Under the cover of war with Iran, Israel’s government is advancing its ultranationalist agenda at a blistering pace.
Ten days into the conflict, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Monday issued an order to make 300,000 Jewish-Israeli residents of Jerusalem eligible for a gun licence, the latest expansion in a policy he has championed since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks.
The decision means almost all of the city's Jewish residents will be able to carry firearms, regardless of whether they have served in the armed forces. Palestinian residents, numbering some 350,000 people, or about 38 per cent of the city's population, will not be eligible.
“This is a continuation of the policy that I have been leading since taking office, to strengthen the personal security of Israeli citizens,” Mr Ben-Gvir wrote on X, announcing the news.
“Since the expansion of the firearms reform, over 240,000 citizens have already received a personal firearm licence, an unprecedented number.”
East Jerusalem activist Daniel Seidemann slammed the move. “Ben-Gvir aspires to see intercommunal bloodshed on the streets of Jerusalem, where vigilantes will ethnically cleanse the city, secured by the militia once known as the Israeli Police,” he wrote in a post on X.
Mr Ben-Gvir has a history of inflammatory action in Jerusalem. The minister regularly visits the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, which is seen by many as a severe breach of a fragile agreement that governs the sensitive site, the third holiest in Islam.
Hamas said Israel's actions at the compound, particularly since the election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in late 2022, were a key reason for the October 7 attacks, which it named “Al Aqsa Flood”.
During major tensions in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in 2021, Mr Ben-Gvir set up a tent in the Palestinian area, calling it his parliamentary office.
The expansion of gun licensing comes amid a sharp increase in killings of Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.
The latest killings were on Sunday. Settlers shot Thair Farouk Hamayel, aged 24, Fara Jawdat Hamayel, 57, and Mohammad Hasan Murara, 55, in the head in the village of Abu Falah, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Seven people were injured, including four with bullet wounds, the ministry added.
The deaths brought the number of Palestinians killed by settlers last week in the occupied West Bank to six, a significant increase even amid the wave of settler violence since the October 2023 attacks.
Palestinian-Israeli politician Ayman Odeh described the attacks as a “pogrom”.
“In the shadow of Netanyahu's war of survival [with Iran], gangs of settlers move from village to village, sometimes alongside the army, and murder Palestinians simply because they are Palestinians,” he said.
“All of this is happening under the auspices of the army and with the encouragement of the government. This is an official and deliberate policy, whose goal is ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and the realisation of the vision of the messianic and fascist government: more conquest, more murder and pogroms, more expulsion and more annexation.”
Palestinians living in hotspots of settler violence report a significant worsening of their situation since the war broke out.
Diab, a farmer in the northern Jordan Valley, told The National that “settlers are using the fact that there are fewer eyes on what they are doing to carry out whatever they want”.
He also reported a major increase in the number of checkpoints, making travel to major cities and between farming communities much harder.
