Israel re-establishes closed West Bank settlement, defying growing international protests

Thirty Families Return to Kadim, Reopening a West Bank Settlement Abandoned Two Decades Ago

Constantvpn.com – Truck convoys carrying mattresses, household furniture, and construction supplies rolled up a dirt track toward a hillside overlooking the Palestinian city of Jenin on Thursday, marking the return of Jewish settlers to Kadim — a community that had been empty since a previous Israeli government ordered its evacuation in 2005. Thirty families, described by the regional settlers’ council as “pioneer families,” traveled from Tel Aviv to reclaim the site, arriving in small groups, some under military escort, with blue-and-white national flags streaming from their vehicles as they passed Palestinian villages and cultivated fields.

The move represents the final chapter in a sweeping reversal of policy. Israel’s current government has dismantled a two-decade prohibition on Jewish settlement activity in the Jenin area, effectively undoing the legacy of the 2005 Disengagement Plan. That earlier initiative, enacted unilaterally, saw all Jewish settlers and soldiers withdrawn from Gaza and three additional northern West Bank communities — Kadim, Ganim, Sanur, and Homesh — dismantled. At the time, officials judged those four outposts too remote, too expensive to defend, and of negligible strategic importance. Today, the political calculus has inverted entirely.

A Ceremony Framed in Biblical Language

The reopening was staged as a national event. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right figure who has long championed settlement expansion, addressed the gathering using the Biblical term “Samaria” to describe the northern West Bank. Beside him stood the Justice Minister, Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, and Yossi Dagan, head of the regional settlers’ council. Dagan went further than mere celebration, declaring that settlers would eventually return to Gaza as well — a statement that lands with particular weight given the ongoing war and displacement there.

“21 years after the crime of expulsion from northern Samaria, we have completed the correction […] and have returned to the settlement of Kadim.”

The language of “correction” signals how the current leadership frames the 2005 evacuation not as a pragmatic security decision but as a historical wrong now being rectified. For Palestinians in the Jenin area, that framing translates into very concrete anxieties about land, movement, and livelihood.

What International and Domestic Law Say

Under international law, all Israeli settlements in occupied territory are considered illegal. Outposts — small, often informally established communities — additionally violate Israeli domestic law, yet they routinely receive state services, infrastructure funding, and police protection. Kadim itself was technically an outpost before it was evacuated, and its reopening underscores how the distinction between “settlement” and “outpost” has become increasingly academic in practice.

A Farmer’s Fifty-Three Years on the Hillside

Media were barred from entering the settlement on the day of the ceremony. From a dirt track behind the hill, however, a Palestinian vegetable farmer — a man who has lived in the same house since his birth 53 years ago — offered a perspective spanning both the original construction of Kadim and its forced abandonment. As a boy, he watched the first settlers arrive; two decades later, he watched the government order them out.

“Back then, the settlers were living alongside us, and we coexisted peacefully. They lived their lives and we lived ours.”

Now, watching the same hillside fill again with white trailer homes and construction activity, his tone shifts to dread. He described a bypass road project in which shops and businesses were demolished, and his nephews were driven away from their vegetable plots and citrus trees with the instruction that they had no place there and should not return.

“I’m afraid of the events spreading around us, and the bypass road [where] they demolished shops and businesses.”

“There’s no more displacement left in me. We’re living with a sense of resignation. It’s a life of fear.”

His family fled Haifa during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, a displacement that shaped the geography of the region for generations. For him, the return of settlers to Kadim is not an isolated event but the latest layer in a long accumulation of forced movement.

The Broader Settlement Acceleration

Kadim’s reopening is the last of the four communities evacuated in 2005 to be formally re-established. Ganim, Sanur, and Homesh have already been opened, and families have moved in. Yet even that modest number sits within a far larger project. Since taking power in late 2022, the current government has approved more than 100 new settlements across the West Bank, including 19 in the northern sector alone.

Hagit Ofran, director of the Settlement Watch programme at Peace Now, characterizes the rapid construction around Jenin as part of a broader race to lock in settlement expansion before Israeli elections scheduled for October. The timing matters: once communities are physically established, with roads, water lines, and schools, reversing them becomes politically and logistically far more difficult.

One such new community is Emek Dotan, situated west of Jenin and formally opened the previous Sunday. It now houses nearly two dozen Jewish families. From a small cluster of Palestinian houses adjacent to the site, teacher Samer Jaber has watched the settlement take shape over recent weeks — another example of how new construction is compressing the space available to existing Palestinian residents.

Why This Matters Beyond the Hillside

The reopening of Kadim carries implications that extend well past a single hilltop. It signals that the current government intends to treat the 2005 Disengagement not as a final act but as a temporary pause, reversible at its discretion. It reinforces a pattern in which international legal norms are set aside in favor of demographic and territorial objectives. And for the Palestinian population of Jenin — already among the poorest and most isolated in the West Bank — it deepens the sense that their land, water, and movement rights are being eroded incrementally, one trailer home and one bypass road at a time, until the cumulative effect leaves little room for negotiation or return.