Herzog says Israel needs bigger police force to stop violent crime, settler attacks

Israel needs a larger and stronger police force to tackle the country’s challenges, said President Isaac Herzog in an interview this week, lamenting the surge in homicides within the Arab community and the daily attacks by settler extremists against Palestinians in the West Bank.

In a pre-recorded interview, aired on Monday at a conference for the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Herzog said: “Our police force, which is doing the best it can, but this country is a little bit beyond their capacity. We need a stronger police force — and a much larger one, because there are so many challenges here.”

“Crime in Arab society is a disaster,” he said. “We’re talking about a huge number of citizens — more than 1.3 million people living under terror, day and night.”

The homicide rate in Arab society doubled in 2023 and has continued to rise since then. So far, 174 Arab Israelis have been killed in violent criminal circumstances since the start of 2026, after an all-time high of 252 Arab-sector homicide victims in 2025.

The massive uptick, which coincided with the start of far-right Itamar Ben Gvir’s term as national security minister, has alarmed Arab community leaders, many of whom attribute the sharp rise to ineffectiveness — if not outright negligence — of law enforcement.

Herzog also decried violence by ultra-Orthodox men protesting the arrest of draft-dodgers, calling recent disorder at a demonstration in Modiin “intolerable.”

But “the thing that most disturbs me, and keeps me up at night, is the violence we’re seeing in Judea and Samaria,” the president said, using Biblical terminology to refer to the West Bank, and speaking about attacks by settler extremists against Palestinians in the territory.

“It’s an enormous stain on the face of the state, a moral stain,” he continued.

“I get this everywhere in the world, they say to me: ‘What happened to you all? You don’t know how to restrain groups of rioters?’ These are groups of rioters, they don’t reflect anything about settlement itself or its values. On the other hand, they’re getting legitimacy from silence,” he said.

The president recalled a recent meeting with Israel Defense Forces commanders in the West Bank, saying they communicated “deep frustration. They’re in very complicated situations.”

He recounted a commander telling him: “‘I don’t know if someone who speeds by in a car at night is a Palestinian who came to hurt a Jew or a Jew who came to make a provocation.’”

The president stressed that “the incident in Jalud was dangerous,” referring to a riot of some hundred settlers in a Palestinian village late last month, sparked by the army’s attempt to return a family to their home after they’d been expelled amid similar attacks.

“And this wasn’t an isolated incident. We’re talking about stones being thrown at commanders,” he said.

Herzog called on all the relevant officials to “gather in a room, build a significant plan and activate all the power of the state, including clear directives from the political echelon.”

Asked whether Israel should return to using administrative detention – a tool that allows for indefinite arrest of terror suspects without criminal charges – against Jews, the president said: “I think we have to examine that option. Certainly, there are cases where one must know to use this tool. If there’s no choice, there’s no choice.”

“We can’t continue to allow this phenomenon. It’s undermining the State of Israel, it’s destroying all our goodwill in the world,” he stressed.

Leon Kraiem contributed to this report.