Palestinian minister accuses Israel of enabling settler violence against Palestinians

Israel does not do enough to protect Palestinians from settler violence and even supports it, the Palestinian foreign affairs minister told EU News.

“The settlers are very much supported by the Israeli occupation forces (which) have an obligation to protect the occupied,” Varsen Aghabekian Shahin told EU News 12 Minutes With interview programme.

“But what we see is they either look and do nothing, or they are engaged in the actual terror attacks, and this needs to be stopped. It’s very serious,” Aghabekian said.

Jewish settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has soared since the October 2023 Hamas-led terrorist attacks on southern Israel, with a notable uptick since the war in Iran and Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, according to the UN.

Last month, in an unexpected move, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed the army and the police to rein in “nationalist crimes” in the West Bank.

Separately, the Israeli army chief of staff recalled a battalion from Lebanon to be posted in the West Bank, labelling Jewish settlers’ actions “morally and ethically unacceptable”.

Radical Jewish settler elements have been emboldened by the presence of hardline politicians in the Israeli government, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Even the US administration, usually mum on Israel’s rapid settlement expansion under Netanyahu, said it was “concerned” in the words of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at an end-March G7 summit.

Asked whether she had noticed any improvements on the ground after Israel’s announcement that it would tackle settler violence, Aghabekian said that it was necessary but not enough “because we need to change the policy”.

“The policy uses the settlers to terrorise the Palestinians. That needs to change. It’s not enough to talk about it. It’s enough to call them terrorists. What we need is to see action on the ground to halt whatever these terrorist settlers are doing,” Aghabekian explained.

Some 700,000 settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as 3.8 million Palestinians who are hoping to establish a future state there. Both territories are occupied illegally under international law, although Israel disputes this.

Death penalty ‘illegal’ and ‘discriminatory’

About Israel’s decision late last month to reinstate the death penalty for perpetrators of terrorist lethal attacks against Jewish citizens, targeting Palestinians without naming them, the Palestinian minister said: “It’s part of a systematic policy of erasing the other.”

“And this law has no legal basis whatsoever. It’s highly discriminatory because it relates to the Palestinians and only the Palestinians,” Aghabekian explained.

Aghabekian added that Palestinians committing violent crimes should be judged in the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

“Our people have been killed for decades, I mean we have been subjected to the death penalty by the Israelis for decades,” she said.

“The extrajudicial killing on our streets continue. What needs to happen is to look at the occupation and the root causes of this occupation and see what entitlements people have under occupation.”

The “death penalty is something that is abolished all over the world and instituting a death penalty today in this day and age should be questioned and challenged,” she also said.

Palestinians reeling from Iran war

According to Aghabekian, one side effect of the Iran war had been the marginalisation of the Palestinian issue and aspirations to statehood. Formal Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations stopped in 2014.

Netanyahu is staunchly opposed to the idea of a Palestinian state. The US government lead by President Donald Trump, by way of its newly-established Board of Peace, prioritises the reconstruction and governance of Gaza with no guarantee of future statehood.

However, Trump has said he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank.

Palestinians also feel the brunt of the conflict economically, all the more so that Israel, Aghabekian noted, is withholding indirect taxes and customs duties it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA) under the so-called 1994 Paris Protocol.

Israel has not transferred any tax revenues to the PA since May 2025, according to the World Bank, crippling the Palestinian government’s ability to provide services and pay public salaries. This revenue is the PA’s main source of income.

Aghabekian told EU News there are “billions of shekels sitting in Israeli banks,” or $4.5 billion (3.8bn) according to the PA.

“Today, the Palestinian Authority is unable to meet the basic needs of its people. I mean, if we talk about education, health care, water, electricity, we’re passing through very, very rough times,” Aghabekian said.

Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich oversees these transfers and has stated that they are being withheld as a punitive measure because the PA “encourages terror” by compensating families of prisoners, including those who have attacked and killed Israelis.