Hendra Wijaya
Israel's far-right finance minister has called for the Israeli military to launch a full-scale war in the occupied West Bank, comparing the operation to the destruction wrought in Gaza and vowing to dismantle the Palestinian Authority.
Speaking to Ynet News in an interview published on Sunday, Bezalel Smotrich said Israel needs to "go to war in Judea and Samaria, to do there what we did in Gaza, to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, which is a terror authority". The biblical terms he used — Judea and Samaria — are Israeli designations for the West Bank that carry clear annexationist connotations.
Smotrich was answering a question about how Israel should respond to mounting "security tensions" in the West Bank, where violence against Palestinians has climbed steadily since the outbreak of Israel's war on Gaza in October 2023. According to the source reporting, the attacks have intensified significantly this year.
His remarks sketched out an explicit military-strategy logic. Just as Israel says it dismantled Hamas in Gaza, Smotrich argued, so too should Israeli forces eradicate what he described as militant infrastructure across the West Bank. "No terrorists, no weapons, no tunnels," he said, adding that soldiers need to be told that no such infrastructure should remain in the territory.
The comments arrived at a moment of sweeping restrictions. Israeli authorities announced a comprehensive military closure across the occupied West Bank, officially citing the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Under the measures, Palestinian movement will be curtailed until at least October 3, adding a further layer of disruption to an already constrained population.
The backdrop to Smotrich's intervention is a documented surge in settler violence. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recorded more than 1,330 settler-related attacks on Palestinians between January and late July — an average of roughly six per day and the highest rate in about two decades.
Settler groups, often supported or protected by Israeli soldiers, have attacked Palestinians in a range of ways, including shootings, besieging homes and other forms of communal violence. Academic and rights experts have characterised some of these episodes as "pogroms", a word that evokes large-scale, organised persecution rather than isolated criminal acts.
Rights groups warn that the violence is being reshaped in ways that obscure accountability. They say settlers are increasingly armed with military-issued weaponry and wear military uniforms during attacks, making it difficult to distinguish between settlers and soldiers. This blurring of lines, campaigners argue, has contributed to an environment in which impunity flourishes and Palestinian access to justice is severely limited.
The West Bank context remains central to any discussion of Israeli policy in the territory. Palestinians have lived under military occupation and movement restrictions for decades, while the Israeli settlement enterprise has continued to expand. Human rights organisations and most of the international community view the settlements as illegal under international law, a position Israel disputes. The Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, has long been the target of Israeli criticism over its governance and its security coordination with Ramallah.
Smotrich, a leading figure of the far-right in Netanyahu's coalition, has been among the most vocal advocates of measures that would effectively cement Israeli control over the territory. His office has pushed for the formal annexation of settler outposts and has championed policies that rights groups describe as entrenching the occupation. In the photograph accompanying the report, he is shown at the inauguration of a new Israeli outpost near Bethlehem on September 2, 2026 — an event that itself illustrates the pattern of settlement expansion under his watch.
At the same time, the escalation is not confined to the West Bank. In occupied East Jerusalem, hundreds of Israelis stormed the courtyards of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Sunday, under heavy protection from Israeli police. According to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, the Israelis entered through the Moroccan Gate and performed Talmudic rituals while Israeli forces tightened restrictions around the mosque and across Jerusalem's Old City.
Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam, has been a persistent flashpoint. Repeated raids, closures and restrictions at the compound have fuelled repeated calls for action from across the Palestinian political spectrum and from neighbouring Arab states. The timing of the raid coincided with the heightened West Bank closure, observers noted, compounding pressures on Palestinians during a period of collective punishment.
Analysts have said Smotrich's comments are significant less for their immediate operational effect than for what they signal about the direction of Israeli government rhetoric. Calls to replicate Gaza's approach in the West Bank, and to dismantle the Palestinian Authority itself, mark a move beyond security framing into the language of regime change — language that rights groups say risks further prejudicing any negotiated outcome.
For Palestinians in the West Bank, the practical consequences of such rhetoric tend to arrive as closures, checkpoints, home demolitions, arrests and settler attacks. The combination of a week-long military closure and the year's most intense documented rate of settler violence suggests that the coming period is likely to be among the most difficult in recent memory, with humanitarian consequences compounded by the onset of winter.
Whether such statements influence operational decisions remains an open question. But they do reshape the political environment in which policy is debated at home and abroad, giving momentum to those who argue that the two-decade-old conflict offers no prospect of resolution absent fundamental change — and providing opponents of continued occupation with a further reason to press for international action.
The United Nations has repeatedly called for an end to the Israeli occupation, describing the situation in the territory as ripe for a fundamental political change. Smotrich's remarks, made publicly and without apparent qualification, run directly counter to that assessment.
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