The Palestinian Anti-Wall and Settlement Resistance Authority confirmed on Wednesday that campaigns to raise Israeli flags on roads and entrances to Palestinian settlements in the occupied West Bank aim to entrench the settler presence and impose claims of Israeli sovereignty over the land. These practices come in parallel with the targeting of Palestinian memorial monuments and national symbols, which the Authority described as "visual occupation" reflecting a struggle over the identity of the place and Palestinian memory.
In the same context, the Authority clarified in an analytical reading that an initial documentation survey recorded 30 incidents or campaigns to raise Israeli flags during the years 2025 and 2026, up to October 16, 2026, including 8 incidents in 2025 and 22 in 2026. The campaigns included entrances to towns and Palestinian sites, including Ein Sinia, Rawabi, Eastern Al-Lubban, and Deir Abu Daif, and the road adjacent to the "Ash Gror" settler outpost east of Beit Sahour.
For his part, the Authority quoted a cafe owner in Eastern Al-Lubban, Muayyad Hussein, saying that a settler monitors whether he has removed the flags and threatens him with closing the cafe. Settlers had erected dozens of Israeli flags in front of the cafe on October 9, 2026, blocking his view from one direction of the road. The Authority also pointed to a joint project between the Binyamin Regional Settlement Council and the Israeli right-wing movement "Im Tirtzu," which involved spreading hundreds of flags along 26 kilometers of Route 465, passing through the entrances to the town of Birzeit and the city of Rawabi.
The Authority added that the project organizers presented it as a declaration of actual sovereignty, noting that similar campaigns covered about 100 kilometers of roads. In November 2025, the Council announced its support for an initiative in which about 100 young people and students from religious institutes participated, hanging nearly 2,000 Israeli flags along 17 kilometers of Route 60, with the aim of enhancing sovereignty and control over the land and roads.
The Authority pointed to Israeli notices issued on October 5, 2026, to remove signs and monuments bearing images of Palestinians killed by Israel in Jenin and Ya'bad, followed by the demolition of a memorial monument and removal of images, according to the official Palestinian news agency "Wafa." The Authority also addressed incidents targeting Palestinian memorial monuments, images, and murals, including the monument to journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the "Return Monument," and the "Jenin Horse" model, which were documented as destroyed in the Jenin camp in 2024 by an Al Jazeera investigation.
The Authority stressed that raising Israeli flags, while enhancing sovereignty claims visually, does not create a legal right to the land. These campaigns come amid an escalation in Israeli settler expansion in the occupied West Bank and efforts by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to enhance its control over it, amid calls from Israeli ministers to annex it and impose sovereignty over it. In July 2025, the Knesset approved a non-binding proposal calling for the imposition of Israeli sovereignty on the West Bank, despite the confirmation by the International Court of Justice in an advisory opinion in 2024 of the illegality of the continued Israeli presence in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Source: Anadolu Agency
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