For more than two decades, Israeli Dror Etkes has crisscrossed the West Bank, bouncing along dusty, rutted roads as part of his personal mission to keep close tabs on the expanding Jewish settlements he fiercely opposes.
The war in Gaza has diverted attention from the West Bank, and the Israeli government and Jewish settlers are making the most of this opportunity to increase their numbers and the land they control, said Etkes.
"The settlers realize that these are the right times to expand and to take as much as possible, to swallow as much as possible, to grab as much as possible," said Etkes, who established the monitoring group Kerem Navot.
This is not the first time we've gone around the West Bank together. Back in 2007, Etkes took me on a tour of new outposts established by hard-core settlers. Today there are nearly 150 Jewish settlements authorized by the Israeli government and more than 100 outposts that have no government sanction, according to monitoring groups.
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