Amnesty Accuses Israel of Ethnic Cleansing in West Bank Bedouin Communities
Amnesty International publishes 150-page report documenting what it calls a state-directed campaign to forcibly displace Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities from the occupied West Bank — a pattern the rights group says amounts to ethnic cleansing, not the work of rogue extremists.
On June 10, Amnesty International released a 150-page report titled “Erasing Anything Palestinian: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of West Bank Bedouin and Herding Communities,” which accuses the Israeli state of carrying out a systematic campaign to uproot, dispossess, and forcibly transfer Palestinian Bedouin communities from Area C of the occupied West Bank. The report, shared with Israeli ministries on May 13, 2026, received a response only from the military’s spokesperson unit at the time of publication, according to Amnesty International.
The central finding is that this campaign is not the product of rogue settlers or extremist ministers acting outside the bounds of state policy. Rather, Amnesty argues, it is an organized, state-directed project to clear territory for permanent Israeli control — a finding that echoes the organization’s broader critique of Israeli policies in the occupied territories, which it has previously described as amounting to apartheid.
“It is implementing the settler movement’s religious nationalist agenda,” the report states, according to Al-Monitor’s coverage. The timing matters. Since Israel’s 37th government came to power in December 2022, the pace of dispossession has accelerated dramatically. The report documents how the government has made formal annexation of Area C an explicit policy objective, pursued through the steady, grinding removal of the people who have lived there for generations.
No single story captures the pattern better than what happened to Khirbet Zanuta, a Bedouin village in the South Hebron Hills that was home to around 250 people.
Zanuta sat in Area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank placed under full Israeli military and administrative control under the 1995 Oslo II Accords. Its residents were herders and farmers who had lived there for generations. In 2021, Israeli settlers established an illegal outpost called Meitarim Farm one kilometer away.
What followed is a chronology of deliberate destruction. Settlers set fire to tents and classrooms. They broke into homes and beat residents. They smashed solar panels, emptied water tanks, and pumped sewage onto farmland. These were not random acts of vandalism. They were part of a campaign to make life untenable.
On October 21, 2023, settlers backed by Israeli forces raided the village again. They threatened to harm residents if they did not leave. The community fled.
Israel’s Supreme Court intervened — twice. In July 2024 and again in February 2025, the court ordered the police and military to facilitate the residents’ return and to protect them. Both rulings were ignored. By March 30, 2025, Khirbet Zanuta no longer existed. It had been forcibly depopulated and extensively destroyed.
In April 2025, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister Orit Strock held an event at Meitarim Farm, according to Middle East Eye reporting on the Amnesty findings. They distributed 19 state-funded all-terrain vehicles, cameras, and night-vision equipment to settlers. “The heroic and pioneering settlers who live here are doing Zionism, and they need security,” Smotrich said at the event. “We are here to build with them and to settle the land.”
The arithmetic is brutally simple: 363 settler outposts had been established in the West Bank by the end of April 2026, according to the report cited by Al-Monitor. Of those, 212 were created since 2023. Each outpost is a claim on land that was someone else’s home. Each one is backed, directly or indirectly, by the Israeli state.
A Pattern, Not an Exception
Amnesty’s report frames Zanuta as one case among many. Across the West Bank, Bedouin and herding communities face a coordinated assault: demolition orders, restrictions on access to grazing land, seizure of water infrastructure, and violence from settlers who know they will not be held accountable. The report documents this as happening against the backdrop of what Amnesty has previously described as apartheid and an unlawful occupation.
The report also notes the broader context. The ethnic cleansing campaign in the West Bank is unfolding alongside an ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip that the International Court of Justice has examined for potential violations of the Genocide Convention. In May 2026, the UN rights office also raised the alarm about indications of ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank, as Al-Monitor reported.
Amnesty International is calling for international action, including a boycott, to pressure Israel to halt the campaign of forcible transfer. The organization argues that states party to the Fourth Geneva Convention have a legal obligation to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law — an obligation that, in its view, is not being met.
The Silence of the Institutions
There is a particular bleakness in the detail that only one Israeli ministry bothered to respond to Amnesty’s findings. The ministries of national security, defense, justice, and finance, as well as the Attorney General, received the report on May 13. Only the military’s spokesperson unit replied. This is not the behavior of a government that disputes the facts. It is the behavior of a government that does not feel it needs to.
What is happening in the West Bank is not a secret. The demolitions are recorded. The outposts are mapped. The court orders are on the public record. The violence is filmed. Israeli ministers say openly what they are doing and why. The information exists, it is verified, and it is ignored. That is the deeper story here — not just that a campaign of ethnic cleansing is underway, but that the mechanisms designed to prevent it have proven entirely powerless to stop it.
The Supreme Court orders and nothing changes. The reports are published and nothing changes. The evidence accumulates and nothing changes. At some point, the question ceases to be about what Israel is doing and becomes about what the rest of the world is prepared to tolerate.