On Monday in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Nablus, a large procession of mourners wound their way past a noisy labyrinth of fresh fruit markets and vegetable stalls, clothes racks and jewelry stands. They were following a small group of people transporting the body of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old American human rights activist draped in a Palestinian flag and a traditional keffiyeh scarf. A wreath of flowers had been placed on her chest.

Ayşenur was killed instantly last Friday when an Israeli soldier shot her in the head, possibly with an American-made bullet, such as the US-designed and manufactured 5.56mm-caliber armor-piercing slug that killed American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. In 2022, Akleh was also shot in the head by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the West Bank town of Jenin. The bullet that killed her was part of the Biden/Harris administration’s multibillion-dollar weapons package. Ayşenur was taking part in a demonstration against Israeli settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories when she was murdered. Yet despite her being an American citizen, there is little chance the Biden administration will act against the Israeli government, just as it took no action when Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered.

Now that the Israeli military has flattened most of Gaza’s infrastructure to sidewalk level; killed more than 40,000 people (mostly innocent women and children); and is allowing thousands more to slowly die of starvation, exposure, thirst, and disease, the IDF is turning its attention to the West Bank with the aim of permanently annexing all Palestinian territory. And it is doing so with the active help of the ever-growing and heavily armed settler militias—the very groups that Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi died peacefully protesting.

But also, and most importantly, it is doing so with help of the Biden/Harris administration and its continuing refusal to cut off the flow of arms used to conduct this illegal annexation. For months, President Biden has been asking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu what his plans are for “the day after.” And every month, the answer becomes more and more obvious: total annexation and the end of any semblance of Palestine—in name, government, and eventually the presence of Palestinians themselves through continual displacement. In Gaza, there have been great efforts by Israel to ethnically cleanse the territory by pushing the population across the border into Egypt’s Sinai desert.

To ethnically cleanse the West Bank, Israel would need to force much of the Palestinian population across the river to Jordan. Their land could then be taken over by the settlers. In fact, last month, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, threatened just that. He stated that Israel needed to “address the threat” in the West Bank “exactly as we deal with terror infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian civilians and any other step needed.” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi then warned Israel that any attempt to displace Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan is tantamount to a declaration of war and is considered a “red line” by the kingdom.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, since the war began last October until the end of August, Israeli authorities demolished, confiscated, or forced the demolition of 1,416 Palestinian structures across the West Bank—including in East Jerusalem—displacing more than 3,200 Palestinians, including 1,400 children. That figure is more than double the number displaced during the same period a year before.

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It is a situation Ibrahim Mohammed Malihat knows well, as he stares from a window in his temporary home near the West Bank village of Taybeh. His view is of the Jordan Valley and a wide expanse where his neighbors and others in his village used to graze their livestock. But their land is now off-limits. “Today, everything is empty from here to Jericho. We don’t go down or south. Everything is left only for the settlers; there’s no area where the flocks can graze,” he told Haaretz last May.

“A few years ago, settlers from the Nablus and Duma area came here, the ones with the long sidelocks,” he said, indicating the “payes” worn by orthodox Jews who make up a large portion of the settlers. “Gradually, they moved south until they reached here. There’s no one in the government to tell them to stop. Go to any village in the area and you’ll see that they’ve destroyed everything there.”

Dror Etkes, a researcher with Kerem Navot, a nongovernmental organization that monitors Israeli settlement and land management policy in the West Bank, pointed out that there are currently some 31,000 acres in the area that Palestinians are de facto prevented from entering by fear of violence and the restrictions imposed by the settlers and the army.

“They’re stealing land in the West Bank as we speak!” exclaimed Rashid Khilidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University in New York, in a recent interview with The New Statesman. “You can see in the West Bank—day in, day out for the past 56 years [since the 1967 war]—to what extent this is and has always been a settler-colonial process. We see it with our bare eyes every single day, as armed settlers rampage through Palestinian towns and villages, chasing people off their land.”

At other times, settlers stop Palestinians’ cars on the highway and tell their occupants that they have 24 hours to leave their homes and that they will be killed if they refuse, according to David Shulman, a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Last March, Shulman stayed overnight with a group of activists in the West Bank village of Mu’arrajat. The group, like the one Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi was with when she was killed, was conducting a “protective presence,” according to Shulman, “to protect Palestinian villagers from the rampages of armed Israeli settlers who are terrorizing them day and night.” A few weeks earlier, he said, “settlers came into the village and dug a row of empty graves near the school—a sign of what they want to do to the people of Mu’arrajat.”

In addition to stealing the land from the Palestinians, annexation also involves stealing what little self-government they have and replacing it with Israeli’s iron fist control. This is also quietly taking place, according to an article in Haaretz by Michael Sfard, an Israeli attorney who represents Israeli and Palestinian human rights movements and activists. What he called the “regime revolution in the West Bank” began last spring. “At the end of May, it happened,” according to Sfard. “Quietly, without any ceremonies or press announcements.” It involved Netanyahu’s transferring to Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right politician who is currently Israel’s finance minister, “all the governing powers in the West Bank…from the army to an apparatus headed by Smotrich himself.” The only exception was powers directly relating to security, which would remain with the IDF.

According to Sfard, Yehuda Fuchs, the head of the army’s Central Command (and the commander of Israeli forces in the West Bank), signed an order creating a new position in the army’s Civil Administration called “deputy head for civilian affairs.” But the “deputy,” says Sfard, “is in fact a civilian appointed by Smotrich.… He needs no approval for his actions, is not required to consult with or report to him. He is subordinate alone to Smotrich.” In effect, says Sfard, Smotrich now runs Israel’s Civil Administration department that effectively controls the West Bank.

Sfard points out the significance of the move. “This is a dramatic change in the governing apparatus of the occupied territory, from one managed by a military administration, subject to international law which requires that it look after the occupied population, to a territory directly managed by civilian administration officials and Israeli publicly elected officials, whose loyalty and duty are by definition given to Israeli citizens in general, and to Israeli citizens living in this occupied territory in particular.”

Once removed from military authority and placed in the hands of a civilian government, the occupation is no longer considered “temporary,” and instead officially becomes permanent, and thus illegal under international law. And rather than there being any move by the government to root out and punish the violent racists and Jewish supremacists of the settler movement, a violent racist and Jewish supremacist is now in charge. All of which creates an urgent need for the Biden/Harris administration to immediately cut off all aid and weapons for Israel—especially the bullets used to kill brave human rights activists like Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi.