IDF officers said to tell PM Jewish terror accounts for up to 80% of West Bank incidents |
Up to 80 percent of incidents that Israeli troops in the West Bank record are Jewish attacks on Palestinians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was told on Wednesday, amid an unchecked surge of deadly settler violence that has plunged the West Bank into chaos in recent months.
The statistic was shared with the premier by an officer in the IDF Central Command during a meeting on Jewish terrorism, the Kan public broadcaster reported.
The officer informed Netanyahu, according to Kan, that the need to devote resources to Jewish terrorism has forced the Israel Defense Forces to cut back on arresting Palestinian terror suspects, putting the security of the state at risk.
“There are company and battalion commanders here who spend the night preventing [Palestinian] terrorism and most of the day dealing with [Jewish] nationalist crime,” the officer was quoted as having said. “Arrests of wanted suspects and offensive operations are canceled because of these incidents. In some brigade operations rooms, 80 percent of the reports in the log are [Jewish] nationalist crime.”
“We are failing every day in maintaining law and order, and we have no tools,” another officer said in an appeal to Netanyahu, according to the report. “There are [illegal settlement] outposts we have evacuated dozens of times — they return. There are key activists inciting youths to violence who are not being removed, and if they are arrested, they are released and return after two days.”
The second officer reportedly stressed “there are outposts engaged in daily violence against Palestinians; by the time we arrive at the scene, there is nothing left to do.”
“The system is structured in a way that makes it impossible to defeat this,” the officer bemoaned. “It’s only a matter of time before we wake up one morning to a Telegram group reporting that terrorists slaughtered Jews in one of the outposts.”
Another officer in Central Command was said to have told Netanyahu that when he brings up the importance of upholding the law, it is seen as expressing a........