Article - Israeli Demographic Engineering Across Colonized Palestine

The Israeli regime subjects Palestinians across colonized Palestine to an intricate system of demographic control. Through its strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people and a body of apartheid laws, Israel continually revokes Palestinians’ residency rights, denies them family unification across the Green Line and beyond, strips them of Israeli citizenship, and secures their deportation.

How has Israel engineered and implemented these policies? What are their implications for the Palestinian people? How can they be challenged?

Al-Shabaka Rabea Eghbariah

Rabea Eghbariah

Rabea Eghbariah is an attorney completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School. He worked as an appellate public defender and later joined the Haifa-based...
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Al-Shabaka Nadim Bawalsa

Nadim Bawalsa

Nadim Bawalsa is Associate Editor with the Journal of Palestine Studies. From 2020-2023, Nadim served as Al-Shabaka’s commissioning editor. He is a historian of modern...
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Al-Shabaka Nada Awad

Nada Awad

Al-Shabaka policy member Nada Awad holds a master’s degree in International Relations and International Security from Sciences Pro Paris. She works on human rights violations...
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Commentary
 Politics

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“We’re all going to end up in Jordan,” remarked a young man from Al-Jiftlik, a Palestinian village in the Jordan Valley. His comment reflects growing despair in the West Bank countryside, where Israeli settler-colonial expansion has intensified to unprecedented levels. This is particularly true in the Jordan Valley, the agricultural heartland along the West Bank’s eastern frontier with Jordan. Once known among Palestinians as the “bride of the Jordan Valley,” Al-Jiftlik now illustrates the gravity of Israeli state-sponsored settler expansion on Palestinian land, having transformed from a prosperous agricultural community into one under siege and facing sustained displacement pressure. Since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, land seizure in the West Bank has shifted from creeping settler encroachment to a vicious military-backed campaign of territorial theft. This commentary shows how the Israeli regime’s land appropriation policy in the West Bank, once justified through bureaucratic-legal land seizure orders, has now increasingly shifted toward direct settler takeovers. This shift does not indicate a change in objectives but rather an escalation of existing settlement expansion mechanisms, signaling the growing power and influence of the settler movement over Israeli policy.
Al-Shabaka Fathi Nimer
Fathi Nimer· Feb 3, 2026
Policy Memo
 Politics

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The announcement of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a 15-member technocratic body chaired by Ali Shaath, signals a shift toward depoliticized governance in Gaza amid ongoing genocide. Shaath, a Palestinian civil engineer and former deputy minister of planning and international cooperation, will lead an interim governing structure tasked with managing reconstruction and service provision under external oversight. While presented as a neutral technocratic governing structure, the NCAG is more likely to function as a managerial apparatus that stabilizes conditions that enable genocide rather than challenging them. This policy memo argues that technocratic governance in Gaza—particularly under US oversight, given its role as a co-perpetrator in the genocide—should be understood not as a pathway to recovery or sovereignty, but as part of a broader strategy of genocide management.
Al-Shabaka Yara Hawari
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 Civil Society

De-Healthification: Israel’s Engineered Collapse of Palestinian Life

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