Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's far-right Finance Minister, told Ynet News that the Israeli military should "go to war in Judea and Samaria, to do there what we did in Gaza, to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, which is a terror authority." The use of the biblical term for the occupied West Bank is not incidental — it signals a maximalist territorial claim dressed in security language. This is a sitting cabinet minister calling for the replication of a campaign that has killed tens of thousands. Smotrich's comments land during a week-long comprehensive military closure of the occupied West Bank, ostensibly for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, with movement restrictions on Palestinians in place until October 3. Simultaneously, hundreds of Israelis stormed the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque under heavy police protection, performing religious rituals inside the compound — a provocation that has historically served as an accelerant for wider violence. The violence trajectory in the West Bank is already steep. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded more than 1,330 settler-related attacks on Palestinians from January to late July alone — averaging six per day, the highest rate in approximately 20 years. Rights groups report settlers are increasingly armed with military-issued weaponry and wearing military uniforms during attacks, effectively dissolving the legal distinction between civilian settler and soldier. Smotrich holds the Finance Ministry portfolio, which controls budgetary levers for settlement expansion and infrastructure in the occupied territories. His call to "dismantle" the Palestinian Authority is not rhetoric from the margins — it is policy preference from within the governing coalition. The PA, whatever its failures, remains the administrative apparatus through which 3 million West Bank Palestinians access basic governance, healthcare coordination, and international aid. The structural logic here is annexation through attrition. Settler violence displaces Palestinian communities. Military closures restrict movement and economic activity. Calls to dismantle the PA remove the last institutional buffer. Each element reinforces the others, creating conditions where formal annexation becomes a description of existing facts rather than a new policy. The international response architecture — UN resolutions, EU statements, US diplomatic caution — has produced no meaningful friction against this trajectory. The 20-year trend line runs in one direction: more settlements, more closures, more normalized violence, less Palestinian territorial contiguity. Smotrich is not describing a departure from policy. He is describing its acceleration. What makes this moment distinct is the explicitness. "Do there what we did in Gaza" is a statement that only makes sense if the speaker considers the Gaza campaign a success worth replicating. That framing — Gaza as template, not tragedy — is the policy signal that matters more than any individual closure or incursion.
