Decades of reporting on the Israeli occupation have given veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass a front-row seat to shifting political tides and escalating pressure on Palestinian communities. Now, the Haaretz correspondent, whose parents survived the Holocaust and who has lived in Palestinian territories since 1993, is sounding an urgent alarm: Palestinians across Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and even those holding Israeli citizenship face an accelerating risk of mass forced displacement from their homeland.
In an exclusive interview with Middle East Eye, Hass explained that the threat of mass displacement is not speculative prophecy, but a grounded warning rooted in decades of observation of Israeli state policy. Over recent years, she argues, Israel has built a robust, interconnected infrastructure of ideological, political, economic, and military power that is fully capable of facilitating large-scale expulsion.
Hass, who recently published a column arguing Israel’s end goal is the erasure of Palestinians rather than diplomatic negotiation for a sovereign Palestinian state, traces the current crisis to a long-running institutional shift that has outlasted multiple Israeli governments. What was once a fringe goal has become completely normalized across nearly the entire Israeli political spectrum, she says, and has now been codified into state institutions. Far-right and religious-nationalist factions, once on the margins of Israeli politics, have emerged as the most powerful political actors in the country, setting the policy agenda for the government and state bureaucracy.
“This process didn’t start with this current government, or even the one before it. It’s been built up incrementally over decades,” Hass explained. “Today, these far-right forces believe the moment is right to move beyond the old framework of fragmented Palestinian enclaves, what she described as the ‘Bantustan’ model that emerged from the Oslo Accords, to a new phase: seizing additional land and pushing more Palestinians out entirely, erasing their presence from the region entirely.
Open calls for expulsion from Israeli officials have become increasingly common in the past three years, particularly targeting Gaza’s population. Just last week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz publicly confirmed the Israeli government is waiting for U.S. approval to forcibly expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, stating there is “no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration.” Katz added that Israeli authorities are already “organised and prepared to get them out by sea, by air, by every way possible.”
In the occupied West Bank, Hass documented widespread suffering, saying Palestinian communities face “unprecedented despair, fear and helplessness” amid growing settler violence and state-enabled restrictions. Small groups of armed settlers, she reported, are able to paralyze entire Palestinian villages with near-total impunity, while Israeli soldiers often block Palestinians from coming to their neighbors’ aid. During her visits to affected communities, Hass met a Palestinian family whose home had been attacked by settlers months earlier and was now ringed by fencing and metal barriers, leaving them unable to access fruit trees just meters from their front door. In the village of Beit Ummar, she said settlers have already uprooted all 1,000 trees in a Palestinian-owned vineyard.
Beyond violence, systemic restrictions including permanent checkpoints, movement limits, and routine home demolitions have cut Palestinians off from agricultural land, grazing areas, and basic community services. Hass notes that settler influence over the Israeli Civil Administration, which governs civilian life in the occupied West Bank, has grown dramatically in recent years, tying these punitive measures directly to national government policy. Compounding this crisis, she added, is the absence of effective Palestinian leadership to coordinate a response, leaving individual communities isolated and vulnerable.
The threat of displacement does not end at the Green Line, Hass stressed: it also extends to Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up roughly 20 percent of the country’s population. Far-right Israeli factions increasingly frame their presence in the country as a problem, she said, and the state has employed a strategy of making daily life increasingly unbearable to push those with the means to leave to emigrate voluntarily.
“There is a very thin line between forced expulsion and voluntary emigration when people have been pushed to the breaking point,” Hass explained. “When life becomes so unbearable that people feel they cannot stay any longer, those who are able to leave will choose to do so. That is exactly the outcome Israeli policy is designed to produce.”
Across all areas where Palestinians live between the Jordan River and Mediterranean, Hass argues the Israeli state uses overlapping, coordinated tactics to pressure communities into leaving: economic strangulation, state tolerance of armed violence, and failure to intervene against actors that undermine Palestinian safety and security. In Gaza, she said the Israeli state supports armed militias that terrorize civilian populations; in the West Bank, armed settlers are allowed to attack Palestinian communities with near-total impunity; and inside Israel itself, deadly organized crime in Palestinian communities has surged, with almost no state intervention to curb the violence.
“Israel pampers militias in Gaza and allows crime organisations in Israel proper to kill Palestinians every day,” Hass said.
Beyond her criticism of Israeli policy, Hass also condemned the international community for its failure to take decisive, meaningful action to stop the escalating crisis. She says foreign governments have repeatedly found new excuses to delay meaningful intervention, enabling the expansion of displacement policies. Closing the interview, she reiterated the gravity of her warning, saying, “I am very afraid about what the Israeli state is capable of doing now.”