On Sunday Israel approved plans for 1,300 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank, in the first move of its kind since US President Joe Biden took office.  Later this week, the Israel Higher Planning Committee is expected to meet to push forward plans for an additional 2,862 units.

Protests have continued in the Palestinian village of Beita against the establishment of a settler outpost on the village’s land. Israeli forces have continued to violently suppress protests, killing two more Palestinians over the past month. “For more than 100 days we have been resisting against the occupation and the settlers,” Abed al-Fattah Hamayel, a local activist in Beita, told Mondoweiss. “And everyday the situation is becoming even more volatile. The soldiers are just waiting for any excuse, or just the right moment to kill anyone.”

There is an ongoing, but hidden, Israeli war on the Palestinians which is rarely highlighted or even known. It is a water war, which has been in the making for decades. The recent protests in the West Bank village of Beita are the latest example, where Palestinians are demanding land rights, water rights and basic human rights.

In early May, a group of Israeli settlers arrived with caravans and set up an illegal outpost on the top of Jabal Sabih on the outskirts of Beita, in the northern occupied West Bank. Every single day since then, protests in the village have been nonstop. “Nothing will appease us until this settlement is returned to how it was, as olive groves,” a school teacher from Beita tells Mondoweiss.

The Israeli government defused a political problem today by reaching a deal to evacuate illegal settlers from the outpost called “Evyatar.” The government wants no sources of tension with the Biden administration as the two governments commence a lovefest. But Palestinians cannot be happy with the deal, which allows a yeshiva to remain in the illegal colony.

Religious zealots have established an “outpost” settlement in West Bank lately and Israeli forces have killed five Palestinians protesting the landgrab. The story is getting wide coverage in Palestine but not in the United States, though these lands are the supposed basis of a “Palestinian state.”

Sixteen year old Palestinian teenager Ahmed Shamsa succumbed to his wounds on Thursday morning, a day after he was shot in the head by Israeli forces in the northern occupied West Bank village of Beita in the Nablus district. According to locals Shamsa is the fifth Palestinian to be killed by Israeli forces in Beita since protests against the establishment of a new Israeli settler outpost in the area began in early May. Shamsa is the ninth Palestinian youth to be killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of the year.