Last week, military bulldozers demolished houses belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank., Zain Jaafar/Agence France-Presse

On Oct. 10, the same day the cease-fire went into effect in Gaza, a group of Palestinians in the West Bank village of Beita set out to harvest their olives when they were assaulted by a group of Israelis. Twenty Palestinians were reported wounded, including two elderly men; one man was hospitalized with a bullet wound. Nine days later, a masked Israeli settler was filmed by an American journalist as he beat a 53-year-old Palestinian woman with a club in the village of Turmus Aya. She was knocked unconscious, and the video clip captured her as she fell to the ground under an olive tree. On Oct. 25, video footage showed a settler and soldiers assaulting a 65-year-old Palestinian man in Nahalin, near Bethlehem, in front of his family. On Nov. 8, Palestinian harvesters in Beita once again came under attack. Israeli activists who joined them to provide a protective presence were assaulted as well, including a 77-year-old art school principal, who suffered a broken jaw and cheekbone. Two Reuters employees were injured in the incident.

Most of the assailants have not been apprehended. The United Nations reported that this October — peak olive harvest season in the West Bank — saw the highest number of settler attacks in the area since it began documenting them in 2006. Over 260 attacks were recorded, an average of eight per day.

This is a serious acceleration of violence, but it is not new or isolated. Since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers; one in every five dead is a child. In the same period, over 3,000 Palestinians say they have been displaced from their homes and lands largely because of Israeli settler violence. Another estimated 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the northern West Bank by Israel Defense Force operations. In the past two years, Israel has erected nearly 1,000 barriers and makeshift checkpoints across the West Bank, suffocating Palestinians’ ability to move and work freely.

This is all part of the Israeli government’s explicit agenda of expanding and deepening its control over the West Bank. Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition are clearly determined to formally annex the West Bank in order to preclude the establishment of a Palestinian state. (Mr. Netanyahu himself hedges on the issue.)

Most Israelis rarely think about the West Bank. Many are not aware of the daily violence and displacement of Palestinians and, as is the case with domestic coverage of the war in Gaza, Israeli mainstream media seldom show the reality on the ground. When they do, it is presented as the exception instead of what is clearly policy. The map Israelis see on nightly weather forecasts and the one used in most classrooms shows what is known as Greater Israel, an area of land that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. On it, there is no demarcation of the pre-1967 borders, known as the Green Line, between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Though the Israeli miliary has occupied the West Bank since 1967, the term “occupation” rarely appears in Israeli media or public discourse.

For most Jewish Israelis, Israel and the occupied territories are seen as more and more geographically seamless. This shift has taken place over the past 25 years, in the wake of the collapse of the Oslo peace accords, the second intifada, the vanishing of the Israeli peace camp and, along with it, the long-held hope of land for peace deals and a two-state solution. The state’s institutionalization of control over land, resources and people beyond the Green Line is only one piece of the way Israel has already effectively annexed the territory.

That process of backdoor annexation accelerated three years ago, when Bezalel Smotrich, a messianic settler ideologue, was granted as part of his party’s coalition agreement with Mr. Netanyahu the role of effective governor of the West Bank. Mr. Smotrich established a new government body called the Settlement Administration and assumed authority over everything defined as daily civilian affairs, including housing, planning and roads. In so doing, he transferred powers from the military officials ostensibly, since 1967, presiding over a temporary military occupation to civilians in government aligned with Mr. Smotrich’s vision of permanent Israeli sovereignty.

Mr. Smotrich has ratcheted up every aspect of Israeli control in the West Bank. On his watch, nearly 50,000 housing units in the settlements have been approved, including more than 25,000 this year alone, a massive increase over the previous years. He has facilitated expropriation of extensive swaths of territory in the West Bank, declaring these parcels Israeli state land. In three years Mr. Smotrich appropriated almost as many acres as Israel had seized in the three decades since the Oslo Accords. He legalized and funded settler outposts built illegally under Israeli law. He pushed Israeli authorities to approve construction in a part of the West Bank known as E1, an area east of Jerusalem that all previous U.S. administrations have warned Israel to leave alone, since building Israeli settlements there would bifurcate the West Bank and render Palestinian territorial contiguity even more difficult to imagine.

But perhaps Mr. Smotrich’s most ambitious plan is to change how the state registers land ownership in Area C of the West Bank, the 60 percent of the territory that has been under exclusive Israeli control since Oslo. The policy now places a much more stringent burden of proof of ownership on Palestinians, making it even easier for the Israeli government to take over land in the West Bank. Once done, that transfer is almost impossible for Palestinians to reverse.

That is why, when President Trump says annexation is off the table, it doesn’t mean much. In 2020, when Israel signed the Abraham Accords, the agreement not to formally annex the West Bank was used as a bargaining chip at the negotiating table. Israel can once again promise the global community it will not formally annex the West Bank, but it has visibly transformed the territory already. The sight of Palestinian shepherds, farmers and picnicking families, once common in the pastoral landscape of the Jordan Valley and areas between Jerusalem and Jericho, has become rare. It’s more common to see small groups of armed Israeli settlers watching over grazing sheep.

International focus on maintaining the cease-fire in Gaza is crucial, but the West Bank must not be disconnected from these efforts, or considered a closed case because of Mr. Trump’s theoretical red line on formal annexation. Recognizing Palestinian statehood, as more Western allies of Israel have done recently, and reasserting the imperative of a path to Palestinian statehood, as the U.N.’s New York Declaration in September outlined and the Trump peace plan gave a nominal nod to, are important steps, but sorely lacking in real impact.

A U.S., European or Arab policy that says no to formal annexation but does nothing to stop de facto annexation will be interpreted by Israel as an invitation to continue apace. Israel has made life in the West Bank increasingly unbearable for the approximately three million Palestinians living there. Such conditions are disastrous for Palestinians and dangerous for Israel.

If Palestinians believe there is no prospect for freedom or self-determination, their despair and frustration will only grow, as will Israel’s impulse to impose more and more repressive security measures. This could, at least for a while, pressure Palestinians to continue to endure their fate, or push those with the means to leave the West Bank. What’s more likely is that it will eventually lead — as it did on Oct. 7 — to an explosion of violence and thus potentially give Israel pretext to do in the West Bank what it has done in Gaza.

Mairav Zonszein is a contributing writer for Opinion and the senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group.