CURRENT AFFAIRS
The warning from their own generals: settler violence threatens Israel's security
July 28, 2026
The facts
On July 27, 2026, on the eve of the meeting between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, more than 550 former senior Israeli security officials — retired IDF generals and colonels, together with former heads of Mossad, Shin Bet, the police, the National Security Council and the diplomatic corps — made public a letter addressed to the US president. The document, promoted by the group Commanders for Israel's Security and signed on the group's behalf by former deputy chief of staff Matan Vilnai, comes after a weekend of particularly violent clashes between settlers and Palestinians. The signatories ask Trump to deliver an explicit message to Netanyahu during the meeting, warning that the escalation, if not stopped, risks jeopardizing the US plan for Gaza and the expansion of the Abraham Accords, as well as Israel's own security. Yair Golan, a former deputy chief of staff and former leader of The Democrats party, added that the current government is creating a dangerous reality for soldiers, police officers and Israeli citizens.
The picture the appeal describes
The available data place the alarm within an already-measured trend, not an isolated episode. According to OCHA, since the start of 2026 about 850 Palestinians have been injured in attacks attributed to settlers — 55% of all Palestinians injured in the West Bank this year — with the rate rising from one injury every three days in 2020 to more than three a day in early 2026. In March alone, the ACLED series recorded at least eight Palestinians killed in incidents involving settlers, the highest monthly figure of the decade of data collection. Between January 2023 and July 2026, 122 Palestinian communities suffered total or partial displacement, 47 of them completely abandoned. On the economic side, the Association for Cooperation and Solidarity estimates more than 120,000 olive trees destroyed or damaged since October 7, 2023, nearly 92,000 in the last year alone.
Legal reading
Two distinct obligations are at stake, not one. The first: Article 43 of the Hague Regulations (1907), read together with Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, requires the occupying power to ensure public order and protect the occupied civilian population from any act of violence, regardless of who commits it. The second, distinct obligation: Articles 46 and 53 of the same Regulations protect private property in occupied territory, prohibiting its destruction except where rendered absolutely necessary by military operations — relevant to the systematic destruction of olive groves and water infrastructure. The International Court of Justice's advisory opinion of July 2024 further found the confiscation of land and the transfer of population in the West Bank to be illegal, citing UN Security Council Resolution 2334.
Add to this a verifiable institutional fact, not an inference: the same state apparatus that tries Israeli citizens residing in the occupied territories in civilian courts tries the Palestinian population of the same area in military courts. Twenty years of monitoring (2005-2025) by the Israeli NGO Yesh Din, covering more than 1,700 case files, shows that 93.6% of investigations into offenses committed by settlers against Palestinians closed without indictment; only 3% led to full or partial convictions. This is not violence tolerated "because" Israel is a democracy, or "despite" being one: it is a system that applies democratic guarantees to one part of the population under its control and military law to the other, in the same territory.
Symmetry test
The obligation to prevent and prosecute violence against a protected population does not change according to who occupies the territory, nor according to the occupier's political system. Applying it more leniently to a democracy — or more severely because of the label "democracy" — would be the same asymmetry, reversed. What matters for this site is not the identity of the state, but the verifiable fact of a dual legal regime operating in the same space.
Counterweight (Phase 4b), declared
In this cycle we searched for a comparator with equally rigorous documentation — another state that legally tolerates, with a comparable apparatus for measuring impunity, violence by civilian settlers against a protected population. None of the four cases checked (Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, Western Sahara, West Papua, Northern Cyprus) presents the same combination of a codified dual judicial system and impunity data measured with two decades of continuity. This should be stated honestly: it is probably a fact about one civil society's capacity to monitor itself over time, not proof that the phenomenon is rarer elsewhere.
Why international pressure remains muted
There have been sanctions, but partial ones. On May 11, 2026 the EU Foreign Affairs Council sanctioned individual settlers responsible for violence, rejecting the trade measures proposed by Spain; on June 9 six Western capitals banned entry to 25 settlers and 25 other people linked to the movement; on July 23 a new summit of EU ambassadors ended without agreement on a ban on imports from the settlements, for lack of the numbers for a qualified majority. Suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement — the measure with the most real weight — requires unanimity among the 27 and has been blocked by Italy and Germany: Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said he preferred individual sanctions on violent settlers to a measure targeting the trade agreement.
These votes do not happen in a vacuum. EU-Israel trade reached €43.3 billion in 2025 — the EU is Israel's largest trading partner, while Israel is only the EU's 27th-largest partner, a real asymmetry of dependence. France and Germany remain the leading European exporters of weapons to Israel; the share of German military exports going to Israel rose from 6% to 33% in recent years. Italy renewed, in April 2026, through an automatic mechanism, its military cooperation memorandum with Israel through 2031. On the technology side, Europe is the main market for Israel's arms industry (about 54% of Israeli arms exports), with imports up 155% between 2020 and 2024; when Spain suspended arms trade with Israel in 2025, it found it genuinely difficult to quickly replace Israeli suppliers. In Italy, public incentives (November 2025) reward companies that buy cybersecurity from the more than 500 Israeli firms in the sector — against the backdrop of the Paragon case, the Israeli company accused of spying on Italian journalists and activists with the Graphite spyware. A specialized industry source has raised the risk of potential backdoors in national critical systems linked to these technologies — a concern to be attributed to that source, not established fact here. These figures show a documented correlation between commercial, military and technological dependence and the vote against the most incisive measures: we do not prove, and do not claim, a direct causal link — it is for the reader to draw their own conclusions from verifiable facts.
Editorial note (declared judgment)
It is worth noting that the signatories' alarm is argued primarily in terms of Israeli security, US interests and the survival of the Abraham Accords — a security register, not a human-rights one. This is a notable absence in the text, not proof of what the signatories think of the Palestinian population: Commanders for Israel's Security has historically been a group that has spoken in favor of a two-state solution and strengthening the governance of the Palestinian Authority. It remains a fact that, in this specific letter, the risk to Palestinians does not appear as an independent argument.
One question remains open, and it is legitimate to leave it to the reader rather than close it with a definitive answer: how is it possible that facts of this magnitude — 850 injured, 122 displaced communities, 120,000 olive trees destroyed, a judicial system that closes 93.6% of investigations without indictment — remain on the margins of international attention, treated more as material for electoral statements than as a matter of law?
Sources: Il Sole 24 Ore · L'Espresso · Mosaico · SIR · il manifesto · Yesh Din / SIR · Amnesty International · Open · Zazoom · ICT Security Magazine · Euronews · Il Giornale d'Italia · European Commission