New Amnesty report reveals Israel’s ethnic cleansing of West Bank Bedouins
An Amnesty International report has called attention to Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Bedouin and herding communities in the occupied West Bank.
“Israeli authorities are accelerating annexation through a state-driven campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities,” said the report released on Wednesday.
Amnesty said its research showed that 27 Bedouin and herding communities comprising hundreds of Palestinians were forcibly displaced between 2023 and 2025 or were at risk of displacement in the West Bank’s Area C, which encompasses 60 percent of the territory and is under Israeli control under the Oslo agreements.
In the report, titled "Erasing anything Palestinian: Israel's ethnic cleansing of West Bank Bedouin and herding communities", Amnesty accused Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government of catering to the settler movement's religious nationalist agenda.
"It has accelerated settlement expansion and land grabs, increased financial and logistical support to settlements, and it has armed settlers, thereby enabling a brutal state-sanctioned campaign of settler violence," the report said.
The "ethnic cleansing campaign is state-led, and state-sponsored, not driven by rogue settlers or so-called extremist ministers", the report concluded.
Armed settlers are seen at the West Bank village of Ras Ein al-Auja, whose Bedouin community was expelled earlier this year, 22 April 2026 (Ilia Yefimovich / AFP)