Israel has not formally declared the annexation of the occupied West Bank. No dramatic parliamentary vote has proclaimed sovereignty over the territory. Yet on the ground, step by step, law by law, road by road, Israel is doing precisely that. Through administrative restructuring, settlement expansion, legal engineering and the steady displacement of Palestinians, the Israeli state is effectively absorbing large portions of the West Bank into its national system. It is annexation not by proclamation, but by practice.

This strategy—often described as creeping or de facto annexation—allows Israel to transform the political geography of the occupied territory while avoiding the diplomatic shockwaves that a formal declaration would trigger. But the consequences are no less profound. What is unfolding today is the systematic dismantling of the territorial basis for Palestinian statehood.

Administrative control becomes civilian governance

For decades, Israel maintained that the West Bank was administered by a military authority because it was occupied territory. That distinction, however thin, preserved the legal fiction that the occupation was temporary.

Recent changes are erasing that line.

Authority over key civilian functions in Area C—the 60 percent of the West Bank that remains under full Israeli control—has increasingly been transferred from military administrators to Israeli civilian ministries. These ministries now oversee land registration, planning approvals, infrastructure development and settlement administration. In practice, Israeli domestic governance structures are being extended into occupied territory.

This is not merely bureaucratic adjustment. It represents the gradual replacement of military occupation with civilian administration, a classic hallmark of annexation.

This is not merely bureaucratic adjustment. It represents the gradual replacement of military occupation with civilian administration, a classic hallmark of annexation.

When the institutions of the occupying state begin to govern the territory directly, the transformation from occupation to incorporation is already underway.

Settlements: The engine of territorial absorption

The most visible instrument of annexation remains the Israeli settlement enterprise.

More than 700,000 Israeli settlers now live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Over the past decade, the pace of settlement expansion has accelerated sharply. New housing units are approved in waves; informal outposts appear on hilltops and are later legalized; infrastructure networks link settlements seamlessly to cities inside Israel.

These settlements do not function as isolated communities. They are connected........

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