In a rare confluence of opinion between boosters of Israel’s settlement enterprise and its staunchest critics, moves by the government expanding civilian governance of the West Bank have been termed by both as acts of de facto Israeli annexation, or significant steps on the way to it.

But even as some diplomats have downplayed the measures as bureaucratic steps with little practical application, experts say that de facto annexation is an accurate description of government moves that are transforming Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank into permanent control.

Earlier this month, the security cabinet greatly eased the ability of Israelis to purchase private property in the West Bank, while expanding Israel’s ability to conduct oversight and enforcement activities against Palestinian construction activity in Areas A and B of the West Bank, where until now Israel has not had civilian administrative control.

A week later, on Sunday, the full cabinet approved the opening of a new land registration process for Area C in the West Bank — the 60 percent of the territory that Israel has full control over. Both the government and critics said the measure would enable the state to declare large swaths of land in the territory as available for public development, meaning the creation and expansion of settlements and settlement infrastructure.

These latest moves are the latest in a series of administrative, legal, legislative, and practical measures the government has taken in the last three years that have greatly tightened and expanded Israel’s presence in and control over Area C of the West Bank.

During the tenure of the current government, some 69 settlements have either been freshly established or retroactively legalized; 120 agricultural outposts have been created to assert control over large swaths of pasture land; the construction of tens of thousands of housing units has been approved; and a record amount of West Bank land has been appropriated for use by the settlement enterprise.

Opponents of the settlement movement have long warned of creeping annexation, and did so again in response to the latest government steps.

But others have pushed back.

After Qatar released a statement this week from eight Muslim and Arab countries accusing Israel of “attempt[ing] to impose a new legal and administrative reality,” the Foreign Ministry responded that the changes were merely “an administrative measure… within the realms of civil and property law.”

This text is factually baseless and intentionally misleading. The Palestinian Authority is the one advancing illegal land registration procedures in Area C, in violation of the law and existing agreements. The Israeli government approved an administrative measure this week… https://t.co/9soaC4N6oP — Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) February 17, 2026

This text is factually baseless and intentionally misleading.

The Palestinian Authority is the one advancing illegal land registration procedures in Area C, in violation of the law and existing agreements.

The Israeli government approved an administrative measure this week… https://t.co/9soaC4N6oP

— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) February 17, 2026

It added that the steps were “designed to enable land registration procedures” and “resolve legal disputes,” and would “protect the property rights of Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Alan Baker, the head of the International Law Program at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, also rejected the idea that the moves were part of a larger process toward annexation.

“Streamlining legal and administrative procedures, improving planning and oversight, ensuring transparent property purchase and registration, and protecting archaeological sites are all part of Israel’s responsibilities under the existing framework,” he wrote on The Times of Israel’s open blogging platform.

Nevertheless, several members of the cabinet have explicitly stated on more than one occasion that the government is advancing de facto processes on the ground to assert Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, a process that would effectively equal annexation.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a staunch supporter of settlements who also holds a role in the Defense Ministry that gives him wide influence over the West Bank’s affairs, has openly declared on several occasions that the policies he is pursuing are specifically designed as a form of de facto annexation, where Israel takes full civilian control of large parts of the West Bank without actually declaring that it is annexing the territory.

This week’s decision on restarting the West Bank land registration process was itself founded on a security cabinet decision from May 2025, which Smotrich and Defense Minister Israel Katz explicitly stated was designed to expand and further entrench the presence of the settlements, and was part of “de facto sovereignty” steps the government was taking.

At the time, Katz said the move, which ordered state agencies to prepare the ground for opening a land registration process, would “do justice for Jewish settlement in [the West Bank], and strengthen it, ground it, and expand it.”

Smotrich, whose Religious Zionism party relies on Israel’s approximately 500,000 settlers for much of its support, said that the decision was passed “within the framework of the normalization and de facto sovereignty revolution that we are leading in Judea and Samaria.”

The cabinet minister added that Israel was “for the first time taking responsibility for the territory as permanent sovereign” through the land registration process, which, he said, would “allow for land reserves for settlement development, and prevent the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to take over the open areas.”

All of this, Smotrich said, was designed to help bring a million Israeli citizens to West Bank settlements and “eliminate the threat of a Palestinian state.”

Land registration in the West Bank was first undertaken during the British mandate and continued under Jordan until 1967, though only one-third of the territory was registered in the process.

In 1968, a year after capturing the West Bank in the Six Day War, Israel halted the process.

The new registration process will only take place in Area C, home to all the Israeli settlers.

The process is expected to take some 30 years, with any parcel not registered by Israel as having an owner becoming state land, which would allow it to be used for essentially any civilian or military purpose the government wants.

Though Israel has controlled the West Bank for 58 years, it has never formally annexed the territory, which Palestinians view as the heartland of their future state.

Instead, it has preserved military governance of the West Bank by the Defense Ministry under the terms of what is known in international law as a “belligerent occupation,” although it has never formally adopted those principles and contends that the territory is not occupied in the legal sense since there was no legitimate sovereign prior to 1967.

Yonatan Mizrachi of Peace Now’s “Settlement Watch” department said the two government decisions this month are part of a shift in how Israel runs the territory that is taking shape in the wake of a far-reaching government decision from February 2023.

That was when much of the authority for civilian matters in the West Bank was transferred from the Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration unit, which is subordinate to the Israel Defense Forces command hierarchy, to a civilian official working under the head of the Defense Ministry’s Settlements Administration, which was established by the government and made subordinate to Smotrich.

“As soon as the government created the Settlements Administration it created the basis of an infrastructure for a system that disconnects the settlements from the Civil Administration,” said Mizrachi.

“As soon as you do that, you disconnect civil governance from the military, you are effectively conducting civilian rule over the territory,” he continued, adding that in his opinion the West Bank was therefore already in a “post-annexation process.”

The widely held position in international law is that belligerent occupations should be temporary, cannot be used to assert control over the territory under occupation, and the occupying power should act in the interests of the prewar inhabitants of the territory.

But using civilian agencies as part of the governing infrastructure for the West Bank could be seen as an assertion of sovereign control over the territory — in other words, annexation.

Tal Mimran, a lecturer in international law at Zefat Academic College in Safed, said that the principles of belligerent occupations require that actions be conducted by the military and that the civilian government have no role in governing the territory.

He pointed out that under the laws of belligerent occupation, the occupying power is expected to maintain the legal status quo in the territory and not make any irreversible changes to its character.

The recent steps taken by the government, in particular the land registration drive, could run up against the obligation to maintain the status quo, said Mimran.

According to Mizrachi, the government decisions this month create “further legal infrastructure” for annexation, as they “radically change” the state’s relationship to West Bank land.

The cabinet decision opening the land registration process instructed the commander of the IDF’s Central Command — the de facto military governor of the West Bank — to authorize the Land Registry department in the Justice Ministry to carry out the land registration process.

The Land Registry department will establish a land title settlement administration to conduct the work, under the terms of the cabinet resolution.

“This would transfer responsibility for land registration in Area C from the Civil Administration, which operates under the military, to the State of Israel,” Peace Now pointed out on Sunday.

Combined with the earlier security cabinet decision enabling Israelis to more easily purchase private property in the West Bank, these new decisions essentially make the state’s relationship with West Bank land similar to land within sovereign Israel “and create the basis to expand Israeli control” of the land, Mizrachi said.

According to the B’Tselem organization, which opposes Israeli rule in the West Bank, Israel has declared over 900,000 dunams (222,000 acres) of land in the West Bank to be state land since 1979, ignoring claims by Palestinians that some property which is not registered in the land registry is nevertheless privately owned. Those claims are based on Ottoman taxation records, which Israeli authorities do not accept as proof of ownership.

According to information provided by the Civil Administration following a freedom of information request by Peace Now in 2018, fully 99.8% of state land allocated for public use in the West Bank has been allocated for the use and needs of Israeli settlements.

“In general, the territories are now basically annexed,” Mizrachi asserted, although he added that these steps could still be undone.

This imposition of greater and greater civilian control over the West Bank is also reflected in the statements of the cabinet ministers involved in these decisions.

Smotrich himself described the strategy of using the Defense Ministry to establish civilian authority over the West Bank in 2024. “We created a separate civilian system,” but kept the process within the Defense Ministry, “so that they won’t say that we are doing annexation here,” he said at the time.

Following the security cabinet decision on February 8 easing property acquisition, Smotrich described the measures as a “real revolution,” stating that the government was “normalizing life in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank],” “deepening our hold on all parts of the Land of Israel,” and “continuing to kill the idea of a Palestinian state.”

Katz made similar comments, saying the step “strengthened the Israeli hold over [the West Bank]” and “enables settlers to live, to build, and to develop as equals to all Israeli civilians.”

Two years ago, the International Court of Justice asserted in an advisory opinion that Israel had already de facto annexed large parts of the West Bank, due to the permanent nature of the settlements and “Israel’s extension of its domestic law to the West Bank, notably to the settlements and over settlers.”

According to Eliav Lieblich, a professor of international law at Tel Aviv University, the new measures move even further “in the direction of consolidating permanent control” than what the ICJ opinion described, and would enable “more Israeli acquisition or taking of land, which is also a form of permanent presence.”

He asserted that the steps were not taken in the interests of the local Palestinian population but rather to advance the settlement movement, as illustrated by the comments of the cabinet ministers following the decision.

“This contradicts the basic rule that the military government should administer the territories in favor of the local population,” said Lieblich.

“Israel is clearly treating the territory as its own, regardless of any formal definition,” he added.

In his opinion on the measures, Baker, a former legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, described annexation as “a formal governmental act” that “cannot be carried out quietly, ‘creepingly,’ or in secret through administrative adjustments.”

But Mimran said that annexing a territory need not be a formal process, as shown by the ICJ advisory opinion.

“Annexation under international law is something that you look at in essence. You don’t need to declare annexation, you look at actions that have been taken,” he said.

Indeed, the ever-deepening entrenchment of Israel’s presence in the West Bank appears to many to be designed to exert permanent control over the territory, even if that process is not formally declared to be annexation.

“Israel argued for a long time that its control of the West Bank was temporary, but now its ministers are saying that’s not the case,” said Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv think tank.

“The administrative moves, the statements, the steps on the ground legalizing existing [illegal settlement] outposts, the extensions of the farming outposts into Area B, these indicate together an intention, expressed as explicitly as possible by the Religious Zionism party, to make control over the West Bank permanent.”

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