Israeli security chief condemns 'terrorism' of militant settlers

The head of Israel’s security agency, Shin Bet, has warned the country’s leaders that Jewish terrorism in the West Bank is out of control and has become a serious threat to national security.

Ronen Bar issued the warning in a letter to the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the attorney general and members of the Israeli cabinet, some of whom are outspoken backers of the extremist settlers responsible for the escalating violence.

Bar’s letter, sent last week but published by Israel’s Channel 12 News on Thursday night, has highlighted the wide, acrimonious gap between the far-right wing of Netanyahu’s coalition and Israel’s security apparatus.

The national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of those criticised by Bar for inflammatory behaviour, called for the Shin Bet head to be fired, triggering a rebuke on Friday from the defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

Bar’s letter focused on Jewish extremists known as the “hilltop youth”, violent militants who have been conducting a campaign of murder, arson and intimidation against Palestinians on the West Bank, aimed at driving them from their land, furthering the far right’s pursuit of complete annexation.

Bar said their actions should not be described as criminality but as terrorism.

Related: One Palestinian killed as Israeli settlers attack West Bank village

“It isn’t crime because it’s the use of violence to create intimidation, to spread fear. That is terror,” he wrote, describing how the campaign had “significantly expanded” in the absence of an adequate police response and with the connivance of some national leaders. The militants had gone from using “cigarette lighters to the weapons of war”, the security chief said, adding that some of those weapons had been provided by the state.

The terror campaign, the letter said, was “a large stain on Judaism and on all of us”.

Bar warned the hilltop youth had gone “from evading the security forces to attacking the security forces, from cutting themselves off from the establishment to receiving legitimacy from certain officials in the establishment”.

The Shin Bet director also referred to the “spectacle” of Ben-Gvir’s visit last month to the compound of al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock, Islam’s holiest site in Jerusalem. The esplanade is also holy to Jews who know it as the Temple Mount, but the status quo for decades has been that while Jews could visit, only Muslims could pray there. During his 18 July visit, Ben-Gvir led prayers in front of the cameras and vowed to change the status quo permanently.

Such actions, Bar warned, could lead “to profuse bloodshed and change the face of the state out of all recognition”.

The security chief, who has been in the post since 2021, said he had reluctantly decided to send the letter “with pain and great fear, as a Jew, as an Israeli and as a security official, about the escalating phenomenon of Jewish terrorism from the ‘hilltop youth’”, which he felt was approaching a tipping point.

“We’re on the threshold of a significant, reality-changing process,” Bar wrote. “The damage to Israel, especially at this time, and to the majority of the settlers is indescribable: a loss of global legitimacy even among our best friends, deploying IDF forces at a time the army, which isn’t meant to deal with these missions, is finding it difficult to carry out all its tasks.”

The nationalist leadership, Bar concluded, was “willing to jeopardise the state’s security and its very existence” in the name of their ideology.

N12 reported that Ben-Gvir had walked out of a meeting of Israel’s security cabinet after Bar’s letter arrived, and called for his dismissal.

Netanyahu has not so far tried to oust Bar but has been critical of the Shin Bet chief and David Barnea, the director of the external spy agency, the Mossad, for their role as negotiators in Gaza peace talks, implying they were willing to sacrifice Israel’s security to reach a deal to release hostages being held by Hamas.

“I am facing the security establishment and the negotiating leaders alone,” Netanyahu said, in remarks quoted by N12. “They display weakness and are only trying to find ways to concede, whereas I insist on the state of Israel’s interests and am not willing to capitulate to demands that will undermine security.”

In the spat between Bar and Ben-Gvir however, Netanyahu’s defence minister sided with the security chief.

“In the face of Minister Ben-Gvir’s irresponsible actions that endanger the national security of the state of Israel and create an internal division in the nation, [the Shin Bet chief] and his people are doing their duty and warning against the serious consequences of these actions,” Gallant said on the X social media platform.

Ben-Gvir hit back on X, telling Gallant to stop attacking him and “to start attacking Hezbollah”, egging on the defence chief to start a preemptive war in Lebanon, a longstanding demand of the Israeli right.