An Israeli settler leader and lawyer has openly called for the mass killing of entire Palestinian villages in revenge, telling a BBC interviewer that a single Jewish life outweighs ten million Palestinian lives, in remarks that lay bare the genocidal ideology driving settler violence across the occupied West Bank.
Yehuda Shimon, a settler of the illegal Havat Gilad settlement and a lawyer with an organization that defends settlers who attack Palestinians, spoke to the BBC's Lucy Williamson days after a wave of settler attacks struck Palestinian villages near Nablus. When Williamson noted that settlers had burned six houses in the village of Sarra that Friday, Shimon called it revenge. He then went further, saying that after one Israeli was killed, Israel now needs to kill everyone in Tell and Sarra, and also in Jit and Farata, so that it does not happen again.
Pressed by Williamson, who put it to him that he was valuing one Jewish life at hundreds or thousands of Palestinian lives, Shimon corrected her upward. A million, he said. One Jewish life is worth ten million. Told plainly that this sounded racist, he agreed, then justified it on the grounds that God had chosen the Jewish people and that Palestinians were jealous of them. He added that the Bible authorizes the claim that the land belongs to settlers.
The remarks came in the aftermath of the killings in Tell on July 24, when more than 20 armed settlers from Havat Gilad stormed Palestinian homes on the edge of the village. Residents initially drove them back, but the settlers returned with Israeli occupation soldiers. During the confrontation, an unarmed Palestinian resident seized a rifle from an armed settler and opened fire. Four Palestinians from the Ramadan family were killed, along with a settler and an occupation soldier. The killings triggered a wave of settler revenge attacks on Palestinian villages across the area, with homes and property torched.
This is not the first time Shimon has used interviews with international media to broadcast the ideology behind settler violence and dismiss any accountability for it. Speaking to NPR in 2024, he framed the presence of Palestinians as a threat, saying they should stop trying to kill Jews if they wanted to live, and cast settlement of the land as a religious command from God. Speaking to The National the same year, he openly mocked international law, saying there was no such thing and that it only spoke up when something happened in Israel. He boasted that friends of his who had been sanctioned by Western governments simply woke up, ate, prayed, and carried on exactly as before, dismissing the measures as ridiculous. He has repeatedly invoked the biblical descent from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to argue that the world is merely jealous of the settlers' claim to the land.
Shimon's Havat Gilad, established in 2002 and considered illegal under both Israeli and international law, was itself founded on revenge. The illegal settlement has a long record of attacks on surrounding Palestinian villages, including arson of olive trees and land, and its settlers form part of the armed settler movement that has escalated its assaults on Palestinians throughout the genocide in Gaza.
Sources: BBC Global News Podcast via Podcast Rex, July 2026; NPR, August 7, 2024; The National, July 26, 2024
