66 Palestinian villages forcibly expelled by Israel from West Bank since October 2023: Rights group

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An excavator demolishes a Palestinian-owned building as Israeli forces carry out a raid in the Taawun Alawi area of Nablus, West Bank, Palestine on August 31, 2026. [Nedal Eshtayah – Anadolu Agency]

Israel has forcibly displaced residents of Khirbet al-Taban in the southern occupied West Bank, making it the 66th Palestinian village to be completely emptied of its residents since October 2023, Israeli rights group B’Tselem said Wednesday.

The group said in a statement that Israeli forces raided the village, south of Hebron, Wednesday morning and demolished the homes of all its residents within hours.

Khirbet al-Taban is home to 12 families totaling about 70 people, including 28 children, it said.

“The forces did not leave a single home standing,” B’Tselem said.

Israeli forces also demolished sheep pens, water tanks and storage facilities and destroyed caves in the area, according to the group.

B’Tselem said Khirbet al-Taban was the “66th Palestinian village that Israel has forcibly displaced since October 2023,” while residents of 18 other villages have been partially displaced.

The group said the displacement operations have forcibly removed about 4,931 Palestinians from their homes, including approximately 2,339 children and teenagers.

READ: Palestinian commission records 2,030 Israeli army and settler attacks in West Bank in August

B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak said Israel was “continuing to erase Palestinian communities at an accelerating pace as part of the ethnic cleansing it is carrying out in the West Bank.”

Novak said the international community was standing “idly by while Palestinian lives are left exposed to Israeli violence.”

The demolition of Khirbet al-Taban comes amid an escalation in the seizure of Palestinian land across the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, alongside occupiers’ attacks and the establishment of illegal settlement outposts and projects.

In July, Israeli authorities issued 31 orders to seize about 831,000 square meters of Palestinian land in the West Bank, according to The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission.

The Israeli army and occupiers also carried out 2,256 attacks against Palestinians, their land and property during the month, including 1,458 by the army and 798 by occupiers, according to the commission.

Since Israel began its genocide on the Gaza Strip on Oct. 8, 2023, Israeli forces and occupiers have intensified attacks in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, through killings, arrests, forced displacement, home demolitions and illegal settlement expansion.

READ: Settler fire attacks damage 11 mosques in West Bank in 2026

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

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