Fresh Air

An article published in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) last week about alleged Israeli settler violence in the West Bank claimed that “The UN is now recording an average of four settler-related incidents a day, up from one a day in 2021 and three a day in 2023… Since the beginning of 2023, 1122 Palestinians have died in confrontations with Israeli police or settlers, compared to 79 Israelis who have died in confrontations with Palestinians.”

Those numbers sound terrible. But they are also almost certainly wrong.

The same article does note, to its credit that “Regavim, a pro-settler organisation, argued in a recent report that such figures are inflated, and that settler violence is a ‘marginal phenomenon that does not reflect the silent majority of settlers.’”

What it omitted, however, is that, if you look at the Regavim report, it appears to unequivocally prove that the widely reported numbers for settler violence are gross exaggerations – even if you do not agree with the group’s labelling of such settler violence as a “marginal phenomenon”.

There is no disputing that some Israeli settlers are indeed violent and the attacks they have committed against Palestinians and their property are a serious problem. AIJAC has condemned settler violence repeatedly, and called for Israeli authorities to do more to crack down on the perpetrators.  There have been numerous reports of violent attacks against Palestinians and damage to property across the West Bank – including the particularly ugly incidents last week in Kfar Malik described in the Age/SMH article.

Media reports may make it seem like settler violence is rampant and widespread. But viewing the issue with a wider lens, and with more context, paints a more complex picture, which recognises that violence against settlers by Palestinians is much more common than the opposite – though that is of course no excuse for the settler violence that does occur.

Almost all claims about the amount of settler violence – like the one in the article noted above – rely directly or indirectly on a database maintained by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Only the summary figures from that database are available to the general public on the OCHA website; the underlying data being summarised is made available only to “humanitarian agencies”.

Regavim gained access to a version of the full OCHA database in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, which lists 6,285 supposed violent incidents by settlers from January 2016 through April 2023. When the NGO looked at the list in detail, it found that thousands of those reported incidents of supposed settler violence – the overwhelming majority in fact – were not actually examples of violence at all, according to OCHA’s own descriptions of them.

Examples included in this database include:

• Traffic accidents
• State infrastructure work by Israeli authorities
• Israeli class trips to archaeological sites
• Hikers trespassing accidentally. Indeed, allegations of trespassing, with no suggestion of violence to either people or property, make up 20% of the whole database
• Incidents that occurred in Jerusalem, which is not part of the West Bank (20% of all incidents)
• Most bizarrely of all, every single time a visibly Jewish individual visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem – the holiest site in Judaism – was classified as “violent incident”. The site has long been open to anyone to visit during normal visiting hours, regardless of religion. These “incidents”, plus some Palestinian clashes with Israeli security forces on the Temple Mount, amount to 19% of all incidents in the database

Once all these non-incidents were removed, Regavim says there were only 833 reported incidents across almost eight years that can be truly defined as West Bank violence, just 13% of the 6,285 incidents that are routinely cited based on the UN database.

This is nothing approaching the incidence of settler violence cited in the Age/SMH article – “four settler-related incidents a day [in 2025], up from one a day in 2021 and three a day in 2023.” In fact, the actual number of violent incidents in the database (which admittedly only goes up to 2023), is about 9.3 per month over the period from 2016 to 2023.

But even that looks like a huge exaggeration, as Regavim showed by investigating each of the “violent” incidents using Israeli security forces data, and also the more detailed database of incidents maintained by the strongly anti-settler Israeli NGO B’Tselem.

Upon further inspection, in almost half of those 833 incidents, the UN records the Palestinian victims’ “involvement in clashes”, meaning it was possible that they themselves started the violence. We simply don’t know.

And in 14% of those 833 cases, the UN says it was Israeli security forces that were involved in clashes with Palestinians, and settlers were not involved at all. Indeed, the database also says that Israeli security forces, not settlers, were responsible for more than 95% of Palestinian deaths or injuries.

Finally, also included as incidents of settler violence in the database were acts of violence perpetrated by Palestinians. In fact, Palestinian terrorists who were injured or killed while in the process of carrying out murderous attacks against Israeli settlers or security forces in the West Bank would have been added to that list of 1,122 Palestinian “victims” cited in the Age/SMH report. Many others would have been members of the terrorist groups Israeli forces have been trying to eradicate in cities like Jenin and Nablus over the past two years, where the Palestinian Authority had lost control to these gangs.

Meanwhile, during just two years (2020-2022), Israel’s Shin Bet security agency recorded 6,068 serious attacks or attempted attacks committed by West Bank Palestinians, including bombings, shootings and stabbings, against Israelis, as well as many less serious attacks.

Even if we use the almost certainly overstated number of 9.3 acts of settler violence per month, this clearly pales in comparison to the number of major Palestinian attacks, around eight serious incidents per day during the two-year period in the Shin Bet data. While the comparison is not exact, it appears that Palestinians are responsible for around 30 times more violence in the West Bank than settlers, as a rough estimate.

So once again, no one should deny that settler violence is real. Moreover, there is good reason to urge the Israeli government and authorities to do more to ensure that the relatively small number of settlers responsible – generally estimated to be no more than a few hundred out of a settler population of some 450,000 – are caught and prosecuted. But one does not have to share Regavim’s pro-settler agenda to see that the numbers being used in most media reports on the subject, derived from UN data, amount to a complete misrepresentation of the reality of this phenomenon.

This appears to be yet another case where journalists uncritically reproducing numbers and claims from UN sources in their reporting are inadvertently spreading distortions and misinformation.