The question carries weight far beyond demography. How many Israeli settlers now live in the occupied West Bank — including East Jerusalem — shapes every serious conversation about Palestinian statehood, land rights, and the future of a population that has lived under military occupation since 1967. Based on the most recent data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and the settlement-monitoring organisation Peace Now, the answer in 2026 is: more than 750,000 Israeli settlers, spread across more than 250 settlements and outposts.
That number did not appear overnight. It is the product of five decades of state-backed construction, subsidised housing, and — critics, including the International Court of Justice, argue — systematic displacement of Palestinian communities to make room for an expanding settler population whose presence violates Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The West Bank Figure: Around 520,000 Settlers Outside East Jerusalem
The Israeli CBS tracks settler population through its annual municipal statistics. Its most recent published figures, covering through late 2024 and projected into 2025–2026 with consistent annual growth rates, put the settler population in the West Bank excluding East Jerusalem at approximately 517,000–525,000 people. Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project, which cross-references CBS data with construction permits and housing starts, has published figures in the same range, noting that growth accelerated sharply after 2020.
These settlers live in 145 government-authorised settlements — each one built on land that international law, UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016), and the ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion all classify as illegally occupied territory. A further 130-plus unauthorised outposts exist alongside those official settlements; many outposts receive retroactive Israeli government recognition or are connected to established settlements by road and infrastructure, effectively functioning as extensions of the settlement enterprise.
The largest settlements in the West Bank proper read like mid-sized Israeli cities. Modi’in Illit, a Haredi ultra-Orthodox settlement bloc near the Green Line, has a population exceeding 80,000. Beitar Illit, also Haredi, numbers more than 60,000. Ariel, positioned deep in the northern West Bank, houses roughly 20,000 residents and contains a university campus. These are not temporary encampments; they are permanent urban communities serviced by Israeli law, Israeli courts, Israeli infrastructure — and connected to Israel proper by a road network largely inaccessible to Palestinians.
East Jerusalem: 230,000 More Settlers in Annexed Territory
Any honest accounting of the settler population must include East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed in 1980 — an annexation the UN Security Council rejected in Resolution 478 (1980) and which remains unrecognised under international law. Approximately 230,000 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem’s ring of post-1967 neighbourhoods: Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev, Har Homa, Ramot, French Hill, and others, many of them built on land expropriated from Palestinian families after 1967.
Israel counts East Jerusalem settlers as residents of its capital, not as settlers at all — a classification rejected by virtually every government and international body outside Israel and the United States. For Palestinians, this distinction is politically loaded: it erases roughly a third of the total settler population from diplomatic discussions and normalises the fragmentation of what Palestinians regard as the capital of any future state.
Combined, the West Bank and East Jerusalem figures yield a settler population of roughly 750,000 to 760,000 — a figure that has more than doubled since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, when settlers numbered approximately 280,000.
Growth Rates That Outpace Israel Itself
Perhaps the most consequential data point is not the raw number but the rate of growth. Peace Now’s analysis of Israeli CBS data has consistently shown that the settler population grows at an annual rate of 3 to 4 percent — roughly double Israel’s national population growth rate of around 1.8 to 2 percent. In absolute terms, that means the settler population is increasing by 15,000 to 20,000 people per year through a combination of natural increase and migration from Israel proper.
The pace surged after the formation of Israel’s most right-wing government in late 2022, which included settler leaders Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir in senior ministerial roles. Peace Now recorded record levels of settlement construction approvals in 2023 and 2024, including the retroactive legalisation of dozens of outposts previously considered illegal under Israeli law as well as international law.
For Palestinians, the physical consequence is measurable. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt) has documented how settlement expansion — combined with the closure regime, Israeli-only roads, and military buffer zones — has fragmented the West Bank into disconnected enclaves. Palestinian communities in Area C, which constitutes roughly 60 percent of the West Bank and remains under full Israeli civil and military control, face systematic denial of building permits while settlement construction accelerates around them. B’Tselem has documented that over 70 percent of Area C is off-limits or heavily restricted for Palestinian use.
What These Numbers Mean for Palestinian Life
Demographics are not abstract when your olive grove is on the other side of a settler bypass road, or when your village’s water allocation is a fraction of that assigned to the settlement on the hill above it. OCHA and UNICEF have both reported that settler-related violence — attacks on Palestinian farmers, livestock, and property — reached record highs in 2023 and remained elevated through 2024, with the Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din documenting a law enforcement failure rate of over 90 percent in cases where Palestinian complaints against settlers are filed with Israeli police.
Scholar Rashid Khalidi, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), frames the settlement project as one of the central mechanisms by which Palestinian self-determination has been foreclosed — not through a single dramatic act, but through the slow accumulation of facts on the ground. The 750,000-settler figure is that accumulation, made concrete.
As negotiations remain frozen and the international community debates the terms of a political horizon that grows more distant with each new housing unit, the settler population continues to grow — at twice the rate of the country that built it, in territory that international law has never stopped calling occupied.
Sources
- Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), municipal population statistics, 2024 — www.cbs.gov.il
- Peace Now, Settlement Watch project — peacenow.org.il/en
- UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016)
- UN Security Council Resolution 478 (1980)
- ICJ Advisory Opinion, Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, July 2024
- OCHA oPt, Humanitarian Situation Reports, 2023–2024 — www.ochaopt.org
- B’Tselem, A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, 2021 — www.btselem.org
- Yesh Din, settler violence prosecution data, 2023–2024 — www.yesh-din.org
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Metropolitan Books, 2020
- Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49, ICRC
