Five days into a disruptive siege that has trapped three Palestinian households in the northern West Bank village of Qusra, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced a controversial policy shift Friday: he has ordered the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to draft a plan that would transfer all civil law enforcement authority over Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank to the national police.
The proposal, which comes amid sustained right-wing criticism of the military for repeated attempts to eject violent, harassing settlers from Palestinian land, would reconfigure security governance in the territory Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War. Under the new framework, the IDF would retain full security control over Palestinian residents, while refocusing its official mandate on counterterrorism operations and border defense, rather than policing unruly settler groups.
“The IDF’s role is to fight Palestinian terrorism, focus on defending borders and communities against threats… and not chase boys on the hilltops,” Katz stated in an official release, referencing the Hilltop Youth, a radical settler faction widely accused of systemic violence against Palestinian civilians. “The police will prepare and establish an appropriate force to handle civil matters, and will be granted all necessary powers and budgets.” The statement used “Judea and Samaria,” the Biblical terminology preferred by pro-annexation Israeli politicians, to refer to the West Bank.
Analysts widely view the proposed transfer of power as a major step toward de facto Israeli annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory, a policy goal openly endorsed by multiple senior members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right governing coalition. However, Israeli media reports indicate the policy shift is extremely unlikely to be finalized before the country’s national parliamentary elections scheduled for October 27, which current polling projects will be highly competitive.
The announcement arrives against the backdrop of an ongoing siege that began Sunday, when Israeli settlers blockaded access to three Palestinian homes in Qusra, near the city of Nablus. Palestinian residents have reported being completely cut off from food, clean water, and essential medical supplies for nearly a week, even after the IDF made multiple attempts to disperse the blockading settlers. The siege has drawn unusual international backlash, including rare public criticism from the United States, a longstanding ally of Israel.
Even Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel and a decades-long outspoken supporter of Israeli settlement expansion, condemned the blockade Thursday. “There is no excuse for such thuggish behaviour,” Huckabee wrote on the social platform X, adding that “Actions by those who carried out this horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass this family are disgusting.” Notably, one of the three besieged properties is owned by a U.S. citizen.
On Friday, a small delegation of left-wing Israeli activists and lawmakers managed to deliver critical supplies to the trapped families, after dropping the donations outside the siege zone for Israeli military inspection. “We have succeeded in bringing water, food and medicine to the besieged homes in the village of Qusra,” said Ofer Cassif, a member of Israel’s parliament from the far-left Hadash party. AFP reporters on the ground observed that while settlers were present at the site early Friday, most had left the immediate perimeter of the homes by midday; a new settler tent erected near the properties Friday morning was also removed by the afternoon.
Many participating activists voiced public condemnation of the siege and the Israeli government’s response. “I’m so ashamed of what my people do here to the Palestinians,” 72-year-old retired Israeli prosecutor Naomi Granot told AFP, who joined the aid delivery. “I would like us both people to get together, to get an agreement. What my people are doing here is just awful. It’s unlawful.”
Anton Goodman, acting director of the Israeli human rights NGO Rabbis for Human Rights, accused the IDF of enabling settler violence in the area. “The military has let settler terrorists go wild in this area, take over houses, injure people, stop their livelihoods, enforce no freedom of movement,” Goodman said. In response to the criticism, the IDF said Thursday that it had deployed troops to Qusra “to protect the residents and maintain security in the area.”
Currently, more than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in West Bank settlements, which are widely recognized as illegal under international law, alongside an estimated 3 million Palestinian residents. Since Netanyahu’s right-wing government took office, settlement construction and expansion have accelerated dramatically, while incidents of settler violence against Palestinian civilians have spiked sharply following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack from Gaza.