More than 100 militant settlers overwhelmed a 15-person Israeli military police escort early Tuesday to attack the Tubasi family as they attempted to return to homes in the West Bank village of Jalud — homes a high court had ordered restored to them. Three Israeli security personnel were injured, the houses were burned, and the military evacuated the family in armoured vehicles. The army had not coordinated with national police or the Shin Bet, and scheduled the operation during the Sukkot holiday when settler outpost populations swell. The structural fact here is stark: the Israeli state issued a court order, deployed its own forces to enforce it, and was physically defeated by the constituency its far-right coalition partners have armed and empowered. As Maariv columnist Avi Ashkenazi wrote: "The real sovereign in Judea and Samaria are the extreme rightwing terrorist activists." Netanyahu condemned the "violent riots" while defending the broader settler movement — a rhetorical split that changes nothing on the ground. The international response is accelerating on a separate track. The Netherlands has imposed a bar on settlement-goods imports. The UK has announced broader trade and financing controls. A US Senate bill demanding a human rights report on the occupation won backing from all but one Democrat before narrowly failing. Israeli analyst Roy Sharon warned that "anarchy in the West Bank" may cost Israel US military aid and international legitimacy. The displacement numbers tell the longer story. More than 60 Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank have been wiped off the map since October 2023, with 18 others partly displaced, according to B'Tselem. Nearly 5,000 people have been forced from their homes, almost half children. The ICRC said attacks, settlement expansion, and movement restrictions were making everyday life "untenable" for Palestinian civilians and violated international humanitarian law. Israel's president Isaac Herzog called the Jalud attack a "moral stain." Former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu's leading election challenger, called for action against a "campaign of terror and violence." But as analyst Mairav Zonszein of the International Crisis Group noted, the opposition's concern is not Palestinian safety — it is that settler violence is making Israel look bad and that the military is losing control. The dynamic is self-reinforcing. Cabinet ministers back settler militants. The military cannot or will not confront them at scale. Court orders become unenforceable. Each successful attack emboldens the next. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has already called for the ICC to intervene because the state has failed. Two suspects have been detained from a mob of over 100. What Jalud reveals is not a policy failure but a governance collapse in a specific territory. The occupied West Bank is governed by whoever can mobilize more force on the ground on a given night. On Tuesday, that was not the Israeli state.
