660 settler attacks were recorded in the first six months of 2026, and the people living under them paid the price. Security establishment figures reported by Kan public broadcaster showed a 63 percent surge in serious incidents of “nationalistic crime” committed by extremist Jewish settlers in the West Bank, up from 405 in the same period in 2025. The numbers are blunt. So is the system behind them.
The State Watches, Then Counts
Attacks targeting Israeli security forces also rose by 50 percent, with 45 such incidents recorded in the first half of 2026. Palestinian casualties climbed even harder. The report said 140 Palestinians were wounded and six killed during the first half of the year, compared with 82 wounded and none killed in the same period last year. The figures did not include July, when roughly 100 additional incidents of nationalist crime were recorded, according to Kan.
The violence has been on the rise in recent years, particularly after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel. The report said the number of attacks by settlers against Palestinians and Israeli security forces in the West Bank rose by 27 percent in 2025 compared with 2024, according to data recorded by the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet security agency. The same machinery that tracks the violence also manages the territory where it keeps happening. That’s the arrangement.
The attacks occur on a near-daily basis, largely go unchecked, and prosecutions of Jewish extremists are rare while convictions are even rarer, the report said. Critics have accused the government, described as the most hardline in Israel’s history, of shrugging off the attacks. The language is polite. The results are not.
Punishment Deferred, Violence Normalized
In an effort to combat the issue, the cabinet quietly approved a plan in March that included financial sanctions against violent Israeli hilltop youth, but it was not made public because of political considerations, according to Channel 13. Quiet approval. No public accounting. Political considerations. The usual administrative fog around a problem that keeps producing bodies.
During deliberations on the plan, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly referred to the violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as a “metastasizing cancer.” The phrase landed in the same political ecosystem that has let the attacks continue on a near-daily basis. Words travel faster than enforcement.
Meanwhile, 2025 saw a decrease in Palestinian terror attacks, including knifings, shootings and car-rammings, continuing a downward trend in recent years. In 2025, 57 Palestinian terror attacks were recorded by the IDF, leading to the deaths of 20 people. Two soldiers were also killed in an attack carried out by a Jordanian at the Allenby Bridge Crossing in September. In 2024, the military counted 258 Palestinian terror attacks with 35 deaths, and in 2023, 847 attacks with 41 deaths. The army attributed the trend to “sustained offensive activity” in areas considered hotspots of terrorism in the West Bank, especially the refugee camps in the north of the territory.
Counting Violence, Managing Occupation
The figures lay out a familiar hierarchy. One armed apparatus records settler attacks, another records Palestinian attacks, and the people living between them absorb the consequences. The report’s own numbers show settler violence rising while prosecutions remain rare and convictions rarer still. The state can count. It just doesn’t seem eager to stop what it counts.
The West Bank’s daily reality sits inside that gap between documentation and enforcement. Settler attacks against Palestinians and Israeli security forces rose sharply in the first half of 2026, and July added roughly 100 more incidents of nationalist crime. The cabinet’s secretive March plan, the rare prosecutions, the hardline government, and the military’s own attribution of Palestinian violence to “sustained offensive activity” all point to the same structure: a territory run through force, managed by institutions that treat violence as a problem of optics until it becomes impossible to ignore.
The people on the ground don’t get the luxury of that delay. They get the attacks, the wounds, the deaths, and the paperwork after.