Israel plans police takeover of West Bank law enforcement amid settler violence surge

Israel's defence minister Israel Katz has ordered the military to draft plans transferring law enforcement authority over Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank to the national police force—a move that has triggered immediate accusations of violating international law and accelerating de facto annexation of Palestinian territory.

The announcement came as a six-day siege in the Palestinian village of Qusra continued unabated, with armed settlers attempting to drive out Palestinian residents through intimidation while the Israeli military proved unable or unwilling to intervene. Palestinian vice-president Hussein al-Sheikh condemned the proposal as a "flagrant violation of international law" and called for international intervention to prevent what he characterized as entrenchment of illegal occupation. The timing of Katz's declaration—made as his own military faced domestic criticism for failing to remove a small group of armed extremists from a single village—suggested the announcement was driven more by political pressure than coherent policy, according to legal analysts.

Michael Sfard, a prominent Israeli human rights lawyer, explained the legal stakes. While the military can technically delegate enforcement responsibilities under occupation law, transferring those powers entirely to police would require creating a new legal framework that absolves the army of accountability—a step Sfard described as "a very major brick" in the architecture of annexation. He noted, however, that Israel could legally expand police authority in the West Bank under existing occupation frameworks, and the vagueness of Katz's statement suggested it may have been reactive rather than carefully considered policy. "This is a cowardly statement made by a minister of defence who is under scrutiny," Sfard said, "because the army that reached Syria, Iran and Lebanon and annihilated Gaza cannot evacuate a few Jewish terrorists that invaded a Palestinian home."

The proposal emerges amid a documented surge in settler violence and land seizures across the West Bank, accelerated by Israel's most far-right government in its history as national elections approach in October. On Thursday, Katz himself presided over the re-establishment of a settlement that Israel had evacuated in 2005, standing on newly levelled Palestinian property and declaring: "Here, this is the land of Israel. Here, we are staying forever." The settlement at Ganim already had two dozen prefabricated homes installed, with bulldozers clearing hillside for expansion. The Israeli military had demolished Palestinian structures along the access road and used the rubble to block routes for Palestinian communities.

In Qusra, the situation deteriorated further. On Friday, the commander of Israeli forces in the West Bank, General Avi Bluth, made a second visit to the besieged village. Two days earlier he had promised Palestinians the army would remove the settlers; instead, soldiers retreated from confrontation and forcibly expelled one Palestinian family from their home, claiming they needed it as a military base for the failed operation. One of the targeted homes is owned by a U.S. citizen, prompting U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee to describe the besieging settlers as terrorists and demand police and military action. Huckabee, despite his public support for the settler movement's vision of a "Greater Israel," characterized the Qusra militants as a "very small minority."

The broader pattern of displacement has accelerated dramatically. According to B'tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, Israeli forces have forcibly displaced 64 entire Palestinian communities and portions of 15 others since October 2023, affecting nearly 5,000 people. On Friday, Israeli gunmen opened fire on a group of roughly one hundred unarmed Israeli and Palestinian activists attempting to reclaim Palestinian land near Beit Sahour, just outside Jerusalem. The activists, affiliated with Combatants for Peace, had gathered to plant trees and demonstrate solidarity with residents living under constant settler threat. A Catholic bishop and journalists documenting the event were also targeted. Mia Biran, one of the organizers, described how gunfire erupted from a nearby settler outpost within minutes of their arrival on private Palestinian land. When the attackers realized Israelis were among the group, they ceased fire. After the activists withdrew, settlers visited a nearby Palestinian home and threatened to burn it down—part of a pattern of arson attacks that have killed families, including a 2015 attack that killed a baby and his parents.

The convergence of these events—the police transfer proposal, the Qusra siege, the Ganim settlement re-establishment, the Beit Sahour shooting—illustrates the escalating pressure on Palestinian communities and the Israeli state's apparent inability or unwillingness to restrain settler violence. As October elections loom, the far-right coalition backing these policies appears intent on cementing territorial control through displacement and intimidation, while international law and Israeli human rights advocates warn that the proposed police takeover represents a critical threshold toward formal annexation.