Occupied West Bank (QNN) - Senior Israeli occupation army officers have warned Israel's political leadership that the escalating settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is approaching a breaking point, and that a mass-casualty settler atrocity could soon drive Palestinians across the territory into armed resistance. Yet the warning, delivered privately to the prime minister and cabinet, is likely to change nothing, because it is Israel's own political leadership that enables, protects, and encourages the settlers in the first place.
In closed discussions with political leaders, army officials said there were early signs that a settler attack causing mass Palestinian casualties has become a realistic scenario, comparing the danger to the 2015 arson attack in which settlers burned alive three members of the Dawabsheh family, including an 18-month-old child. The officers warned that settlers are liable to commit arson or open live fire on Palestinians, and that such an atrocity could push Palestinians who had not been involved in any confrontation into armed resistance throughout the occupied West Bank.
The army described several scenarios it fears. Among them, Palestinians storming settlers during an attack on their village because they have concluded that neither the occupation army nor the Palestinian Authority will protect them, and Palestinians carrying out acts of retaliation against the illegal outposts and settlements from which the attacks are launched. Officers acknowledged seeing growing numbers of Palestinians gathering to defend their villages at flashpoints, unarmed for now, but increasingly willing to confront the armed settlers rampaging through their villages.
By the army's own account, the settlers have been emboldened to the point that they no longer fear the soldiers. Officers reported far larger numbers of settlers taking part in increasingly violent assaults on Palestinian villages, and said settler rabbis are giving religious sanction to the attacks, encouraging settlers to violate the Sabbath in order to storm Palestinian communities, as they did in Qusra over the weekend. The officers called the normalization of settler violence a genuine security threat, one fueled by the open backing of prominent settler rabbis and by the Shin Bet's failure to act against the perpetrators.
The admission is a remarkable one, but it exposes a truth Palestinians have long lived: the settler violence is not a breakdown of the system but a product of it. The same Israeli state whose officers now warn of catastrophe has spent years arming the settlers, shielding them during their attacks, and refusing to hold them accountable. In the recent assaults documented across the occupied West Bank, from the siege of families in Qusra to the raid on al-Mughayyir, it was Palestinians who were wounded, robbed, and arrested, while the settlers acted under the protection of the occupation forces and walked away untouched.
Nothing in Israel's political conduct suggests it intends to stop them. The army's warnings, the officers admitted, are going unheard, with commanders fearing political attacks and the loss of political backing if they act against the settlers. Israel's police, which answers to the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, is carrying out no enforcement on the ground at all, and the police commander in the occupied West Bank reportedly answers only to Ben-Gvir, ignoring the army's instructions. Rather than rein in the settlers, the political leadership is moving to transfer enforcement powers over the territory from the army to Ben-Gvir's police, a step Palestinians have warned amounts to entrenching the very impunity that drives the violence.
