Olmert: Israeli settlers committing daily war crimes with gov. backing

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Israeli media
13 Jul 2025 04:33
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Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert stresses that settler militias are committing daily war crimes in the West Bank with the tacit backing of the government and military.

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Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during an interview with The Associated Press in his office in Tel Aviv, occupied Palestine, on May 22, 2025. (AP)

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has issued a denunciation of the current government's handling of settler violence in the occupied West Bank, calling the “Hilltop Youth” militias a grave internal threat for committing daily war crimes against Palestinians under the protection of the government.

In remarks for Israeli broadcaster Channel 13 and elaborated further in a column for Haaretz, Olmert characterized the settler groups as organized terrorist militias carrying out a government-enabled campaign of violence, displacement, and land theft against Palestinians.

“War crimes are occurring daily. Jews are murdering Palestinians. Burning them,” Olmert said on live television.

“The IDF doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. The police shut their eyes.”

A campaign of terror — with political cover

Known as the “Hilltop Youth,” these settler militias consist mostly of radicalized young men entrenched in illegal outposts across the occupied West Bank. Their attacks, according to Olmert, are not the actions of a rogue minority, as often claimed by Israeli officials, but part of a deliberate policy backed by political forces within the Israeli government.

“These militias are not a gang of savages,” he wrote in Haaretz, “but the vanguard of everyone who encourages and inspires them – and covers for them.”

Olmert explicitly linked their actions to senior far-right figures, naming ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Tzvi Succot, and others as part of the political ecosystem that enables settler violence.

“There are people in power who will protect them, as long as they don’t relent,” he warned.

“Palestinians are assaulted and run off their lands. Their fields are burned. Their homes are burned. Yesterday, an American citizen was beaten on the head with a club and killed,” Olmert told Channel 13.

'They could turn on us next'

The former premier claimed that the current trajectory of unchecked settler violence poses an existential risk not just to Palestinians, but to Israeli civil society as a whole.

“If the Israeli government fails to understand that these militias are our most dangerous enemy… they won’t hesitate to shoot us too,” he cautioned.

Despite these alarming developments, Olmert criticized the broader political establishment—including opposition figures like Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, and Yair Lapid—for their silence and failure to mount a meaningful challenge to settler extremism.

Ethnic Cleansing by Policy

What emerges from Olmert’s analysis is a grim picture of Israeli settler policy: not merely a failure of enforcement, but a government-sanctioned process of ethnic cleansing aimed at forcing Palestinians out of the West Bank.

“Their main mission,” Olmert wrote, “is to expel all the West Bank Palestinians by making life so miserable that they will all want to flee.”

He described the process in precise detail: seizing hilltops, establishing unauthorized outposts under army protection, burning olive groves, demolishing homes, and intimidating Palestinians with weapons often supplied by the Israeli government itself.