IDF admits failure to sufficiently reduce Jewish violence against West Bank Palestinians

IDF admits failure to sufficiently reduce Jewish violence against West Bank Palestinians

YONAH JEREMY BOB

Mon, January 19, 2026 at 6:05 PM UTC

5 min read

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An attorney has urged the Shin Bet to act after three Jewish hilltop youth allegedly attacked a pregnant Arab woman in Jaffa, warning that settler violence is being shifted from the West Bank into Israel’s cities. (photo credit: screenshot/section 27a copyright act)

New electronic bracelets have been so far ineffective

The IDF on Monday admitted that it failed in 2025 to sufficiently reduce the volume of Jewish extremist violence against West Bank Palestinians

In 2025, the number of "nationalistic" Jewish incidents, a term the IDF uses to refer to both violent attacks and vandalism targeting Palestinian property, spiked to 867, up from 682 incidents in 2024.

Although the IDF pointed out that the number of incidents was still lower than the 1,045 number in 2023 and the 922 number in 2022, it was still a far cry from the 446 total in 2021, 353 in 2020, and 339 in 2019.

Beyond the raw numbers, the IDF also acknowledged that the number of more serious, dangerous incidents, and especially of mass attacks, as opposed to an attack by one or two individuals, went up even more.

Currently, the IDF does define individual deadly Jewish attacks on Palestinians as Jewish terror.

Israeli security forces clash with Jewish settlers during the evacuation of Illegal structures in Tzur Misgavi, an outpost in Gush Etzion, in the West Bank, November 17, 2025 (credit: REUTERS/NAAMA STERN)

However, it still does not define groups of Jews involved in group attacks as terror groups because it says that they are not as organized as Palestinian terror groups.

IDF notes surge in Jewish extremist attacks on West Bank Palestinians

Critics say that the different terminology is impacted by the right-wing politics of the existing coalition, by Bluth, or by other defense officials.

More recently, Bluth has referred to many of the Jewish extremists as anarchists.

Breaking down who the attackers are, the Shin Bet has defined 70 Jews as the worst offenders. Bluth has issued 39 restraining orders against more than half of these individuals.

Beyond those 70, there are another approximately 250 that are involved in Jewish nationalist incidents, even if less extreme to some extent, said the IDF.

Roughly half of the Jewish extremists, noted the IDF, come from the West Bank and another half from within the Green Line, including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Raanana, and elsewhere.

Despite that roughly 50/50% split, the IDF would acknowledge that the vast majority of the Jewish extremists now spend most of their time in the West Bank, even if their original homes and parents are within the Green Line.

IDF sources said that many of them have run away from their homes and have little regard for any authority figures, even right-wing religious Zionist rabbis.

For example, in some cases, Jewish extremists have attacked Palestinians or even IDF commanders with arson on Saturday despite biblical religious prohibitions against using fire on theShabbat.

Some of the Jewish extremists are as young as age 12, and most of them are in their teens or early 20s, with one of the oldest currently being 26.

The worst months of the year for Jewish extremist violence were January, with 116 incidents, May and June, both with around 90, and then October and November with 100 and 87 incidents respectively.

An ongoing problem, according to IDF sources, remains that Defense Minister Israel Katz released seven of the worst offenders from administrative detention around a year ago, and then cancelled administrative detention for Jews.

This is at a time when over 3,500 Palestinians are in administrative detention.

Even taking into account how much larger and more deadly Palestinian terror is as compared to extremist Jewish violence, critics say that there is no basis to zero out administrative detention of Jews when the majority of IDF and Shin Bet positions for all of 2024-2025 were that ceasing using the tool would endanger national security.

While restraining orders have some impact, IDF sources said that in practice, there are many ways around restraining orders and ways for Jewish extremists to avoid law enforcement detecting their movements.

Recently, electronic bracelets were placed on two Jewish extremists to track them and prevent their entering the West Bank, particularly while one of them was under house arrest.

However, the individual under house arrest succeeded in traveling to Eilat, against the orders of Bluth, without anyone being able to stop him in time, given that measures were more in place to prevent him from traveling to the West Bank.

In addition, many Israeli civilian courts have not fully recognized the validity of IDF military orders placed on some of these Jewish extremist Israeli civilians.

This has limited the effectiveness of their enforcement and the deterrent impact on the individuals of the restraining orders or electronic bracelets.

Likewise, a new law had been passed to make it illegal for citizens to wear face masks in the West Bank. The concept was to make it easier to identify offenders or empower law enforcement to arrest them for the act of concealing their identities, even if an individual was not caught in the act of a nationalist crime against Palestinians.

But this initiative has had limited effectiveness again due to lack of enforcement from Israeli civilian courts.

There is an ongoing debate about whether the West Bank police are making a comeback in recent months to arrest and indict more Jewish violent extremists after around three years of criticism from the Shin Bet and the IDF of looking the other way due to pressure from National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

Besides Jewish extremist violence, the IDF has bulldozed dozens of illegal outposts established by Jewish West Bank settlers.

However, dozens more have been officially legalized by Betzalel Smotrich in his capacity of controlling that policy within the Defense Ministry.

While under former defense minister Yoav Gallant, there was some pushback on such issues, Katz has given Smotrich a complete greenlight.

Those moves have led to international criticism, including from the Trump administration.

It was recently reported that some new outposts could disrupt any future attempt to implement Trump's 2020 plan for establishing a Palestinian state on portions of the West Bank law in dispute between Israel and the Palestinians.

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