The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded more than 1,600 settler attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties, property damage or both across 275 communities in the West Bank since the start of 2026.
The attacks averaged 6.7 a day, the highest rate recorded by the office since it began documenting such incidents, amid UN and human rights reports saying they occurred in the presence of Israeli forces and, at times, with their participation or protection. Yagil Levy, a professor of political sociology and public policy, offers an interpretation that goes beyond viewing these incidents as mere security failures.
Levy puts forward the concept of an “army of regulation”
Levy, who heads the Institute for the Study of Civil-Military Relations at Israel’s Open University, says a network of forces, settlers, and social and ideological ties forms what he calls an “army of regulation”, acting as a “grey arm” of the state to consolidate control over the West Bank.
Levy first proposed in 2022 that there was a practical division within the Israeli military establishment operating in the West Bank. Alongside what he describes as the “official army”, a force emerged to carry out daily security and policing duties. It includes permanently deployed military units, Israeli Border Police forces, and armed settler groups operating within the army’s regional defence units.
These formations are formally subordinate to the Central Command, but Levy says the boundary between the army’s authority and the settlers’ role has become less clear. He explains that the presence of settlers in some units, along with the close social and ideological ties between them and soldiers, has complicated the chain of command and the actors influencing decisions in the field.
According to his interpretation, soldiers receive instructions from settlement security officials, while rabbinical directives and rulings influence the positions of some military personnel. This influence is particularly evident when missions involve evacuating settlements or outposts, as official instructions overlap with local ties and ideological positions, reducing the clarity of the established chain of command within the military establishment.
Levy says this overlap has produced a force with partial independence from the General Staff that, in practice, tends to side with the settlers.
He says this force may turn a blind eye to the establishment of unauthorised outposts and attacks targeting Palestinians, or be slow to prevent them and pursue those responsible, arguing that this goes beyond the forces’ mere inability to enforce the law. At the heart of his argument, Levy says the system performs a function that official state institutions would find more difficult to carry out openly with the same ease.
According to his reading, this function involves expanding control over the land, pushing Palestinians to leave their communities and land, and reducing the prospects for a viable Palestinian entity through practices occupying the space between formal legal orders and what is permitted in the field.
Accordingly, Levy does not view the forces standing aside during settler attacks, or delaying the protection of Palestinians and pursuit of attackers, as an occasional failing. He considers these practices part of a broader process aimed at expanding control and gradually annexing land, while the formal wording of orders remains different from what actually happens on the ground.
Arming settlers expands joint operations
The overlap between settlers and Israeli forces became more entrenched after the 7 October 2023 attack, alongside the expansion of settler armament and their integration into regional defence units.
Levy links these figures to the expansion of a joint-operating model that brings official forces and armed settlers together in the daily mechanisms of control on the ground. At the same time, senior Israeli army officers criticised some settler attacks, and Central Command chief Avi Blut took measures to curb them.
Avi Blut’s measures to curb the attacks
Levy does not interpret these steps as a break with the settlement project or the move towards annexing land, but as an attempt to control the pace of the process and prevent it from moving beyond the framework that the military leadership wants to preserve. Levy distinguishes between two types of settler violence: violence that directly serves the control project, and violence that expands to a level that could threaten the security system the army seeks to manage.
In the first case, settlers may attack a small Palestinian community and drive its residents away, after which the forces refrain from securing their return to their homes and land. But if the attacks become widespread, attract international attention and threaten a larger security flare-up, they become, under this analysis, a burden on the gradual annexation process, which those overseeing it prefer to keep out of the spotlight.
From this perspective, Levy says Blut’s measures to curb some settlers aim to return the process to army control, not necessarily to halt the seizure of land. At the same time, Blut’s period in command saw agricultural outposts become established as a means of controlling wider areas of the West Bank.
Levy says this took place in cooperation with the Civil Administration, in which Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was granted broad powers, enabling the consolidation of control on the ground alongside efforts to curb attacks that could have wider security or political repercussions.
The roots of the process go back about two decades
Levy does not limit this transformation to extremist settlers or the current government of Benjamin Netanyahu, but traces its roots back about two decades. He says the process accelerated after Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, when the political track declined and preserving the status quo while gradually changing it towards annexation became an increasingly important part of the Israeli forces’ role in the West Bank.
After the 7 October attack, Levy places this policy within what he calls, drawing on the work of historian Dirk Moses, the doctrine of “permanent security”. According to his explanation, the doctrine is based on removing potential future sources of threat rather than merely deterring them, rejecting risk and compromise, expanding freedom of military action, strengthening control over the land and creating buffer zones.
Levy stresses that this doctrine does not necessarily require a religious starting point, as it also developed within a secular military leadership that presents it in security and strategic terms. He concludes that explaining developments solely through “settler extremism” obscures a key part of the picture: the settlers did not simply take control of an army moving in the opposite direction; the two sides became intertwined over years.
As a result of this overlap, the distance narrowed between policies officially implemented by the state and practices carried out on the ground through less transparent means.
In Levy’s reading, military units, Border Police, armed settlers, and ideological and social ties have become elements of a single structure. Their levels of official status vary, but they intersect in consolidating control over West Bank land and supporting the gradual annexation process.
