Families moved into Ganim on Thursday, 21 years after the settlement was evacuated. About two dozen prefabricated houses stand along one newly laid street, with heavy machinery still working around them, and roughly a hundred people came for the ceremony.
The route back ran through legislation. Ganim was one of four northern West Bank settlements cleared in 2005 under the Disengagement Law, alongside the withdrawal from Gaza. The Knesset repealed the law in March 2023, and in December of that year the government approved re-establishing Ganim. Sa Nur was repopulated in April 2025 and Homesh in March 2026, which makes this the third of the four.
Ministers were explicit about what the day was for. Defence Minister Israel Katz said that here we are staying forever. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described it as erasing the terrible sin of the expulsion. Yossi Dagan of the Samaria Regional Council said the era of evacuations is over. That is the point being made: not that a settlement has been built, but that one which the state itself removed has been put back.
The same day, the army demolished Palestinian shops in the valleys nearby and blocked roads to Palestinian communities with rubble. The wider tally is 22 settlements approved in May 2025 and 19 more in December. Polling puts 38 percent of Jewish Israelis behind annexing the whole West Bank and 35 percent behind partition, which is a country without a majority for either answer while the facts on the ground keep moving in one direction. Most of the international community holds the settlements to be illegal.