Our news feed runneth over with horrific accounts of bloodthirsty, rampaging hordes of kippah-clad Jews attacking innocent Arab villagers. Foreign governments have gone far beyond condemnations and applied direct sanctions of the sort usually reserved for internationally designated terrorists or drug cartel kingpins.
Experts in sociology, criminology, political science, and religion continue to provide learned analyses of the causes and objectives of the reported surge in settler violence, and anti-Israel forces have justified the mass murder or ethnic cleansing of Jews on this hyper-inspected “phenomenon.”
Perhaps we ought to take a moment to figure out if settler violence is really “a thing.”
Media reports and foreign sanctions are based on a damning dataset, provided by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) through the “Data on Casualties” dashboard, which claims to include only incidents verified by two independent, impartial sources.
Predictably, and unfortunately, OCHA does not share the data outside of its own circle of “humanitarian agencies.” In order to inspect and analyze this data, researchers at Regavim, an Israeli research group dedicated to Zionist land policy, obtained it through the intervention of a French criminologist.
OCHA, a reason for hiding
Apparently, OCHA has a very good reason for hiding the actual data and instead presenting its own version of reality: Regavim analyzed over 8,300 “incident reports” on settler violence spanning a six-year period, which included the months following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War in October 2023.
The first finding of note, before analyzing the incident reports themselves, concerns the sources: The overwhelming majority of incident reports were supplied by only one source: the Palestinian Ministry for Resistance to the Settlements, or extreme anti-Israel organizations.
Regavim also found that more than 95% of the reported incidents were either gross inversions of reality (i.e., Arab violence against Israelis), misrepresentations of incidents that either didn’t involve violence, didn’t involve settlers, or didn’t occur in Judea and Samaria (confrontations with IDF forces, non-Muslim visits to the Temple Mount described as “storming al-Aqsa,” road improvement projects classified as ”invasion or confiscation of Palestinian property,” elementary school visits by Israeli children to historic or religious sites that were classified as “trespass” – even dog bites and car accidents.
The bottom line in Judea and Samaria
There have been incidents of violence perpetrated by Israelis against Arabs in Judea and Samaria – but they are few and far between.
In fact, when compared to other segments of Israeli society – Jewish or Arab, on either side of the Green Line – the Israeli communities of Judea and Samaria are the least violent, most law-abiding in the country.
They also enjoy levels of violence far below that suffered in cities of similar population and socio-economic profile anywhere in the West; citizens of Kansas City, a typical mid-Western US city with just over half a million residents, are some 300 times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than Arabs living in Judea and Samaria.
These facts haven’t been allowed to confuse the anti-Israel Left and the foreign governments and organizations that fund them. Peace Now, Rabbis for Human Rights, Breaking the Silence, and other foreign-funded NGOs have been stoking this libel for years as a means of delegitimizing the settlement enterprise, and defaming the IDF and the State of Israel, particularly the current government.
Israel has invested untold resources – millions of shekels, thousands of hours, hundreds of formal and informal educational initiatives, community policing, social workers, and more, in an effort to address the problem. On November 18, 2025 the security cabinet approved additional measures that had an immediate impact: arrests and administrative detentions resulted in a 60% drop in incidents of violence.
Why was violence allowed to run amok?
The flip side of this is quite dark. Critics might rightly ask: What took you so long? If the police were able to effect such sweeping change so quickly, why was violence allowed to run amok for so long?
If you ask this when you read these statistics, you’ve fallen into the trap. What you should be asking is: What do these percentages really mean? How widespread was the violence before the cabinet intervened, and how much of a problem is it today? Who are the perpetrators; where do they come from, where were they educated, who is responsible, and, knowing all of this, how will future violence be prevented?
The real numbers tell the whole story: Before the cabinet decision and the enforcement sweep, there were six “serious” incidents per month. This includes all types of violence that resulted in damage to Arab property or persons. Six incidents. The impressive 60% drop missed out on a whopping two “serious” incidents.
How did this massive change come about?
The Israel Police made 16 arrests, and a similar number of military restraining orders were issued. Of those either detained or barred from entering the region, nearly 50% are not residents of Judea and Samaria. They are, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently described them, troubled teens who crossed the Green Line looking for trouble; when they didn’t find it, they made it.
The current “wave of settler violence” consists of two incidents that did not result in a single Arab fatality. In fact, over the past 10 years, the only Arabs killed by Israeli civilians were terrorists who were caught in the act. Compare this to dozens of Israeli fatalities and many hundreds of casualties caused by thousands of acts of Arab terrorism.
But if the facts are so unequivocal, why is the general impression so skewed? That, my friends, is the definition of a blood libel.
The writer is the director of the international division of Regavim.