Under heavy security protection, thousands of settler activists and members of right-wing organizations, together with senior government ministers, began a march to the illegal West Bank outpost of Evyatar on Monday afternoon.
Organizers said the march was to strengthen the settlement movement and to pressure the government to allow the outpost to be repopulated.
Some of the government’s most senior cabinet ministers, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, were slated to participate in the march against their own government’s policy, along with four of the most senior rabbis in the religious-Zionist community.
The event comes amid a wave of Palestinian terror attacks carried out in recent days, as well as riots on the Temple Mount and inside the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and rocket barrages fired from Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza.
On Sunday, security officials warned that the march to Evyatar would put more pressure on security forces already “spread thin” by the security situation in the West Bank, and the threats from other fronts.
Israel Defense Forces spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said the military approved the march, saying it would be “highly monitored and highly protected.”
Ohad Tal, a lawmaker with the Religious Zionist party, said that “there was no reason in the world to cancel the march.”
“We need to send a message — the message that we don’t intend to concede and we are here to stay,” he told Army Radio.
However, Yesh Atid lawmaker Elazar Stern said that the march should not go ahead.
“A large number of government ministers think that the state is a kind of toy, and they play with the security of all of us,” Stern told the Ynet news site.
An unnamed security official told Channel 12 News on Sunday that since the country was currently experiencing a wave of terror attacks, “[the march] will require security forces to dedicate to it officers who are supposed to be on other missions.”
The security official said that among their other tasks, security forces were working to combat rising rates of nationalist crimes being perpetrated by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank, for fear that such an incident may worsen the escalation.
According to a report in the Haaretz daily, an entire IDF battalion will be diverted from the manhunt for the perpetrators of the Jordan Valley deadly terror attack that killed British-Israeli sisters over the weekend in order to secure the settler march. Generally, the IDF does not allow large congregations of Palestinians in the West Bank, viewing them as a public disturbance.
The settler activists and public officials will march 1.7 kilometers (one mile) from Tapuach junction in the northern West Bank to Evyatar and will enter the settlement and conduct various recreational activities there during the course of the day.
An IDF battalion has been assigned the task of securing the area during the march, while Border Police forces will secure the marchers themselves.
The IDF has said it expects between 10,000 to 15,000 activists to participate in the event.
According to organizers, the goal of the march is to “strengthen the settlements,” but more broadly is largely designed to bring pressure to bear on the government to allow Evyatar to be repopulated in accordance with the coalition agreements signed between the ultranationalist Religious Zionism party and the Likud.
Evyatar was first established in 2013 but has been destroyed and rebuilt on several occasions, until it was re-established most recently in 2021. In an agreement with the then-outgoing Netanyahu government, the settler activists in Evyatar agreed to leave the settlement pending a government review of the land and commitment to legalize the outpost and on condition that the buildings at the site were not demolished.
The Bennett-Lapid government did not move forward with the agreement, but the Religious Zionism party demanded that Evyatar be legalized as one of the conditions of its coalition agreement with Likud in the current government.
In a recent agreement with the Palestinians brokered by the US, Israel has however agreed not to advance the legalization of West Bank outposts for six months.
“We are calling on the Jewish people to come and take part in this massive event to strengthen the settlements,” said Tzvi Elimelch, the head of the Nachala settlement activist group which re-established Evyatar in 2021 and is organizing the march.
He praised the cabinet ministers and lawmakers for announcing their participation in the event and for their “understanding of the strategic importance of the Evyatar settlement.”
Times of Israel staff and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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