Gendered Impacts of Israel’s Settlement Regime in the West Bank

Executive Summary

This report documents an intensifying and mutually reinforcing pattern of violations against Palestinian women, young women and youth in the West Bank, during the current Israeli occupation power (2022–2026), across three domains: territorial control and movement, civic space, and gender-specific socio-economic harm. The most significant evidence-based findings are as follows:

Unprecedented settlement acceleration: 54 new official settlements approved and 86 outposts erected in 2025 alone — record highs — with 63,311 housing units advanced across the oPt and control now extending to 42% of the West Bank, 71% of Area C, and 91% of the Jordan Valley.

Lethal settler violence: 25 Palestinians killed by settlers in 2026 to date — the highest annual toll on record and 79% above all of 2025; 61 of 87 recorded killings since 2019 occurred after 7 October 2023, virtually all without prosecution.

Documented sexual violence: at least 16 cases of sexual violence by settlers and soldiers, plus a wider pattern of stalking, forced nudity, strip searches and threats of rape reaching into homes and bedrooms — conduct the report links to forced displacement, with over 70% of displaced households citing threats to women and girls as decisive.

Pastoral dispossession: over 100 pastoral outposts now cover 14% of the West Bank, displacing more than 7,000 Palestinians and severing rural women's livelihoods in dairy, herding and agriculture.

Movement obstruction: 925 movement obstacles recorded by April 2026, plus a 712-km Annexation Wall unlawful by the ICJ (2004); WHO recorded 98 attacks on healthcare (Jan–Jul 2026) including four fatalities.

Criminalisation of civil society: six Palestinian organisations, including the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees, designated “terrorist organisations” by Israel in 2021 without public evidence, authorising asset seizure and criminalising even public support.

Escalating multi-jurisdictional sanctions: in 2025 the United States sanctioned Al-Haq, Al-Mezan and PCHR under an ICC-related executive order, freezing assets and barring US engagement — UN experts called this a “direct attack on international justice.”

Incitement and delegitimisation: coordinated campaigns brand rights defenders as terrorists or political operatives, compounding funding restrictions with reputational and physical risk to women-led organisations specifically.

Digital and associational restriction: surveillance, arbitrary detention and asymmetric content moderation increasingly constrain women human-rights defenders' online and offline advocacy.

Systemic gender-based violence: OHCHR and independent researchers describe settler violence occurring in the presence of IOP forces and rarely investigated or prosecuted, functioning as a tool of domination, displacement and community fracture.

Economic devastation: 72,000+ farming and herding families required urgent assistance in early 2026; 87% of displaced women reported total loss of income (dairy, embroidery, foraging); at least 20% of movement obstacles block agricultural access.

Reproductive health crisis: approximately 232,000 women and girls, including 14,800 pregnant women, had limited access to reproductive healthcare (Jan 2026); only 42% of West Bank health facilities were fully operational; OHCHR recorded roughly 73,000 pregnant women facing critical health risk from closures, and the killing of an eight-month-pregnant woman fleeing Nur Shams camp.

Compounding mental-health burden: 45,600+ children and 9,650+ caregivers received psychosocial support in 2025 alone, with women bearing disproportionate, largely unsupported caregiving demands.

Read together, the report chapters point to conduct engaging: (i) the war crime of transfer of an occupying power's civilian population into occupied territory (Rome Statute Art. 8(2)(b)(viii)); (ii) crimes against humanity and war crimes of sexual violence (Art. 7(1)(g), 8(2)(b)(xxii)) where settler and soldier conduct meets the relevant thresholds; (iii) persecution of an identifiable group through the systematic suppression of women's civil society (Art. 7(1)(h)); and (iv) a broader unlawful occupation regime, as found in the ICJ's 2004 and 2024 Advisory Opinions, generating an obligation on Israel to cease settlement activity, evacuate settlers, and make reparation. These are documented patterns and legal characterisations drawn from UN and NGO reporting; immediate military and economic sanctions must be imposed on the IOP, in compliance with the 2024 Advisory Opinion's finding that: "States must not render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s continued unlawful presence in the OPT" (paras. 275–276).

The violations documented across all three chapters are not discrete: land confiscation and settler violence drive displacement and economic collapse; movement restriction severs access to healthcare, education and justice; and the deliberate narrowing of civic space disables the very organisations positioned to document, respond to, and seek accountability for these harms. Palestinian women sit at the intersection of every track — as direct targets of violence, as primary economic and caregiving actors absorbing the resulting shocks, and as the leadership of the civil society sector now under sustained attack with multiple political reference points. The scale, pattern and coordination of these findings, set against the applicable legal framework, indicate a system requiring urgent, coordinated action by the Palestinian Authority, third States, and UN agencies alike.