Key Takeaways:
- Despite being under Israeli control, Area C in the West Bank has thousands of illegal structures, including villages with mansions that sit empty.
- A residential project in Area B designed exclusively for terrorists overlooks the main highway in the West Bank.
- International coverage rarely captures the West Bank’s complex realities, leaving many of its stories outside the dominant narrative.
The West Bank that the international media presents is oftentimes a relatively simple landscape. Jewish communities and violence dominate the narrative, along with contested ownership and land disputes. The framing ultimately flattens the vast rolling hills into a single, easily digestible image, leaving little room for the stories that, in their complexity and contradictions, reveal a very different picture of what is happening on the ground.
Ultimately, that simplified picture leaves little room for the complexities that emerge when the landscape is examined up close. Beyond journalists’ reluctance to cover those complexities, the broader issue is that many stories unfolding across the West Bank simply do not fit neatly into the narratives that dominate its coverage.
Area C: Illegal Construction
Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B, and C. Area A was placed under full Palestinian Authority control and has no civilian Israeli presence, while Area B was placed under the Palestinian Authority’s civil control and Israel’s security control, without civilian Israeli presence. Area C, which comprises roughly 60% of the West Bank, remained under full Israeli control, while the Palestinian Authority retained responsibility for certain aspects of Palestinian civilian life.
Under the interim arrangements, Israel retained authority over planning and zoning in Area C, including the authority to approve or reject Palestinian building applications.
Related Reading: Do You Know Your Area A, B and C?
Yet despite building permits being required in Area C, the construction of illegal structures has become a defining feature of the area. According to Regavim, a non-profit that monitors land use, resources, and construction, there are 4,311 illegal Jewish structures in Area C. 85% of these structures are inside communities recognized by the state of Israel as legal, leaving roughly 500 illegal structures built by Israeli citizens in places not recognized as legal by the state. In contrast, Regavim has noted that there are more than 103,000 illegal structures built by Arabs in Area C, many of which are mansions.
While some of the illegal structures include Bedouin encampments, many include vast neighborhoods filled with multi-story expansive mansions that frequently sit empty. Mukhmas, a Palestinian village northeast of Jerusalem that lies primarily in Area C, offers a striking example of this phenomenon.
Approaching the village, the landscape quickly challenges the image of sparsely developed hills. Large, multi-story homes stretch across the surrounding hillsides, most of them substantially larger than the homes typically associated with West Bank villages. Some appear lived in, while the vast majority stand uninhabited as their owners live in the U.S. Because the homes remain empty, the need for basics such as schooling options, pharmacies, clinics, supermarkets, and other necessities is nowhere to be seen, and the roads remain silent.
The contrast between the size of the homes and the emptiness becomes more striking when understood within the context of the location of the village. Mukhmas is removed from the major Palestinian population centers, sitting close to the Jerusalem hills. Construction in elevated and contiguous areas of Area C further creates facts on the ground, adding to the increasingly complex landscape of the West Bank.
A Neighborhood Exclusively for Terrorists
The building of mansions is not exclusive to ordinary Palestinians or Palestinian-Americans in Area C. In 2014, the idea for a housing project specifically for former Palestinian prisoners began taking shape near Silwad in Area B. The Al-Karama Housing Association for Prisoners, with supervision by the Palestinian Authority, subsequently developed plans for a residential neighborhood. By 2023, the project was reported to include 100 luxurious villas reserved for Palestinians who had served at least five years in Israeli prisons for terrorism-related offenses.
The executive committee of Al-Karama includes the wife of the secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the father of a Hamas terrorist.
Similar to pay-for-slay, the Palestinian Authority’s monthly stipends to families of terrorists, the housing project forms part of a broader system of material benefits available to Palestinians, awarding them or encouraging them to commit acts of terror.
Beyond the horrendous incentives of buying and living in this neighborhood, its strategic location can not be understated. The neighborhood sits on elevated terrain, between the Israeli communities of Ofra, Ateret and Shiloh, and overlooks Route 60, the principal north-south highway through the West Bank.
The terrain provides the neighborhood with a clear line of sight over lower terrain and a commanding position over this route could prove to have catastrophic consequences. In 2002, a Palestinian sniper positioned near the British Police Junction in the same area murdered 7 IDF soldiers, 3 civilians, and injured 6 others.
While the homes remain unfinished, with the reasons for the stalled construction unclear, the nature of this neighborhood and its development plans are nonetheless worrisome.
Pollution Knows No Borders
It is not only terrorism that can have ramifications for society. The burning of trash and lack of sewage infrastructure can have consequences for both the environment and the communities living nearby. In parts of the West Bank under Palestinian Authority control, limited waste-management and sewage infrastructure means that garbage accumulates and is eventually burned in open areas, while untreated wastewater flows into surrounding lowland.
Neither the rivers of untreated wastewater nor the winds carrying the smoke of burning trash know any border. Rivers of waste that are a result of the lack of infrastructure in areas under Palestinian Authority civil control – meaning it is their responsibility to build and manage such infrastructure – flow into the terrain of Area C.
Meanwhile, trash burning has impacted residents within the West Bank as well as Israeli towns along the Green Line. Between 2017 and 2022, the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection received 50,000 complaints from Israeli residents about air pollution and odor due to trash burning in the West Bank. In the same time frame, unregulated landfills increased from 70 to 123. In November 2025, Israel reported that 250 waste fires were extinguished in the West Bank in the span of two months.
The landscape of the West Bank cannot be understood when its vastness is flattened into a single story that dominates the front pages of major newspapers. Villages of mansions owned by Palestinians or Americans, an exclusive housing project for terrorists, and fires from burning trash are aspects of the reality of life in the West Bank. When these realities are left out, the contradictions of the landscape remain on the sidelines, while a far simpler picture takes their place.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
