Ideologically motivated violence by Israeli citizens against Palestinians has reached a record high over the past two years; attacks against Palestinians and their property, some deadly, throughout the West Bank now occur daily. Yet settler violence is not new: ideologically motivated crime by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank, Aimed at taking over land in the West Bank and achieving political objectives, has always been a part of the Israeli settlement enterprise in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) with varying levels of intensity.

Since 2005, Yesh Din has documented offenses committed by Israeli civilians, settlers and others, against Palestinians or their property in the West Bank. Yesh Din monitors the investigations opened by the Israel Police following such incidents in order to assess how willing Israeli law enforcement agencies are to protect Palestinians in the West Bank from harm, as required by international and Israeli law.

Over twenty years of monitoring of the outcomes of investigations into ideologically motivated crime against Palestinians reveals that the State of Israel breaches its obligation under both Israeli and international law to protect Palestinians in the West Bank from harm. The data show that Israeli law enforcement agencies consistently and systematically fail to enforce the law upon Israeli civilians who harm Palestinians and their property in the OPT. Such offenses include assault, beating, shooting, throwing stones and threatening, torching, theft, harming crops and destroying property.

Yesh Din monitoring data 2005-2025 Key figures:

  • 93.6% of all investigation files monitored by Yesh Din concerning ideologically motivated offenses committed by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank (“settler violence”) opened by the Israel Police since 2005 ended without an indictment
  • Analysis of the investigation files opened into offenses committed by Israelis against Palestinians shows that the police failed in the investigation of 82% of these cases
  • Since 2005, just 3% of the investigation files opened into ideologically motivated crimes committed against Palestinians led to full or partial convictions
  • Yesh Din documented nearly 30 incidents of organized, mass violence perpetrated in the West Bank between 2023 and November 2025; in 16 of these incidents, soldiers or police officers were reported to have been present during the riots and assisted the attack directly or indirectly.

This systemic failure has persisted for over two decades, proving that the failing enforcement policy is not an oversight but rather evidence that Israel intentionally enables the violence perpetrated against defenseless civilians, collaborating with it in practice on occasion.This is because settler violence serves Israel’s objectives to expand its control over the occupied territory by terrorizing and exercising violence against Palestinians while maintaining a semblance of the rule of law.

The conclusion arising from the data presented here is that the State of Israel and its law enforcement agencies in the West Bank are directly responsible for the violence Israelis perpetrate against Palestinians.