe Sharvit – the man Ayesha says threatened her at gunpoint. Both he and the outpost he set up less than 800m (0.5miles) from Ayesha’s home, were also sanctioned by the US government in March. His outpost was described as a “base from which he perpetrates violence against Palestinians”.

“He’s made our life hell,” Ayesha says, who must now live with her son in a town close to Nablus.

Outposts lack any official Israeli planning approval – unlike settlements, which are larger, typically urban, Jewish enclaves built throughout the West Bank, legal under Israeli law.

Both are considered illegal under international law, which forbids moving a civilian population into an occupied territory. But many settlers living in the West Bank claim that, as Jews, they have a religious and historical connection to the land.

In July, the UN’s top court, in a landmark opinion, said Israel should stop all new settlement activity and evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Israel rejected the opinion as “fundamentally wrong” and one-sided.

Despite outposts having no legal status, there is little evidence that the Israeli government has been trying to prevent their rapid growth in numbers.

The BBC has seen new evidence showing how two organisations with close ties to the Israeli state have provided money and land used to set up new outposts in the West Bank.

One is the World Zionist Organization (WZO), an international body founded more than a century ago and instrumental in the establishment of the state of Israel. It has a Settlement Division – responsible for managing large areas of the land occupied by Israel since 1967. The division is funded entirely by Israeli public funds and describes itself as an “arm of the Israeli state”.

Contracts obtained by Peace Now, and analysed by the BBC, show the Settlement Division has repeatedly allocated land on which outposts have been built. In the contracts, the WZO forbids the building of any structures and says the land should only be used for grazing or farming – but satellite imagery reveals that, in at least four cases, illegal outposts were built on it.

One of these contracts was signed by Zvi Bar Yosef in 2018. He – like Moshe Sharvit – was sanctioned by the UK and US earlier this year for violence and intimidation against Palestinians.

We contacted the WZO to ask if it was aware that multiple tracts of land it had allocated for grazing and farming were being used for the construction of illegal outposts. It did not respond. We also put questions to Zvi Bar Yosef, but received no reply.

The BBC has also uncovered two documents revealing that another key settler organisation – Amana – loaned hundreds of thousands of shekels to help establish outposts.

In one case, the organisation loaned NIS 1,000,000 ($270,000/£205,000) to a settler to build greenhouses on an outpost considered illegal under Israeli law.

Amana was founded in 1978 and has worked closely with the Israeli government to build settlements throughout the West Bank ever since.

But in recent years, there has been growing evidence that Amana also supports outposts.

In a recording from a meeting of executives in 2021, leaked by an activist, Amana’s CEO Ze’ev Hever can be heard stating that: “In the last three years… one operation we have expanded is the herding farm [outposts].”

“Today, the area [they control] is almost twice the size of built settlements.”

This year, the Canadian government included Amana in a round of sanctions against individuals and organisations responsible for “violent and destabilising actions against Palestinian civilians and their property in the West Bank”. The sanctions did not mention outposts.

There is also a trend of the Israeli government retroactively legalising outposts – effectively transforming them into settlements. Last year, for example, the government began the process of legalising at least 10 outposts, and granted at least six others full legal status.

In February, Moshe Sharvit – the settler Ayesha Shtayyeh says evicted her from her home – hosted an open day at his outpost, filmed by a local camera crew. Speaking candidly, he laid out just how effective outposts can be for capturing land.

“The biggest regret when we [settlers] built settlements was that we got stuck within the fences and couldn’t expand,” he told the crowd. “The farm is very important, but the most important thing for us is the surrounding area.”

He claimed he now controls about 7,000 dunams (7 sq km) of land – an area greater than many large, urban settlements in the West Bank with populations in the thousands.

Gaining control over large areas, often at the expense of Palestinian communities, is a key goal for some settlers who set up and live on outposts, says Hagit Ofran of Peace Now.

“Settlers who live on the hilltop [outposts] see themselves as ‘protecting lands’ and their daily job is to kick out Palestinians from the area,” she says.

Ayesha says that Moshe Sharvit began a campaign of harassment and intimidation almost as soon as he set up his outpost in late 2021.

When her husband, Nabil, grazed his goats in pastures he had used for decades, Sharvit would quickly arrive in an all-terrain vehicle and he and young settlers would chase the animals away, he says.

“I responded that we’d leave if the government, or police, or judge tells us to,” Nabil says.

“He told me: ‘I’m the government, and I’m the judge, and I’m the police.’”

Through limiting access to grazing land, outpost settlers like Moshe Sharvit are able to put Palestinian farmers in increasingly precarious positions, says Moayad Shaaban, the head of the Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission.

“It reaches a point where Palestinians don’t have anything anymore. They can’t eat, they can’t graze, can’t get water,” he says.

Following the 7 October Hamas attacks on southern Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza, Moshe Sharvit’s harassment became even more aggressive, says Ariel Moran, who supports Palestinian communities facing settler aggression.

Sharvit had always carried a pistol with him in the fields, but now he began approaching activists and Palestinians with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder and his threats became more menacing, Ariel says.

“I think he saw the chance of taking a shortcut and not waiting for another year or two years of gradually wearing them [Palestinian families] out.

“Just do it overnight. And it worked.”

Many of the families, like Ayesha’s, who say they left their homes following threats from Moshe Sharvit, did so in the weeks immediately following 7 October.

Throughout the West Bank, OCHA – the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – says settler violence has reached “unprecedented levels”.

In the past 10 months, it has recorded more than 1,100 settler attacks against Palestinians. At least 10 Palestinians have been killed and more than 230 injured by settlers since 7 October, it says.

At least five settlers have been killed and at least 17 injured by Palestinians in the West Bank over the same time frame, OCHA says.

In December 2023, two months after they say they were forced from their home, we filmed Ayesha and Nabil as they returned to collect some of their belongings.

When they arrived at the house, they found it had been ransacked. In the kitchen, the cupboards hung from their hinges. In the living room, someone had taken a knife to the sofas, slashing through the upholstery.

“I didn’t hurt him. I didn’t do anything to him. What have I done to deserve this?” Ayesha said.

As they began to sort through the damage, Moshe Sharvit arrived in a buggy. Before long, the Israeli police and army arrived. They told the couple, and the Israeli peace activists accompanying them, that they had to leave the area.

“He hasn’t left anything for us,” Ayesha told the BBC.

We contacted Moshe Sharvit on multiple occasions to ask for his response to the allegations made against him, but he did not respond.

In July 2023, the BBC approached him in person at his outpost to seek his response to allegations and also to ask if he would allow Palestinians – like Ayesha – to return to the area. He said he didn’t know what we were talking about and denied that he was Moshe Sharvit.

Graphics by Kate Gaynor and World Service Visual Journalism team