Across the occupied interior, from the Negev’s desert villages to the streets of Lod, 2025 has brought a grinding intensification of policies that empty land and fracture communities. Demolitions roll on at pace, displacement orders multiply, and social pressure tightens, producing a landscape where families are pushed out either by force or by the slow unravelling of daily life. Bulldozers, planning schemes and tolerated criminality operate in tandem, advancing a genocidal war waged through bureaucracy as much as brute power.

Nowhere is this more stark than in the Negev, where thousands of homes have been levelled within a single year and entire villages face removal. Court rulings demand evacuations without offering alternatives, clearing space for urban expansion while residents are left without housing or compensation. Political repression has deepened alongside the destruction of property, with activists jailed on contested charges and community leadership targeted. The effect is cumulative: villages rendered uninhabitable, families driven into precarity, and a clear signal that permanence is not permitted.

Plans for new settlements accelerate this trajectory. Projects along major highways and proposals for large religious towns advance while long-established villages remain “unrecognised”, denied basic services such as electricity, water and roads. Thousands are left living in the open, a form of collective punishment designed to corral people into cramped enclaves or force departure altogether. Demography becomes a battleground, with policy choices rewarding one population’s growth while constraining another’s survival.

In Lod, displacement takes a quieter but no less devastating form. Organised crime has flourished amid official neglect, spreading fear that pushes families to leave. Killings have reached alarming levels, shattering neighbourhoods and trust, while authorities maintain a heavy security presence that fails to protect residents from violence. Budgetary starvation, unemployment and engineered housing changes have weakened the social fabric, enabling a creeping takeover of mixed areas and pressuring Arab residents to abandon their homes. Demolitions may have slowed, but the outcome is the same: a city reshaped by intimidation and exclusion, another front in a wider genocidal war against presence itself.