On July 2, 2026, the world marked 1,000 days since Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza. The toll is almost incomprehensible. According to Gaza's Government Media Office, at least 73,066 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 21,500 children and 1,022 babies. A further 9,500 people are missing, most believed buried under rubble, and 173,514 have been wounded. More than 90 percent of Gaza has been destroyed, and Israeli forces now control roughly 80 percent of the territory.

The October 2025 ceasefire has not stopped the killing. Since the truce took effect, Israeli forces have killed at least 1,072 more Palestinians and wounded over 3,400, striking tents, vehicles, and displaced families almost daily, including repeated attacks on al-Mawasi, an area Israel itself declared a humanitarian safe zone. Nearly all of Gaza's 2.1 million people remain displaced, compressed into shrinking strips of land, with the entire population at extreme risk of famine and 400,000 people surviving on a single meal a day.

Now Israel is openly seizing what remains of Palestine. Blocked by the United States from a new ground offensive, Israel chose what its own officials, speaking to Israeli media, called creeping or quiet annexation, pushing its lines of control westward without formal announcement. In the West Bank, the process is louder. On July 2, Israel's Security Cabinet approved 13 new illegal settlements in the central West Bank, designed to fracture the territory, sever it from East Jerusalem, and make Palestinian statehood impossible.

This is a deliberate strategy to reshape the geography and demographics of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, entrenching annexation and deepening Israel's unlawful occupation, in clear violation of international law.

International Center of Justice for Palestinians

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich celebrated the move publicly, declaring, We've only just begun the revolution in settlement. We'll get to the Negev and the Galilee too. He has also announced the cancellation of the 1997 Hebron Agreement, stripping Palestinians of planning authority over the Old City and the Ibrahimi Mosque, where Israeli forces have installed steel beams over the courtyard and blocked the Muslim call to prayer. Settlement outposts have exploded from an annual average of eight between 2012 and 2022 to 86 in 2025 alone.

Even the US State Department has said it does not support Israel annexing the West Bank. Yet the annexation continues, in open daylight, while the world's attention is diverted elsewhere. This is not the aftermath of a war. It is the deliberate, permanent erasure of a people and their homeland. Silence is complicity.