Since the October 7 attacks on Israel, much of the world's attention has been focused on the war in Gaza.
But another kind of conflict has also been flaring nearby.
For more than 50 years, Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory have grown in both size and number, especially in the West Bank.
Many Palestinians there now live alongside Israeli settlements and the relationship between these two groups is fraught.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, instances of settler violence — violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied territory — have been on the rise.
And even if the war in Gaza comes to an end, these settlements are a key stumbling block to any future peace deal.
'A massive expansion of Israeli territory'
Like many stories in the Middle East, this one begins with a war.
In 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike which started a conflict with its larger Arab neighbours, Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
In what became known as the Six-Day War, Israel quickly defeated this coalition and managed to seize new territories from them, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
These areas fell under Israeli control and form today's Occupied Palestinian Territory.
"It was a massive victory and a massive expansion of Israeli territory," Callie Maidhof, a professor of global studies at the University of Chicago, tells ABC Radio National's Rear Vision.
Israel annexed East Jerusalem as it was home to key Jewish religious sites. But it refused to give Palestinians in the city citizenship, giving them only Israeli residency and leaving them stateless.
It was much more reluctant to incorporate the West Bank and Gaza into the state of Israel due to their much larger Palestinian populations.
This meant Palestinians in those areas didn't become Israeli residents or citizens, instead finding themselves stateless and subject to Israeli military law in most areas.
"The political leaders … had no clear agenda of what to do with these new territories that Israel just conquered," says Arie Perliger, a professor at the School of Criminology at the University of Massachusetts.
Embracing settlements
In the late 1960s, Israeli settlers, many of whom were deeply religious and nationalistic, began to move into the newly-occupied areas, particularly the West Bank.
Settlers bought land from the Palestinians or they occupied land previously controlled by the Arab states who were defeated in the 1967 war.
There were also cases where "the owners [of land] didn't have the capability to challenge the settlers", Professor Perliger says.
The Israeli government, however, was lukewarm to the settlement idea and multiple settlements were evacuated.
"The most dominant policy was that [the occupied] areas would not become part of the state of Israel, that it was not a realistic vision," Professor Perliger says.
But that all changed in 1977.
That year, a shock election saw the right-wing Likud party come to power, ending decades of rule by the left.
Likud was "highly supportive of the idea that the [occupied territory is] part of the historical land of Israel" and "should never be given back to anyone else", Professor Perliger says.
He says Likud also thought these areas were of "strategic military and operational importance" and could act as a buffer zone against aggressive neighbours.
On this basis, the Israeli government began to provide financial, operational, military and legal support to grow and maintain the settlements.
A 'hero' for the settlers
That same 1977 election boosted the profile of Ariel Sharon, who would go on to serve as Israel's prime minister from 2001 to 2006.
Sharon was appointed agriculture minister and used his position to become a champion of the settler movement.
"He planned to move 1 million Israelis to the occupied territories [within] 10 years," explains Akiva Eldar, a journalist and co-author of Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories.
"He offered cheap housing … [with] all kinds of subsidies from the government."
But in 1979, a landmark court case in Israel prohibited Israelis from seizing private land for settlement purposes in the occupied territory.
"Almost immediately, Ariel Sharon was like, 'OK, how do we get around this?'" Professor Maidhof says.
"[He] started using this old Ottoman land law that said if land had not been cultivated for a certain amount of time, and if it was a certain distance from a village, then it was declared 'dead land'."
Ever since, the growth of settlements has continued unabated, regardless of which political parties governed Israel.
"People just kept moving there," Professor Maidhof says.
"Today you have around 800,000 Jewish-Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem."
The intifadas
In 1987, Palestinians began to rise up across Israel and the occupied territory, in what came to be known as the first intifada.
The following six years were marred by tension and violence, which transformed relations between Palestinians and Israelis.
Against this backdrop, the 1992 Israeli election was won by the Labor party and its leader Yitzhak Rabin, who embraced dialogue with the Palestinians.
But Rabin and his politics worried many in the Israeli settler movement.
"After almost 25 years of dramatic success, [some Israeli settlers] were extremely frustrated by what they saw as Rabin's willingness to make substantial concessions in the West Bank," Professor Perliger says.
"They used every tactic to portray the left and Rabin as an enemy of the Jewish people."
At the time, Yasser Arafat was the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the political group which represents Palestinian people to the region and the world.
In 1993, Rabin and Arafat signed the Oslo Accords. The historic agreement was intended to help bring peace to the region and, in doing so, reshaped the West Bank.
"The Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into areas A, B and C. It effectively said where Israelis can go, where Palestinians can go, and who has control in those places," Professor Maidhof explains.
But she says for some Israeli settlers, this marked "an existential threat".
In 1995, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli right-wing extremist who opposed the Oslo Accords.
And in the years that followed, negotiations stalled and tensions rose.
In 2000, a renewed uprising, known as the second intifada, saw mass demonstrations, unprecedented violence and a spate of suicide bombings around Israel.
"The Israeli government felt that the only way to actually block those waves of suicide bombers [was] having much more control over Palestinian movement [in the occupied territory]," Professor Perliger says.
In response, Israel established security checkpoints and other controls across the West Bank.
But while settlements grew in the West Bank, Israel took a very different approach to the smaller number of settlements which had been built in Gaza over the decades.
In 2005, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon surprised the world when he ordered the dismantling of all Israeli settlements there.
But shortly after, Sharon fell into a coma and later died, leaving his overall plans unclear.
Professor Maidhof believes "it wasn't a grand altruistic gesture. It was a way of … pulling out of this small number of settlements [in Gaza] to maintain and expand the broader settlement project [in the West Bank]".
A rise in violence
Israeli settlements have been found to be illegal under international law by the International Court of Justice.
And legal or not, they are on land that could one day be part of an independent Palestinian state under a two-state solution. And Australia has now joined many other nations in recognising Palestinian statehood.
In 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud party formed a coalition government, which included parties and individuals with close links to the settler movement.
His government has asserted that "the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel" including the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
And since the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza, settler violence has been on the rise.
"Every settlement has its own emergency squad that is armed ... They're supposed to defend the settlements in the case of a terrorist attack," Professor Perliger says.
"[But] the Israeli military [is] stretched thin. So what has happened was that [it has] almost completely relied on local [settler] military units in the West Bank."
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said it had documented 759 settler attacks in the first half of this year.
Recent settler attacks have included torching Palestinian properties, violence and killing.
"There's plenty of evidence that many of the attacks on Palestinians by settlers receive almost zero reaction. Palestinians receive almost zero protection from the Israeli military," Professor Perliger says.
But Prime Minister Netanyahu has defended settlers as broadly a "model" community and there have been some rare instances where his government has denounced settler violence.
Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a historian at the University of Haifa, says that today "something like 5 per cent of settlers are probably involved in settler terrorism".
"It's a small percentage of people but it's a percentage of people that has explicit support from the Israeli [government] coalition".
She adds that "less than 2 per cent of settler terrorist cases are prosecuted and those are only amongst ones that are actually opened".
Dr Hirschhorn says there's been "a cycle of violence that's been happening in the West Bank" since October 7 and it shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.
"Certainly October 7 is in the background of all of this — both for Palestinians and for Israelis."
