Benjamin Netanyahu told i24 News on 12 August 2025 that he feels "very much" connected to the vision of Greater Israel and is on "a historic and spiritual mission" for the Jewish people. Fourteen months on, his government holds land in five territories at once: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Syrian buffer zone beyond it, and a widening "security zone" in southern Lebanon. UN investigators found on Monday that Israel is committing the crime against humanity of extermination in the West Bank and is still committing genocide in Gaza to hold them.
Zionist leaders put a map before the Paris peace conference in 1919 that reached the Litani river in Lebanon, the Golan and land east of the Jordan. In 1948 Israel took 78 per cent of Palestine, drove out more than 750,000 Palestinians and destroyed more than 400 of their villages. In six days in June 1967 it took the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Sinai, and by the 1970s Gush Emunim was building settlements on the West Bank hills on roads the state paved for them.
More than 700,000 Israelis now live in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, every one of them illegal. The government approved 54 new settlements in 2025, the most in any year, 86 new outposts went up, and planners advanced 27,941 housing units, twice the previous record. Bezalel Smotrich approved E1 in August 2025, 3,401 homes that cut the West Bank in two, and said the plan "buries the idea of a Palestinian state". The army had already handed its powers over Palestinian land, planning and demolition to Smotrich's civilian officials in 2024, which is annexation in all but the word, and in October 2025 the Knesset gave preliminary approval to a bill annexing every settlement.
Israeli terrorists, commonly referred to as settlers, carried out 1,828 attacks in 2025 that injured Palestinians or destroyed their property, and the outposts they set up that year emptied 15 Palestinian communities entirely. The army's operations in the north of the West Bank since January 2025 had displaced at least 34,176 people by August, the largest displacement there since 1967, and Israeli air strikes killed 254 Palestinians in the West Bank between October 2023 and September 2026, against six in the fifteen years before. The UN commission found that Israeli authorities knew of and intended the terrorists' violence as part of a coordinated, planned attack on civilians that is state policy, and last week Israel sealed the whole West Bank and forcibly displaced thousands of Palestinians for its election.
Israel holds the ground east of its Yellow Line in Gaza, close to two-thirds of the Strip, a year into a ceasefire in which it has killed 1,559 Palestinians. The commission found in September 2025 that the Israeli government intends to keep Gaza permanently and to secure a Jewish majority across the West Bank. Donald Trump said in February 2025 that the USA would "take over" Gaza and move its people out, and Netanyahu said this month that he is working hard to find countries to take them.
Israeli troops crossed the 1974 ceasefire line into Syria the day Bashar al-Assad fell in December 2024 and took the Syrian summit of Mount Hermon, and Netanyahu said they would stay indefinitely. Israel Katz, his defence minister, said the army will remain on the peak and in the buffer zone. In Lebanon, Israel kept hilltop positions after the November 2024 ceasefire, went back to war in 2026 and runs a security zone across the south. Katz said last week that Israel is ready to push to Nabatieh and the Litani, remove the people who live there and add the land to the zone. The Litani was the northern border on the 1919 map.
The International Court of Justice ruled on 19 July 2024 that the occupation is unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible, with the settlers removed and reparations paid, and the General Assembly gave Israel until September 2025 to comply. Israel ignored both and built faster. The International Criminal Court has had arrest warrants out for Netanyahu since November 2024. Moshe Ya'alon, who was Netanyahu's defence minister, said in December 2024 that the government's road is "conquest, annexation and ethnic cleansing" and that northern Gaza was being cleared of Arabs.
The United States has vetoed six Security Council ceasefire resolutions on Gaza since October 2023 and arms the army doing the clearing. The European Union condemns the settlements and keeps its trade agreement with Israel in force, and the Abraham Accords states have stayed in them through the genocide. Nobody with the power to stop the project has tried.
The map Netanyahu held up at the UN General Assembly in September 2023 had no Palestine on it. His government has spent the three years since making that map true, and we keep the running record of every territory Israel holds and the full toll in Gaza on our Gaza record.
