Are Israeli settlers out of control in the West Bank?

**Lewis Goodall** (0:02)
This is a Global Production. We have seen basically more and more license given explicitly to these settlers to basically do what they want in these areas of the West Bank.

**Jon Sopel** (0:13)
It makes it almost impossible for an Israeli government to deliver a two-state solution, and that is the long-term strategy of Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, that they just don't want it to be a possibility.

**Noga Tarnopolsky** (0:27)
Betzalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister, racing ahead with a policy basically of depopulating the West Bank, and a kind of ethnic cleansing.

**Lewis Goodall** (0:37)
These so-called settlers, who are they? Who are they exactly? And what are they hoping to achieve?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:41)
This reality reflects a double standard that we must address today. When speaker after speaker refers to settler violence, it is an insult to thousands of years of continuous Jewish history in the land of Israel.
Jews have never been and will never be settlers in Judea and Samaria.

**Jon Sopel** (1:06)
That is Israel's ambassador to the UN taking issue with the description of Jewish settlers as Jewish settlers in a land that Palestinians have lived in for centuries.

**Lewis Goodall** (1:19)
We're not hearing much about it this summer, but the situation in the West Bank increasingly feels like anarchy, with Israeli settlers besieging Palestinian families in their homes. Can anything be done to make Israel obey international law? Welcome to The News Agents.

**Andy Burnham** (1:43)
The News Agents.

**Jon Sopel** (1:44)
It's Jon.

**Lewis Goodall** (1:45)
It's Lewis.

**Jon Sopel** (1:45)
And the land that is being contested here, the West Bank, nothing to do with Gaza. Gaza is a completely different strip of land that doesn't have any common borders with the West Bank. The West Bank is the West Bank of the Jordan River, which until 1967 was Jordanian. It was Jordanian controlled, and the centers of population were Arab, Arab Muslim, Arab Christian, Hebron, Jenin, Ramallah and places like that. Which is where the bulk of the Palestinian population were based after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948
In recent years, what has happened is that following the 1967 invasion, there was a move by certain groups of very ideological zealots, I think is not an unfair description of people who wanted to take over this land. They would call it Judea and Samaria, as if it was something back from the Old Testament days, that rightly still belonged to Israel, even though that if there was to be peace with the Palestinians, this was the center of Palestinian population. Increasingly, under Benjamin Netanyahu's government, a blind eye, maybe even more than that, encouragement has been given to these settlers to take over more and more land in the West Bank. What we've seen in the past few days, few weeks, is an upsurge in settler violence.

**Lewis Goodall** (3:17)
Indeed. As the Israeli government, under Benjamin Netanyahu, supported by his far-right allies in his cabinets, have become more and more extreme, especially in the way of October the 7th and over the last few years, we have seen, as Jon says, basically more and more license given explicitly to these settlers to basically do what they want in these areas of the West Bank, where traditional Israeli governments have tried to constrain. This is really been getting worse, especially over the last year and even over the course of this summer. We're now over the last few days seeing a situation where Israeli settlers are besieging two Palestinian families in their homes in the occupied West Bank. The families are saying that they're running out of supplies, they're running out of food, international human rights groups urging the authorities to step in. Today, Israeli security forces have been reported to have withdrawn from the Jewish settler outpost in the village of Kusra, which is near Nablus after clashes with these extremist settlers.
If you take the bigger view, according to UN figures, 76 Palestinians, including 18 children, have been killed in the West Bank this year by Israeli forces or settlers. Same time, three Israelis, including one civilian have been killed in confrontation with Palestinians. And since January 2023, 127 Palestinian communities in the West Bank have experienced full or partial displacement, including 47 that have been entirely displaced, affecting more than 6,000 Palestinians. That's according to the UN. And as Jon says, these are people and families who in many cases have lived on this land for generations and their displacement is clearly, explicitly illegal under international law.

**Jon Sopel** (5:03)
Yeah, the UN and international courts say that what you have at the moment in the West Bank is a military occupation of that land, and therefore you cannot build settlements on land that you are occupying militarily.