From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
IDF officers said to tell PM up to 80% of incidents they address in West Bank are Jewish terror
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleLazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
Up to 80 percent of incidents that IDF brigades in the West Bank record are Jewish attacks on Palestinians, an officer in the IDF Central Command told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting today on Jewish terrorism, the Kan public broadcaster reports.
The need to devote resources to Jewish terrorism means that IDF units are forced to cut back on arrests of Palestinian terror suspects, according to the officer.
“There are company and battalion commanders here who spend the night preventing [Palestinian] terrorism and most of the day dealing with [Jewish] nationalist crime,” said the officer, according to the report. “Arrests of wanted suspects and offensive operations are canceled because of these incidents. In some brigade operations rooms, 80 percent of the reports in the log are [Jewish] nationalist crime.”
“We are failing every day in maintaining law and order, and we have no tools,” said another officer, according to Kan. “There are [illegal settlement] outposts we have evacuated dozens of times — they return. There are key activists inciting youths to violence who are not being removed, and if they are arrested, they are released and return after two days.”
The second officer reportedly stresses that “there are outposts engaged in daily violence against Palestinians; by the time we arrive at the scene, there is nothing left to do. The system is structured in a way that makes it impossible to defeat this. It’s only a matter of time before we wake up one morning to a Telegram group reporting that terrorists slaughtered Jews in one of the outposts.”
Another officer in Central Command is said to have told Netanyahu that when he brings up the importance of upholding the law, it is seen as expressing a left-wing political position.
Shin Bet chief David Zini reportedly said at the meeting that “outposts that generate violence should be evacuated.”
He calls for the evacuation of Israeli outposts “that are problematic, lack security, and outposts in Area B,” which is under Palestinian Authority governance and Israeli security control.
The Times of Israel Community.