Why Jewish Squatter Violence in the West Bank is Skyrocketing

November 15, 2025
Dan Steinbock

In October, amid the two-year anniversary of the Gaza genocide, Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank hit an all-time high. And they will escalate – as long as they are allowed by U.S.-led West.

On Thursday at dawn, Israeli squatter-settlers set fire to the Hajja Hamida Mosque in the Palestinian village of Deir Istiya in the north of the West Bank. Photographs taken at the scene showed racist, anti-Palestinian slogans sprayed on the walls of the mosque, which was damaged in the blaze. Copies of the Quran – the Islamic holy book – were also burned.
October 2025 recorded the highest monthly number of Israeli settler attacks since the UN Humanitarian office (OCHA) began documenting such incidents in 2006. That’s more than 260 attacks resulting in casualties, property damage or both – an average of eight incidents per day.
Reminiscent of the Gaza atrocities, one in every five Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in 2025 across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is a child.
During this olive harvest season, settler violence has reached the highest level recorded in recent years, with the injury of more than 150 Palestinians and the vandalism of over 5,700 trees.
This violence is not a fringe phenomenon. It is deliberate, systematic and escalatory. Shunning all international condemnation, it seeks to establish new “facts on the ground.” It is ethnic cleansing aiming at involuntary population transfer and, unless disrupted, mass atrocities. 
From vigilantes to state terror  
At the beginning of 2024, Zvi Sukkot, Knesset member of the Religious Zionist Party and a colleague of the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, urged the government to “occupy, annex, and demolish all the houses [in Gaza], and build large neighborhoods and settlements.” It sounded harsh, but the zealot was consistent. He had a dream. What happened in Gaza would not stay there but spread to the West Bank.
A far-right Jewish settler living illegally in the West Bank, Sukkot is a former member of The Revolt, a violent Jewish terror group, which has engaged in numerous arson attacks. The group advocates the dismantling of the Israeli state to establish the Kingdom of Israel that follows Jewish Law rather than the rule of (secular) law.
In 2010, Sukkot was arrested in an investigation of a mosque arson and expelled from the West Bank for violent anti-Palestinian attacks. He had defended Jews suspected of firebombing a Palestinian family and been arrested for alleged involvement in “price tagging”; that is, vandalism and violent settler attacks against Palestinians.
As of 2017, the group was still active, in what the Shin Bet internal security agency calls “the second generation of…The Revolt.”
By early 2023, Sukkot had made it to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. And after October 7, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him to chair the Knesset Subcommittee for “Judea and Samaria” (read: the West Bank).
To the settlers, Sukkot is a success story reflecting the march of extremist settlers to the Israeli institutions in the past two decades.
As a member of The Revolt, Sukkot could only firebomb a few Palestinians, mosques and churches. It wasn’t efficient. Now he is in a position to shape the future of the land. He is no longer fighting those in charge. He is in charge.
How did the Messianic far-right march into institutions they once hoped to pull to pieces? Ostensibly, democratically. With the rise of the Jewish dual state, the Netanyahu cabinets have subverted the secular democratic state. The parallels are alarming. Similar trajectories broke the back of the Weimar Republic a century ago.
Ironically, the Israeli settlement policy was first developed by the Labor governments, which paved the way for the foxes to take over the henhouse.

The rise of Jewish settlements  
Since the 1970s there has been a tacit collusion between the Israeli state and the settlers. It is a symbiotic system. The state takes over land, while the settlers, who seek land to further their agenda, engage in violence against Palestinians to achieve their expulsion.
Occasionally, the two cooperate directly, but the preference is to retain an arm’s length distance, to preserve the semblance of the rule of law. The ultimate aim of settler violence is to foster Greater Israel; that is, a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
A new stage ensued in 2018, when the Basic Law codified that “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening.” In keeping with this principle, Israel has dispossessed Palestinians in the West Bank to use their land to build new settlements and to expand existing ones.
According to international law, an occupier must not confiscate land for the needs of the occupier. So, Israel came up with the legal acrobatics of “declaring” instead of “confiscating” land. Based on a subversion of the Ottoman land law from 1858, this bizarre interpretation allowed Israel to take over 16 percent of the West Bank prior to October 7; or 500 to 5,000 dunams per year. Amid the Gaza genocide in the first half of 2024, declarations of state land shot to 24,000 dunams. In other words, while Gaza was burning, Israeli occupation authorities were rushing to take over the West Bank.
Under the labor coalition, the number of settlements grew slowly until the election triumph of the Israeli hard right in the late 1970s. That’s when Prime Minister Begin initiated a huge and purposeful settlement policy to take over the West Bank. In the process, the Jewish settler population soared from a few thousands to over half a million in the West Bank prior to October 7, 2023.
In parallel, Israeli governments have encouraged increasing Jewish settlement in Jerusalem. Since 1967, it has more than tripled to 600,000, whereas the number of Palestinians is close to 390,000. The tacit objective has been to maximize the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, while increasing the Jewish population in Arab East Jerusalem.

Settler violence  
Following the rise of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet in late 2022, the efforts to achieve Jewish supremacy in the West Bank have escalated dramatically. Taking advantage of the Gaza War, groups of violent settlers have carried out organized operations to expel Palestinian communities, through threats, intimidation, property damage, and physical assaults.
Until recently, Israeli and international media have characterized instances of settler violence as “rampages,” which suggests violent but uncontrollable behavior, involving a large group of people. In reality, the violence has been systemic and coordinated.
After the settler violence in Huwara in February 2023, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, head of the military’s Central Command in charge of the West Bank, described the rampage as “a pogrom done by outlaws.” He deliberately used the term referring to mob attacks against Jews in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. As a result, Fuchs himself was targeted for assassination by Kahanite settlers, according to Shin Bet. It wasn’t the first time. In 2007, then-prime minister Ehud Olmert lashed out at settlers in Hebron, who attacked Palestinians and their property. Like some other Israeli leaders, Olmert called the attacks a pogrom, which made him the target of far-right settlers, supported by U.S. billionaires like the late casino tycoon, Sheldon Adelson.
Referring to antisemitic violence in Russia, the term “pogrom” is usually defined as an officially tolerated organized massacre. In this sense, the pogroms by the Jewish settlers in the West Bank are indeed reminiscent of those in Kishinev and elsewhere, as many Israelis suggest.
More than a century ago, Jews knew only too well the consequences of mobs rushing into Jewish neighborhoods while calling for “Death to the Jews!”
Today, Palestinians know exactly what will follow when Jewish settlers burst into Arab neighborhoods crying for the “Death to the Arabs!”
Settlements as a Security Burden  
Ever since the 1970s, the settlers and their U.S. financiers have argued that the settlements ensure Israel’s security. In this view, settlers allow the residents of Tel Aviv to breathe easy because the settlements are good for national security.
In reality, the settlements are a security burden for Israel. ln the past decades, there have been no major war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Yet, due to the Separation Wall and fragmentation of the West Bank, the line of defense that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is required to protect is today about five times the length it would be without the settlements.
Stunningly, before October 7, the IDF had to deploy more than half its active forces, and in crisis situations even two-thirds of them, in the West Bank. That was more than the forces allocated to guarding all other fronts combined (Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the Jordanian border along the Arava).
Worse, these allocations had to be coupled with a large contingent required to protect the settlements. According to estimates, some 80 percent of IDF forces in the West Bank were allocated to settlement guard duty, while the only 20 percent focused on defending the borders of the pre-1967 Israel.
Furthermore, the IDF presence and operations have contributed to several major uprisings, which penalized economic prospects in Israel as well. If Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon was the architect of Hezbollah, its presence in the West Bank and Gaza has served as the midwife of Hamas.
The brutal occupation has divided Israel internally and isolated it externally. It is responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the genocidal atrocities in Gaza. None of this was inevitable. None of it was warranted.
And none of it could have happened without the continuous flows of arms and financing by the U.S.-led West.