Settlers and segregation: Inside the conflict forcing Palestinians from their homes
On the side of a busy road outside the West Bank city of Ramallah, I'm speaking to Mohammed Robin.
I'd read how he left his smallholding one morning to go to work, and when he came back he found it had been taken over by Israeli settlers.
He was not allowed in - they simply told him to leave.
We agreed that I'd follow his pick-up truck to a hill overlooking his property so I could see. He said it was far enough away from the settlers below to be safe.
We turned off the main road on to a dirt track and drove about half a mile across rolling rocky hills, before pulling up to a stop.
As we spoke on the hilltop, we noticed movement at his property down below.
Two men jumped into an all-terrain buggy, along with a large black dog. They started moving up the hill towards us - we had obviously been spotted.
The buggy pulled up and two heavily-armed settlers climbed out and exchanged a few words with Mohammed.
I introduced myself and asked about Mohammed's home and why he couldn't return to it.
They basically ignored me and said nothing.
The men then manoeuvred the buggy sideways, blocking the track so we couldn't get past them.
Still ignoring me, they walked to Mohammed's truck, looked inside, then walked back over and glanced into our vehicle.
They still hadn't said a word to us. The two men talked to each other in whispers, and one stayed behind with us, while the other drove back towards Mohammed's occupied home.
Settlers can be notoriously volatile and clearly Mohammed felt uncomfortable, if not a little scared that more settlers might return with the driver who'd just gone back down the hill.
With nobody talking and not much happening, we decided to leave.
Mohammed's family had owned the property since 1952, when the land was developed by his grandfather.
"He built olive trees on it," Mohammed had told me. "Then my father was a teacher and supported the land and invested in it."
"When I was growing up I used to come here and play, we used to come and visit our grandfather and grandmother."
"I have to go the legal route to defend my land, but even with a legal process, I'm not... there's not much chance. This is aggression."
Settler encroachment is perhaps the most important issue in the West Bank at the moment, and it's got worse since the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent war in Gaza.
The settlers feel emboldened, the government is largely supporting them, they act with impunity and are in many ways enabled by Israel security forces.
It's left Palestinians like Mohammed traumatised and angry, but perhaps worse, overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness.
I spent two weeks in the West Bank and saw that fundamental human rights are being whittled away daily, while the world watches on.
It's different to the war in Gaza of course, but Palestinians in the West Bank are involved in a conflict nonetheless.
THE ISOLATED TOWN
I'd heard about Sinjel, a Palestinian town in the West Bank I was told was cut off from the outside world.
It isn't yet completely surrounded but a five-metre-high metal fence around its eastern edge, and the early stages of construction on the other side, indicates the direction it's going.
We entered the town on a small road that is the only exit and entry now available to its 8,000 residents. The main entry point has been permanently shut by the Israeli army since the 7 October attack.
Israel says the barricades and fence are there to protect the main road from attack by stone-throwing villagers – security concerns are used as a catch-all reasoning for virtually everything.
Sinjel is the first town in the West Bank to be slowly encircled and many here believe it won't be the last.
It's a particularly vivid example of Israeli segregation.
The mayor, Mutaz Tawafsha, told me that people who live here have two big issues. One is the encroachment of settlers on their land and the other is the fence and barricaded gates.
"They're trying to make Sinjel a jail by isolating people from their land, from the north side, south side, east side, and west side."
We walked along the fence towards a large, thick, orange iron barrier gate closing off the main entrance to the town.
"We've had this gate from before October 7th by the way, and the army opens it and closes it as they like, but since October 7th it's been closed," Mutaz explained.
I asked him if they could not just cut the padlocks to the gate and open it.
"They have a camera over there, you will see it and they're going to come and take you," he said, pointing to a CCTV camera just above.
"They are watching us right now."
As we spoke, it became clear that the other big issue - the settlers - is in many ways more dangerous to their community.
The mayor took out his phone and showed me a video he'd filmed of a settler attack on a farm on the edge of town.
The video, included above, shows a farm building being ransacked and later set on fire by a large group, and a second video shows sheep and goats being herded away from the farm by the settlers.
He took me to the place he had filmed that from, and I asked him if we could get a little closer to the area.
He looked at me incredulously.
"If you just try to go close to the settlers, you will see them, they are going to come and start to attack you."
The West Bank would form the largest territorial part of a Palestinian state if it were to be recognised.
It's geographically on the west bank of the River Jordan – hence its name – and it is, nominally at least, divided into areas A, B, and C under the terms of the Oslo Agreement.
'A' areas are the most densely populated, largely major towns and cities fully governed by the Palestinian Authority and its security services.
'B' areas are governed by the Palestinian Authority, but they have an Israeli security presence.
Area 'C' is entirely administered by Israel and its security forces and takes up 60% of the West Bank.
There are signs for these different areas everywhere in the West Bank, and the striking red 'Area A' sign clearly states that Israeli citizens are not allowed to enter "by Israeli law".
But movement for Palestinians, even in Area A, is now so disrupted by Israeli security checks and barrier gates locked at will that normal life is effectively suspended.
For example, leaving one part of town to reach another involves walking past a closed gate, across the road, past another closed gate and then the journey home.
Car journeys are characterised by hours-long queues at checkpoints, and treatment can be arbitrarily unpleasant.
At an armed checkpoint, we watched as a man in the car in front of us was told to get out and hand over ID documents for himself and the other passenger.
He handed over his documents to one of the two soldiers and was told to get back in his car and wait.
The soldier then gestured for the man to collect the documents, and as he got out of his car to get them, the soldier threw the documents on the ground.
The man leaned down, picked them up, and quietly drove away.
Israeli military seen in Hebron in the West Bank
The Israeli military uses a range of obstacles like iron gates and concrete roadblocks across the West Bank.
The Israeli justification for these barriers is security – what's undeniable is the impact they have on movement across the West Bank for Palestinians.
The obstacles can range from earth mounds to checkpoints that are accompanied by inspections and guarded 24/7.
The use of these obstacles has intensified.
Since the 7 October attack, the number of obstacles has risen by more than 200.
In early 2023, the United Nations documented a total of 645 obstacles in the West Bank. By early 2025, it had risen to 849.
And from what we've seen while travelling around the West Bank, that number is growing all the time.
Beneath the hilltop village of Al Mughayyir, we watched as IDF soldiers oversaw a digger working on a roadway, while a new barrier gate was being moved into position from the back of a lorry.
I introduced myself to the two soldiers and told them I was trying to get to the village. They were immediately uncomfortable, telling me it was a "military area" and to stop filming, and go away.
THE SETTLER
Daniel Winston is an American-born Israeli settler, who has lived in Israel for more than 25 years.
He, his wife and 10 children live in Yitzhar – considered one of the most hardcore settler communities in the West Bank. Some members of the settlement and the religious school in Yitzhar have been sanctioned by the British government, for example, for aggressive behaviour or for 'promoting violence against non-Jewish people'.
We weren't allowed to meet at his settlement, so he invited me to a lookout point in another one.
He wanted to show me the valley where Joshua led the Israelites to the promised land, according to scriptures.
He, like all the settlers, believe the land is theirs and reject any notion of a Palestinian state.
Like the Israeli government, Daniel refers to the West Bank by its biblical names Judea and Samaria.
"I've chosen to live in the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, truly out of a biblical imperative to make this happen and make it happen better, even though the entire world has this mythology around it being occupied territory and being the so-called the land of the Palestinians," he told me as we drove.
Interestingly, Daniel is a relationship therapist. He struck me as well-mannered, and well read, but his views on the modern day, like many of the settlers, appear to be thousands of years old.
Throughout our conversation he made it clear that in his mind the Bible trumped any type of modern international law.
"I am not one of those frothing at the mouth settlers who are going to yell and scream and start throwing things at you because I don't like what you're saying," he said when I challenged him on the creation of a Palestinian state.
"I don't like what you're saying because what you are saying is wrong, it is not consistent with a historical record, there was never a Palestinian state."
"Even if I were to say, okay well these poor people they have to do something, they have to go somewhere, I would say, well, not on my account, not on my watch.
"Because not only is it inimical to my essential national interests of settling the entire land of Israel, it's also an intrinsic danger, a clear and present danger to our physical survival."
Daniel consistently argued that the presence of Israelites in the West Bank going back 3,000 years justified his claims that the land belongs to them.
I pointed out that Romans controlled London thousands of years ago as well, but no Italian has ever claimed ownership of Park Lane.
"The problem is that first of all the Italians aren't interested, second of all, the Italians can't claim that God sent them there, I can whether you believe it or not and I understand that people don't buy into that," he replied.
"It's like, oh, that's just a religious thing, yeah, that's what it is, you know, God's real, and he wrote the Bible, and the Bible says, 'I made this land, and I want you to be here'."
A TWO-STATE SOLUTION?
The UK, France and Canada are all threatening to recognise Palestine as a state in the coming months, much to the condemnation of Israel.
All these countries talk of the so-called two-state solution, where Israelis and Palestinians live side-by-side.
Israel rejects it and despite decades of negotiation and sometimes apparent agreement, the two-state solution remains a theoretical possibility – although many here doubt it's actually achievable.
Yossi Beilin is one of the original architects of a two-state solution plan.
He has worked on it for years and points out that because of this it remains viable if both parties were willing, as many technical issues have been addressed in the past.
"If you don't want to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, you will always have good enough reasons on both sides why never to do that," he told me at his home in Tel Aviv.
"But if you want to solve the problem, you will find you will solve it."
Beilin is a rare voice of optimism in what is a largely depressing state of affairs.
I asked him if we'd reached a tipping point where a two-state solution was just no longer possible. He fixed his eyes on me as he delivered his assessment.
"We are in a situation whereby both sides need the two-states solution badly," he said.
"The Palestinians, because this is the only way for them to fulfil their vision of said determination.
"For the Israelis, it is the way to have a border, unless we do it unilaterally, and we already know that unilateral decisions about borders are not usually fulfilled - so we need an agreement about the border in order to assure that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, otherwise, we are doomed."
CREDITS
Reporting: Stuart Ramsay, Sky News chief correspondent
Production: Sameer Bazbaz and Dominique Van Heerden
Camera Operator: Mostyn Pryce
Shorthand production: Michael Drummond, foreign news reporter
OSINT Producer: Olive Enokido-Lineham
Editing: Adam Parris-Long, assistant editor
Design: Arianne Cantwell, Eloise Atter, Anisa Momen and Carmela Joannou
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