{"id":1033378,"date":"2026-08-30T17:44:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1033378\/"},"modified":"2026-08-30T17:44:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:44:20","slug":"whats-behind-netanyahus-condemnation-of-this-weekends-settler-pogroms-israel-palestine-conflict-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1033378\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s behind Netanyahu\u2019s condemnation of this weekend\u2019s settler pogroms? | Israel-Palestine conflict News"},"content":{"rendered":"

A wave of coordinated Israeli settler attacks swept across<\/a> the occupied West Bank over the weekend, leaving dozens of Palestinians injured and properties torched.<\/p>\n

The pogroms have seen little or no response from Israeli police and soldiers.<\/p>\n

Dozens of settlers attacked a Palestinian home in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus, with tear gas and stones, injuring seven people. A Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance that attempted to reach the besieged families was also attacked.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously, Israeli forces fired tear gas during incursions into the Far\u2019a refugee camp, el-Bireh, and al-Mughayyir. Soldiers also attacked journalists in Hebron\u2019s Old City.<\/p>\n

A Palestinian family and an American NBC news crew were assaulted in the village of Jalud. In Arrabeh, two Palestinians were also beaten near the Mevo Dotan settlement, in a weekend of violence against locals by Israeli settlers.<\/p>\n

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly condemned<\/a> the escalation, particularly the 20-day siege on al-Mughayyir, describing it as a systematic policy of forced displacement and colonial expansion.<\/p>\n

Surgical isolation<\/p>\n

Israeli politicians have launched a coordinated campaign to minimise the public relations damage after the pogroms.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement strongly condemning the \u201ccriminal acts of violence\u201d in Qusra and Jalud, blaming it on a \u201chandful of rioters\u201d who violated the law, interfered with the military, and harmed Israel\u2019s standing in the world.<\/p>\n

He publicly stated that he expected law enforcement authorities to \u201carrest the rioters and bring them to justice\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, this public outrage contrasted sharply with the reality on the ground.<\/p>\n

Documented footage captured masked settlers storming the villages of Qusra and Jalud in open pickup trucks, according to Israeli media reports. Despite this visual evidence and Netanyahu\u2019s stated demands, the Israeli police\u2019s West Bank district, under the command of Moshe Pinchi, made zero arrests.<\/a><\/p>\n

President Isaac Herzog echoed the sentiment<\/a>, calling the events a \u201cred line\u201d.<\/p>\n

Former US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee praised Herzog\u2019s statement and claimed that the half-million Israelis living in the West Bank are \u201cmost disgusted by a small group of thugs\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared<\/a> that the violence carried out by \u201cextremists\u201d stands in complete contradiction to the values of Israel.<\/p>\n

Opposition leader Yair Lapid described<\/a> another weekend of violent rampages as a \u201cmoral stain\u201d and said the government\u2019s failure to tackle Israeli violence in the West Bank is a \u201cnational disgrace\u201d.<\/p>\n

Experts told Al Jazeera that this chorus of condemnation from the Israeli establishment represents a calculated political manoeuvre by the government, which is actively engineering the annexation of the West Bank.<\/p>\n

Ehab Jabareen, a writer, analyst, and Palestinian citizen of Israel, said that Netanyahu is pursuing a \u201cpolitical surgical isolation process\u201d to shield the broader settlement project from international scrutiny.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe puts forward a political equation stating that there are 500,000 legitimate settlers, alongside a few dozen deviants or anomalies,\u201d Jabareen said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe wants to punish, or give the illusion of punishing, the most blatant link in order to protect the wider system.\u201d<\/p>\n

By defining the latest pogroms as a criminal anomaly, Netanyahu aims to isolate this from the wider settler enterprise, Jabareen added.<\/p>\n

Security fears<\/p>\n

Few see the prime minister\u2019s statement as anything more than a practical response to fears among the military that unchecked settler pogroms could ignite a massive Palestinian uprising in the occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n

Recent closed-door security assessments by Major General Avi Bluth, head of the Israeli military\u2019s Central Command, warned that \u201cnationalistic crime\u201d, such as the pogroms, could spark a massive response from Palestinians.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe army speaks to Netanyahu in the language of cost-benefit analysis,\u201d Jabareen noted.<\/p>\n

\u201cDozens of settlers create an open front that requires the mobilisation of thousands of soldiers. Netanyahu did not say this is unacceptable because it targets Palestinians, but rather said it obstructs the army.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mamoun Abu Amer, an analyst on Israeli politics, dismissed the idea that the state has lost control over the settlers.<\/p>\n

He emphasised that the military consistently protects the settlers during these attacks while heavily punishing Palestinians who attempt to defend themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe settlers are too cowardly to carry out any attack without the sponsorship and cover of the government,\u201d Abu Amer said, pointing to instances where the military demolished Palestinian homes simply because the residents resisted settler assaults.<\/p>\n

\"IsraeliIsraeli settlers confront Palestinian and Israeli activists accompanying Palestinian landowners on their property, which is threatened with confiscation by Israeli settlers, in Beit Sahour in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, August 14, 2026 [Mussa Qawasma\/Reuters]Engineered expansion<\/p>\n

While top Israeli officials publicly distance themselves from individual attacks, the government is still systematically funding, legalising, and expanding the settlers\u2019 presence.<\/p>\n

A report by the Israeli organisation Peace Now detailed<\/a>\u00a0how successive governments, heavily influenced by Netanyahu, have thrived on expanding settlements since the 1993 Oslo Accords.<\/p>\n

Thirty years ago, there were approximately 110,000 settlers in the West Bank and 140,000 in East Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

Today, those numbers have skyrocketed to 465,000 in the West Bank and 230,000 in East Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

The current far-right Israeli government has accelerated this process to unprecedented levels.<\/p>\n

According to a 2025 European Union report<\/a>, the Israeli government officially approved the establishment of 54 new settlements in the West Bank in a single year, a more than tenfold increase from the five approved in 2024.<\/p>\n

In parallel, 86 new outposts were erected, and a record-breaking 63,311 units were also approved across the occupied territories.<\/p>\n

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who holds sweeping administrative powers over the territory, recently declared a \u201crevolution in settlement<\/a>\u201d expansion, openly linking the construction to the prevention of Palestinian statehood.<\/p>\n

The government recently passed<\/a> a record $271bn national budget that bypassed legal frameworks to allocate 400 million shekels ($134m) to the Ministry of Settlement and National Missions, which officially authorises illegal outposts.<\/p>\n

This massive infrastructure investment includes advancing the strategic E1 settlement project, <\/a>which could sever the West Bank in two and effectively kill any hope for the establishment of a Palestinian state.<\/p>\n

The government recently issued<\/a> tenders for 1,234 homes as part of a larger plan to build 3,401 units connecting the Ma\u2019ale Adumim settlement to occupied East Jerusalem, as part of this plan.<\/p>\n

International complicity<\/p>\n

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that settler violence is on the rise, recording over 1,540 attacks that caused Palestinian casualties or property damage this year alone.<\/p>\n

OCHA noted that the monthly average of these attacks is now higher than in any other year on record.<\/p>\n

Despite this historic surge in state-sponsored pogroms and land theft, Western responses have largely remained confined to rhetorical outrage.<\/p>\n

While European nations and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)<\/a> strongly condemned the recent settlement approvals, including the E1 project, analysts note a glaring double standard.<\/p>\n

Abu Amer highlighted that Western countries have failed to impose meaningful economic sanctions on the Israeli state, opting instead to issue travel bans against a few individual settlers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are political positions issued recently by Western countries condemning the Israeli behaviour in reviving the E1 project, but these positions have not translated into practical measures,\u201d Abu Amer said.<\/p>\n

He contrasted this hesitation with the immediate actions taken by 28 Western nations to defund the UN agency for Palestinian refugees based on unproven Israeli allegations.<\/p>\n

By decoupling the violent acts of individual settlers from the state machinery that arms, funds, and protects them, Israel continues to advance its broader strategic goal: the permanent, irreversible annexation of Palestinian land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A wave of coordinated Israeli settler attacks swept across the occupied West Bank over the weekend, leaving dozens…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1033379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[118,99,13191,3097,1802,50,42440,4851,80],"class_list":["post-1033378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-human-rights","tag-israel","tag-israel-palestine-conflict","tag-middle-east","tag-military","tag-news","tag-occupied-west-bank","tag-palestine","tag-politics"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117185707073563020","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1033378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1033379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1033378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1033378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1033378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}