Israel re-establishes West Bank settlement Kadim with 30 families, reversing 2005 evacuation

Israel settled thirty "pioneer families" at the Kadim settlement in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, marking the re-opening of the last settlement evacuated during Israel's 2005 Disengagement Plan. The arrival completed the reversal of all four northern West Bank settlements dismantled 21 years ago.

Kadim was evacuated in 2005 as part of Israel's wider unilateral withdrawal that also saw all Jewish settlers and soldiers pulled out of Gaza. At the time, the four settlements were considered too isolated and costly to protect and of little strategic value. Israel's current government, which took power in late 2022, has since overturned the 20-year ban on Jewish settlements around Jenin.

Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attended the opening ceremony and stated: "21 years after the crime of expulsion from northern Samaria, we have completed the correction and have returned to the settlement of Kadim." Senior Israeli politicians present included the Justice Minister, the Speaker of the Knesset, and Yossi Dagan, head of the regional settlers' council. Dagan vowed that settlers would one day return to Gaza.

Kadim is the last of the settlements evacuated in 2005 to reopen. Ganim, Sanur, and Homesh have already been formally opened with families moved in. A new settlement called Emek Dotan, west of Jenin, was formally opened last Sunday and is home to almost two dozen Jewish families, per BBC reporting.

Since Israel's current government took power in late 2022, it has approved more than 100 new settlements across the West Bank, including 19 in the northern West Bank. Hagit Ofran, director of the Settlement Watch programme at Peace Now, said the rapid construction in Jenin is part of a wider race by the Israeli government to expand settlements in the West Bank before Israeli elections are held in October.

All Israeli settlements and settler outposts are illegal under international law. Outposts are also illegal under Israeli law, though are often supported by state services and funding.

Palestinian residents near the settlements express fear of displacement and settler violence. A Palestinian vegetable farmer who has lived in his house for 53 years watched Kadim built for the first time as a boy, then saw settlers forced out 20 years later, and now watches them return. He told the BBC: "Back then, the settlers were living alongside us, and we coexisted peacefully. They lived their lives and we lived ours." But now, he said: "I'm afraid of the events spreading around us, and the bypass road where they demolished shops and businesses." He reported that settlers drove his nephews away from their vegetables and citrus trees, telling them "you have no place here, don't come back." The farmer, whose family fled to the area from Haifa during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, said: "There's no more displacement left in me. We're living with a sense of resignation. It's a life of fear."

Samer Jaber, a teacher living in a Palestinian hamlet next to the Emek Dotan settlement, reported that groups of settlers come to his property and film him, his children, and his wife. He told the BBC that settlers "go house by house, shining powerful floodlights directly through all the windows at two or three in the morning." Jaber, who is partially blind and has a leg injury, said: "Fear dominates everything. We are completely defenceless. All of them have weapons." He added: "I'm bringing concrete blocks to close off this side of the house because I'm afraid for my children."