WEST BANK
—
On a hillside
overlooking the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir, a crowd of Israelis and Jewish visitors from abroad gathered for an inside look at how settlement works. They listened intently as Netanel, an Israeli settler-soldier in olive fatigues with a rifle strapped to his back, advertised his group’s impact in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“It started with this hilltop,” he said, referring to the current settlement push that has crept ever closer to al-Mughayyir. “We ended up putting the area in Jewish hands. There are no Arabs here.”
Netanel was speaking on a tour aimed at English-speaking Jews, some of whom expressed interest in moving to the settlements. He described his “mission” to support his fellow settlers and shepherds in their return to “
Judea and Samaria
,” the
biblical name
Israeli settlers and the Israeli government use for the West Bank.
The settlement movement is accelerating, recruiting outsiders to join and bringing in reinforcements from the military’s Hagmar battalions, regional defense units staffed largely with settlement residents that have exploded in size since October 7, 2023. The government has issued thousands of rifles to civilian security squads, at times
distributed
personally
by Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Israeli watchdog groups describe the push as an unprecedented state-backed land grab, one that settlers are carrying out with an odd combination of tools: government-supplied rifles alongside herds of sheep and goats.
Reservist settler-soldiers like the Hagmar battalions “are not simply self-organized militia groups,” said Marko Milanovic, a professor of public international law at the University of Reading. “In essence, they should be treated in the same way as IDF soldiers as a legal matter.”
Established in 2025, the Metzudat David is illegal, even under Israeli law. It is one of 10 Israeli outposts that now surround al-Mughayyir as settlements expand at a
… [more]
