Israel’s defence minister wants to transfer law enforcement powers for Israelis in the occupied West Bank over to the police, a plan that Palestine’s vice-president described as a “flagrant violation of international law” and step towards full Israeli annexation.
Israel Katz announced that he had ordered the military to draw up plans for the handover of responsibility for policing Israeli settlers amid domestic and international criticism of the army’s failure to tackle militants besieging three Palestinian families.
The Palestinian vice-president, Hussein al-Sheikh, called for international intervention to enforce international law and stop a move that would “entrench the illegitimate annexation of Palestinian land”.
Katz unveiled his plan as a settler siege in the Palestinian village of Qusra entered its sixth day. The Israeli army has proved unable or unwilling to remove the group of militants trying to drive out Palestinian residents through a campaign of terror.
Michael Sfard, a leading Israeli human rights lawyer, said a transfer of law enforcement powers could constitute a major step towards formal annexation.
“The military can delegate enforcement but not responsibility [of the law],” Sfard said. “If they want to create a normative legal framework that absolves the army from responsibility and transfers it to police, that would be another brick, a very major one, of annexation.”
However, Israel could also legally expand police powers in the occupied West Bank under the current occupation framework, he added, and the lack of detail in Katz’s statement indicated it may have been driven more by politics than clear policy.
“This is a cowardly statement made by a minister of defence who is under scrutiny, because the army that reached Syria, Iran and Lebanon and annihilated Gaza cannot evacuate a few Jewish terrorists that invaded a Palestinian home in an area under occupation for six decades.”
There has been a surge in attacks on Palestinians and construction of new settlements across the occupied West Bank, as extremists backed by the most far-right government in Israel’s history intensify a campaign of ethnic cleansing ahead of national elections set for October.
On Thursday Katz celebrated the re-establishment of a settlement evacuated by Israel in ۲۰۰۵, under then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan.
“Here, this is the land of Israel. Here, we are staying forever,” Katz said at the ceremony in Ganim, where two dozen prefabricated homes have already been installed, and the hillside is being levelled to make space for more.
On the road that leads to the settlement the army had levelled Palestinian property and used piles of rubble to block access roads for Palestinian communities.
On Friday the commander of Israeli forces for the occupied West Bank, Gen Avi Bluth, made a second visit to Qusra. Two days earlier he told Palestinians the army would remove the settlers, but soldiers retreated from confrontation with the group.
Instead they forced one of the Palestinian families out of their home, saying they needed it as a base for the unsuccessful military operation against the settlers.
One of the homes is owned by a US citizen, and US ambassador Mike Huckabee described the Israelis besieging it as terrorists, and said he had requested the Israeli police and army act to remove them.
Huckabee, who supports the settlement movement’s vision of establishing a “Greater Israel” on land seized from Palestinians and neighbouring countries, said the militants in Qusra represent a “very small minority” of the settler movement.
State and settler violence has driven a surge in displacement of Palestinian communities in the past three years.
Since October ۲۰۲۳, Israel has forcibly displaced ۶۴ entire Palestinian communities and parts of ۱۵ additional communities, affecting nearly ۵,۰۰۰ people, according to data from Israeli rights group B’tselem.
On Friday Israeli gunmen opened fire at a group of unarmed Israeli and Palestinian activists as they attempted to peacefully reclaim Palestinian land seized by settlers in Beit Sahour, just outside Jerusalem. A Catholic bishop and journalists covering the event were also targeted by the attackers.
Israeli settlers had put a large Star of David and Israeli flags on the roof an old, dilapidated house, owned by Palestinians, just ۵۰۰ metres from a Palestinian family home.
Mia Biran, from the group Combatants for Peace, said: “They are all the time threatened by the settlers. We were about a hundred activists, our goal was to clean the area, plant some trees, to show presence and to stand with the residents who are very scared. We were on private Palestinian land.”
A few minutes after they started work, the group heard gunfire from the settler outpost and were forced to take cover. One gunman moved close to the group, opened fire in the air and aimed the gun at activists, in an attack videoed by the group.
He was later joined by three or four others. “We screamed in Hebrew ‘do not fire’ and then they understood there are Israelis among the crowd,” Biran said.
“I called the police to tell them we are threatened by settlers, the activists who were at the roof saw there was a military Jeep all the time in the area who did nothing.”
After they withdrew from the area, settlers visited the nearby Palestinian home and threatened to burn it down, she added. Settlers regularly launch arson attacks on Palestinian homes. One such attack in ۲۰۱۵ killed a baby and his parents, orphaning their only surviving son.
Quique Kierszenbaum and Sufian Taha contributed reporting
