Major-General Avi Bluth, the Israeli commander with responsibility for the occupied West Bank, had not known his comments would be leaked when he boasted of the success of Israel’s policies in the occupied territory.

The army, he claimed in undated comments published by the Israeli liberal daily Haaretz last week, was “killing like we haven’t killed since 1967″.

Israel, Bluth added, was “turning villages into conflict zones”. Critically, he also admitted to his audience what many had long known: that Israel was practising a two-tier firing policy, actively avoiding firing at Israeli settlers throwing stones at Israeli forces, while freely firing at Palestinians doing the same.

“This [stone throwing] is terrorism, not popular or grassroots terrorism – there’s only popular [‘folk’] dancing,” Bluth said, adding that the military had killed 42 Palestinian stone-throwers in 2025. Firing at Israeli settlers, however, was to be avoided, he said, due to what he described as the “profound societal consequences” of doing so.

Al Jazeera approached Bluth, via the Israeli authorities, for comment, but did not receive a reply at the time of writing.

Ratcheting rhetoric

That double standard is unlikely to come as a surprise to anyone who lives in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, or the rights groups that campaign on their behalf. However, within an Israeli society described by analysts as veering sharply to the right and increasingly nationalistic, comments such as Bluth’s were increasingly becoming a point of pride, irrespective of the human cost.

In a landscape where government ministers, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, celebrate the passage of a death penalty law targeting Palestinians with noose-decorated cakes, or Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich can describe an Israeli government with Palestinian members as a thousand times worse than the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, Bluth’s comments are hardly shocking.

“This is nothing,” Orly Noy, editor of the Hebrew-language Local Call, told Al Jazeera, describing a process where Israel’s far-right has increasingly taken over the country’s institutions.

A few years earlier, Noy explained, “[ex-soldier organisation] Breaking the Silence ran a report showing that Israeli soldiers in Area C [the part of the West Bank under full Israeli administration] were unaware that part of their job was to protect Palestinians from settler violence. They were completely unaware. That was years ago, before October 7, before the [Gaza] genocide. People in Israel could live with it then; they really don’t care now.”

Prejudice as policy

In March, Israel passed legislation that allows for the death penalty – but only for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

A month earlier, Israel again earned worldwide condemnation after it introduced legislation ushering in what several countries described as the “de facto annexation” of the occupied territory, further entrenching a system by which the lives of Palestinians and Israeli settlers are governed by separate legal regimes: one for those who have lived there for generations and one for the Israelis who claim a biblical right to the territory.

“This isn’t new,” Yair Dvir, from the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, told Al Jazeera, “These are the policies that have underpinned Israel’s apartheid for years. What’s new is that statements like this have become everyday comments for politicians, military leaders and those in the media.

“The feeling is that the international community is not stopping Israel, the US is backing it, so there is no longer any reason to hide the policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing – on the contrary, it is something that leaders today are proud of.”

The human cost of racism

Those policies appear to be escalating still further under cover of the US-Israel war on Iran.

According to figures compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 12 Palestinians have been killed in settler attacks in the West Bank since February 28 – the date of Israel and the US’s first strikes on Iran – with hundreds of others injured and forced from their homes.

In contrast, the same office recorded 10 Palestinians killed by settlers across the whole of 2025. The Israeli military killed at least 226 Palestinians during the same period.

Contacted by phone, Aida Touma-Sliman, a member of parliament representing the left-wing Hadash party, described a visit earlier this week to the village of Duma, near Nablus in the occupied West Bank. The village was the site of a 2015 settler attack that killed three Palestinians, including 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh, who was burned alive.

“I visited Duma after the attack 11 years ago, and I visited it this week,” she said, “Both times, I felt the same sense of hopelessness and an understanding that nobody was there to defend them and they would face these settlers alone.”

While ending the occupation of the West Bank altogether was the ultimate hope for its people, for now, their best chances lay in the forthcoming Israeli elections, Touma-Sliman added.

‘The only hope I have, and it’s a slight one, is that, in the elections later this year, we will finally vote these fascists out from government and perhaps begin cleaning up all of the mess they’ve made.”