If Israel were to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised in his re-election campaign, it would be a potentially fatal blow to the already tattered prospects for a peace agreement with side-by-side states, and could unleash a new round of violence, Palestinians warned on Monday.

But among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world, the reaction to Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign promise was largely muted, colored by a deeply skeptical view of Israeli vows and intentions.

The prime minister’s remarks changed little, many Palestinians said, because in their view the two-state peace process was dead already and Israel was headed in the direction of annexation all along. Some Palestinians said they suspect Mr. Netanyahu is playing short-term politics more than making a serious long-term political statement.

“The truth is that annexation has been happening for the last 50 years; it just hasn’t been directly called annexation,” Fadi Quran, 31, an activist in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said on Monday.

The Palestinian experience, he said, has been “creeping annexation, that their land has been slowly taken over and thousands of people have been removed from their homes one way or another.”

Khalil Shikaki, a political scientist and pollster based in Ramallah, said: “Much of the Palestinian public already expects that this is what Israel’s ultimate goal is.’’

“In fact, they expect much worse than that,’’ he said — they expect the Israelis to expel the Palestinian population of the West Bank.

Mr. Netanyahu has been trying to win over far-right Israeli voters who might opt for more extreme parties in Tuesday’s election. He said on Saturday that if re-elected, he would begin asserting Israeli sovereignty over areas of the West Bank, starting with Jewish settlements. Suddenly, the future of the West Bank became a central issue in an already-heated campaign.

Much of the world would consider annexation both a violation of international law and a breach of the Oslo accords, which committed both sides to a two-state solution. But to many Palestinians and other Arabs, Mr. Netanyahu has never been serious about a peace agreement or a Palestinian state. In their view, building and expanding settlements has long amounted to an unofficial, creeping annexation.

Mr. Netanyahu has been emboldened by President Trump, who has reversed decades of American policy by recognizing Israeli authority over the Golan Heights, moving the United States embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and imposing financial penalties on the Palestinian Authority.

“Annexing the settlements will end any possibility for a two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state,” said Asad al-Dein, 24, an engineering student in Ramallah. But, he added, “those who are tough eat the weak, and this is exactly what’s happening in the West Bank today,” where Israel is already effectively in control.

Even if Mr. Netanyahu’s statement on the West Bank came as no surprise, Palestinians said, Israeli actions to carry it out would draw a reaction, if only to drive Fatah, the dominant party in the Palestinian Authority, to a more militant stance.

On a sidewalk in Bethlehem, where a group of young men were hanging around outside a store, one of them, Mahmoud Marazek, 23, painted a bleak picture of their lives. “Around us are settlements; we are being choked,’’ he said. “There’s no work. There’s no economic movement.”

In a comment that could be taken as a warning, he added, “I don’t see my life in the future.”

Many Palestinians said they had not heard of Mr. Netanyahu’s comments, but they said they were unfazed by them.

“It won’t happen,” said Mohamed Hamamra, 19, who works in a sweet shop in Bethlehem. If it did, he added, “there would be lots of problems,” possibly war.

“The situation is heading toward escalation,” said Qassem Qasir, a Lebanese journalist and political analyst. “More pressure will lead to an explosion.”

Mr. Netanyahu “wants to destroy the two-state solution with Trump,” Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, said at a forum in Jordan on Sunday. “In the absence of two states, in the absence of hope, I’m afraid there will be blood.”

Absorbing West Bank land formally into Israel would “greatly diminish the prospect of a two-state solution,” said Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres. He reiterated the longstanding opposition by Mr. Guterres and most of the world’s nations to Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the expansion of Israeli settlements there.

Mr. Shikaki, the pollster in Ramallah, said that because of Mr. Netanyahu’s statement, support for violence would probably increase among Palestinians, and that effect would be magnified if annexations actually took place. But he said he suspected that the prime minister was just posturing in the final days of a heated election campaign — and that Palestinian leaders probably think so, too, explaining the subdued official reaction. But he also cautioned that this represented dangerous talk that the prime minister might be forced to act on, in a coalition with the far-right parties.

One of the strongest Palestinian reactions came from within Israel, from the Balad party, which primarily represents Israeli Arabs.

“The war crimes being carried out by Netanyahu and his government are causing irreversible damage to this entire region,” the party said in a statement. “We will oppose and battle the annexation of every inch of Palestinian occupied land and we will demand to have U.N. resolutions honored and have all of the settlements dismantled.”

The Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, cooperates extensively with Israel on security and economic matters, and Mr. Erakat said Israeli annexations would make its position untenable. “The Palestinian Authority may have to make a disappearing act,’’ he warned, which could create a power vacuum that would be filled by more militant forces, like Hamas, which governs Gaza.

A Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, wrote on Twitter: “Netanyahu’s dreams of annexing the West Bank will not be realized and we will not allow this to pass.’’

“It’s time to stop the security coordination with the occupation,’’ he added, referring to the Palestinian Authority.

There was little reaction from Hezbollah in Lebanon, or from the governments of neighboring Arab states. Analysts said those governments were probably wary that heated reactions could alarm Israeli voters and further drive them into Mr. Netanyahu’s camp.

Marwan Muasher, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former foreign minister of Jordan, said Mr. Netanyahu’s announcement was another dismaying — if unsurprising — sign of deep trouble for Jordan, where many Palestinian refugees and their descendants live.

The leaders of Jordan, which once claimed sovereignty over the West Bank, support a two-state solution that would allow Palestinian refugees to return to the West Bank. But there are fears in Amman, the capital, that further Israeli encroachment, possibly abetted by a long-promised Trump peace proposal, could drive more Palestinians into Jordan, Mr. Muasher said.

”This has been on Jordanian officials’ minds for quite some time,” he said. “That this deal is going to be of course very unfair to the Palestinians by not giving them a state, but very unfair to Jordan by trying to solve the conflict at Jordan’s expense.”

Reporting was contributed by Miriam Berger from Bethlehem; Vivian Yee and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon; Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel; Miriam Berger in Bethlehem and Rami Nazzal in Ramallah, on the West Bank.

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