Can new Dardik model be used to reduce administrative detention for some Palestinians? - analysis

Previously, it had been on a spectrum between hundreds and around 1,000, and for the last three years, between 3,000 and over 3,300.

Along with other issues, this has severely harmed Israeli legitimacy worldwide.

However, since somewhere between summer 2024 and October 2025, Israel has been reevaluating various more extreme wartime practices.

For example, currently (though tactics can change at any moment), the IDF is in a ceasefire on all fronts and is not actively attacking any of its adversaries.

The next challenge would be: Under what model could this be done?

This is where Dardik could come into the picture.

Israel’s defense establishment suspects Dardik was involved in multiple violent and dangerous attacks on Palestinian villages, including in March.

Despite viewing Dardik as an ongoing and potential future danger – beyond even his past alleged dangerous conduct – a series of court decisions and debates within the Israeli defense establishment have led to more lenient terms for Dardik than his prison stints and even than previous administrative travel restraining orders.

For example, at one earlier point, Dardik was prohibited by an IDF administrative restraining order from traveling anywhere in the West Bank.

While he still cannot travel to most of the West Bank, it is now permitted for him to travel to and live in Modi’in Illit, which is in Judea and Samaria.

Essentially, with Dardik, a mix of the courts and the Israeli defense establishment decided that he was and remains dangerous, but that if he does not go anywhere in the West Bank other than Modi’in Illit and if he checks in with the police of that town twice a day, the danger he presents can be counterbalanced or tolerated.

In addition, the IDF went further, suggesting that if Dardik was willing to wear electronic ankle cuffs that allow him to be tracked, it could even consider allowing him to travel in other parts of the West Bank.

In the past, a small number of extremist, violent Jews were sometimes put in administrative detention. But that has not happened since Defense Minister Israel Katz vetoed it in January 2025.

All that has been left – short of full criminal indictments – are administrative restraining orders related to traveling to the West Bank.

It would appear that the Israeli defense establishment thinks it can strike creative and lenient balancing acts short of house arrest, not just merely with Jews who are affiliated with an ideologically violent group, but even with Jews like Dardik, who are suspected of repeated actual violence.

If so, could this model be used for Palestinians who are merely affiliated with terror groups, such as passing out recruiting fliers, but have not been part of a plot to perpetrate violence?

Until now, the answers about why Palestinians get treated more harshly, often regarding administrative detention and similar tools, than Jews have been twofold.

First, ideologically speaking, more of the Palestinian detainees are looking to commit murders, and more of the Jewish detainees are looking to commit vandalism or lower-grade violence.

Second, it was considered too dangerous to leave Palestinians under house arrest or under an administrative restraining order against certain travel in the West Bank because they do not live surrounded by Israeli police.

Further, if a Palestinian decided to disappear and break the conditions of his or her release from detention, it would be much harder to locate and rearrest them, requiring a large IDF incursion into Palestinian areas.

There was also an assumption that Jewish detainees were not all that dangerous, and so they could be released as long as they did not perpetrate witness tampering.

But now, possibly all of these differences have fallen away, paving a path toward more leniency for Palestinians instead of administrative detention, and toward winning back some of Israel’s legitimacy globally – especially in the United States.

Dardik has been declared dangerous in both the past and the future, but officials deemed an administrative restraining order regarding travel or ankle cuffs sufficient to balance the danger.

Even more significant, the idea that invading Palestinian areas to rearrest a Palestinian detainee who broke the conditions of his release was a big deal comes from a pre-2022-2023 time period when such raids were rare.

Since 2022, and even more since October 7, nightly IDF raids into all parts of the West Bank have become standard. Leaving large IDF outposts in the center of Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur Shams, and other places has also become standard since January 2025.

So what exactly is so hard and unusual about another raid or two to rearrest such a Palestinian? Knowing how complete the IDF’s control over Judea and Samaria is today, as opposed to a few years ago, could also deter an only mildly committed associate of a terror group from trying to flee and hide.

The Dardik model could be rolled out as a pilot program for a small number of Palestinian detainees and tracked for outcomes before it is expanded much.

Besides starting to try to improve the already bad legitimacy situation, rolling out such a pilot program would save Israel from otherwise undermining its entire basis for administrative detention of Palestinians.

One of the critical bases and defenses has always been that detainees are usually held for periods of six months to two years.

But with a rising number of thousands of detainees (How can each one be an arch terrorist leader?) being held for longer than that, there is a point where Israel would be eroding its own defense of the administrative detention tool under international law.

None of this suggests Israel should be releasing hardened violent terrorists.

But it has been clear for some time that when Israel has over 3,000 Palestinians in administrative detention on top of twice as many other Palestinians in other detention situations, not all of the 3,000-plus detainees can be as bad as Israel has claimed the kind of person who gets administratively detained needs to be.

Palestinian terror is nowhere near disappearing and must be fought in a variety of ways, likely still involving administrative detention at times.

Yet getting the volume of Palestinian administrative detainees under control is a time bomb for American and global support that Jerusalem likely needs to defuse so that Israel can save its global standing while there is still time.