Israeli settlements are Jewish-only communities built illegally on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. These settlements often look like ordinary suburbs: uniform townhouses, red-tiled roofs, and neat lawns, perched atop hills that give them a commanding view of the Palestinian towns and villages carved up to make room for them. In this visual explainer, Al Jazeera maps the spread of illegal Israeli settlements and outposts, and the settler pogroms accompanying them, now at their highest levels on record.
Settlements predate the creation of Israel in 1948, but their number and scale expanded dramatically after Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. Over the past six decades, the settlement network has grown from scattered hilltop outposts into a sprawling system of settlements, roads and highways binding them to each other and to Israel. According to Peace Now, an Israeli anti-settlement watchdog, there are at least 148 illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and 15 in occupied East Jerusalem, 163 in total, now home to some 750,000 Israelis, roughly 10 percent of the country’s Jewish population.
The animation below tracks the founding of each settlement and outpost, along with their growing populations. In 2025 alone, nearly 28,000 housing units were advanced within existing settlements in the occupied West Bank, far more growth than new settlements or outposts added on their own. By 2024, these 163 illegal settlements were home to 744,700 Israeli settlers: 511,100 in the West Bank and 233,600 in East Jerusalem, alongside a record number of illegal outposts, now more than 400, that are not officially counted but are often absorbed into recognised settlements over time, making a true tally difficult to pin down.
Settlements are illegal under international law as they violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bans an occupying power from transferring its population to the area it occupies. The United Nations Security Council, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Committee of the Red Cross, among others, have affirmed this position, most recently in the ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion. Under Israeli law, settlements are legally sanctioned, planned, funded and built with direct government approval, ranging from small rural communities to large towns like Ariel and Maale Adumim.
They are smaller communities built without formal authorisation, though many are later legalised or absorbed into existing settlements. Some Israeli settlements have grown into sizable urban communities, complete with their own mayors, schools, shopping malls, medical centres and even universities. Modi’in Illit is the largest, with 89,301 residents, followed by Beitar Illit with 70,251 and Pisgat Ze’ev with 48,419.
Like most settlements, they are linked by a dense network of roads built exclusively for settlers, many of them bypass roads that cut through Palestinian land, fragmenting communities and, backed by checkpoints and roadblocks, restricting the movement of Palestinians who live alongside them. Nowhere is this clearer than E1, an area east of Jerusalem planned for the expansion of Maale Adumim, which would sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and further fragment Palestinian territorial continuity. In August 2025, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich approved more than 3,000 homes in the E1 settlement project, a plan frozen for decades under international pressure, declaring the move would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.
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