Jewish terrorists have become ‘sovereign’ in West Bank, Ynet analyst says

Jewish extremists and terrorists have effectively become “the sovereign” in the occupied West Bank, while the Israeli army protects their illegal activities and serves the political interests of the far-right government, a veteran Israeli military analyst has warned.

Writing for Israel’s Ynet news site, Ron Ben-Yishai said that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), police and Shin Bet internal security agency are no longer capable of enforcing the law against violent settlers.

“The IDF has lost control of the extremists among the settlers and has become a security company for their whims and illegal actions,” Ben-Yishai concluded. He described the situation in which the army protects “Jewish extremists and terrorists” as intolerable. 

The extraordinary assessment followed an investigation into a deadly confrontation in the Palestinian village of Tell, near Nablus, last month.

Initial Israeli reports described the incident as a Palestinian “terror attack”. However, Ben-Yishai rejected that account, saying the violence began after dozens of armed Israeli settlers entered the Palestinian village.

Palestinian residents moved to expel the Israeli terror group. During the ensuing struggle, a Palestinian man wrested a rifle from a member of the Havat Gilad settlement security team and opened fire. 

Ben-Yishai said that the Palestinian man manage to snatch the weapon “Only after the IDF removed the weapon strap from his back and neck and swung it”.

READ: The meaning of Tell: Why the West Bank may be nearing a breaking point

Israeli reserve soldier Benayahu Mellet and Israeli army officer Major Yuval Ezra were killed. Four Palestinians were also killed in the exchange of fire.

Ben-Yishai stressed that the Palestinians had not arrived armed and that there was no evidence of a planned attack. The violence, he argued, escalated only after the Israeli terror group entered the village despite knowing that the army would probably have refused to approve their excursion. 

The Times of Israel also reported that the gunfight was sparked by an Israeli settler “foray” into the village. 

The findings undermine the official narrative advanced immediately after the incident, when Israeli officials labelled the Palestinian villagers “terrorists” and announced punitive military measures against the surrounding Palestinian population.

Ben-Yishai argued that the Tell incident exposed a much wider collapse of Israeli authority in the occupied territory.

A relatively small but increasingly powerful group of Jewish extremists, he said, now enters Palestinian communities, establishes unauthorised settlement outposts and creates provocations which the Israeli army must then protect.

“The people who have taken the law into their own hands are a large and extremist group which grew within the settlement movement,” wrote Ben-Yishai. “It is now the sovereign in the territory. It does whatever it wants. The IDF merely protects it and its whims.” 

A senior Israeli military official has separately described the proliferation of illegal settlement outposts as one of the army’s “biggest challenges”. The Times of Israel reported that more than 80 illegal outposts were undermining the army’s ability to maintain control, while 126 settlement farms had been established with government support. 

Following the Tell incident, Israel’s minister of finance Bezalel Smotrich demanded that the Palestinian village and neighbouring communities be subjected to the same widespread destruction inflicted by Israel on refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarm. He also called for a new settlement to be established near the scene. 

READ: 5 Palestinians killed in Israeli forces, occupier attacks in West Bank