More than 37,000 Palestinians were displaced across the occupied West Bank in 2025, the United Nations announced in late January 2026 — the highest annual total on record. UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said the figures came from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and reflected displacement driven overwhelmingly by Israeli military operations in refugee camps across the northern governorates of the West Bank, combined with settler violence, demolitions, and access restrictions that make staying in communities impossible.

OCHA recorded more than 1,800 settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank in 2025 — the highest annual total since the UN began systematic tracking in 2006. Those attacks, documented as resulting in casualties, property damage, or both, take place with near-total impunity. According to Israeli human rights organizations, less than 5 percent of complaints filed by Palestinians against settler violence result in indictments.

The West Bank displacement is not separable from what is happening in Gaza. It is the same logic of dispossession applied through different instruments: military operations in refugee camps, settler mob attacks on villages, demolition orders on structures built without permits that Israel’s occupation refuses to grant, and now — as of February 2026 — a cabinet-approved plan to publish West Bank land registry data for Area C for the first time since 1967, shifting the burden of proof for land ownership onto Palestinian communities and enabling settler land acquisition at scale.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini warned that 33,000 people remain forcibly displaced a year after the start of Israel’s “Iron Wall” military operation in the northern West Bank — an operation that targeted refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus, displacing entire communities and destroying camp infrastructure. Many have not been able to return.

37,000 people in a year. More than 900 in the first six weeks of 2026. The displacement is not slowing. It is accelerating.