Melissa Steinberg Brodsky | Facebook
THE ATTACKS NOBODY TALKS ABOUT
Before we get into the numbers, let’s address the question that will inevitably come up. And that’s why are Israelis in Judea and Samaria at all?
The short answer is that the legal and historical picture is considerably more complicated than the phrase “illegal occupation” suggests, and anyone telling you it’s simple is leaving out a lot of information.
Jordan seized the West Bank in 1948, fighting a smaller Jewish army, and formally annexed it in 1950. That annexation was not recognized by most of the world, meaning Jordan was never the legitimate legal sovereign of the territory.
When Israel took control in 1967, it wasn’t taking land from a recognized state. It was taking land that had been held in legal limbo.
There’s also the matter of the League of Nations Mandate, which explicitly recognized the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land and called for encouraging dense Jewish settlement there. Those provisions have never been formally repealed. Israel’s position is that the 1949 Green Line was an armistice line, not an internationally binding border, and that the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits transferring a population into occupied territory, doesn’t apply here because the territory was never under a legitimate sovereign from whom it was taken.
These arguments can be debated at length, and they are, by serious legal scholars on both sides of this. The point is that the people who live in Judea and Samaria are not simply squatters defying obvious international law. They are living in territory whose status is genuinely contested, in a region whose history did not begin in 1967.
With that on the table, here’s what’s actually happening there right now, on the ground, to Israeli civilians. Because this part seems to be omitted from mainstream conversations.
I believe in fairness, balance, and truth-telling. When it comes to Israel and Gaza, nothing on MSM is any of those.
So while eyeballs are locked on what Israelis are doing in Judea and Samaria, there is a parallel story that almost never makes a single front page. And that’s not fair, balanced, or truthful.
For years, Palestinians in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria have been conducting a sustained, organized, and increasingly sophisticated terror campaign against Israeli civilians in the area. The total silence around it is pretty loud, wouldn’t you agree?
Here are the numbers, directly from Israel’s Shin Bet security agency.
In 2023, the Shin Bet recorded 3,436 Palestinian terror incidents in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Forty-one Israelis were killed.
In 2024, that number nearly doubled to 6,828 total incidents.
The breakdown, cross-checked against official security data by Rescuers Without Borders, tells you exactly what those incidents look like:
3,668 instances of rock-throwing
843 Molotov cocktail attacks
671 attempts to blind drivers with laser pointers
526 explosive charges
364 arson attacks
179 shootings
37 stabbings
19 car-rammings
27 Israelis murdered. More than 300 wounded. These weren’t provocations or protests. These are targeted attacks on civilians going about their daily lives.
In 2025, successful attacks dropped to 57, with 20 Israeli fatalities. That drop is being reported as though the threat diminished. It didn’t.
Attempted attacks actually rose to 1,374 in 2025. What dropped was the number that got through, because Israel’s security forces stopped them.
The Shin Bet thwarted 1,040 major attacks in 2024 alone. That includes 689 planned shootings, 326 explosive device plots, car-rammings, stabbings, and two planned suicide bombings.
A stopped attack produces nothing visible. No bodies, images, footage, international emergency sessions, and absolutely zero statements from world leaders.
The 1,040 attacks that were prevented in 2024 generated almost no coverage outside Israeli media. The ones that weren’t prevented did.
That gap between what happens and what gets reported, that’s where this wild distortion of reality lives.
This might come as a surprise, but all this violence has a state sponsor.
Iran has been smuggling weapons into the West Bank through Jordan, recruiting Palestinians for terror operations, and funding the armed infrastructure of groups like the Jenin Battalion, affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The Shin Bet recorded a 400% rise in Iranian espionage arrests in 2024. 13 Iranian plots were foiled that year alone.
When Israel launched Operation Iron Wall in January 2025, targeting the Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps, they uncovered weapons manufacturing sites, explosives labs, underground tunnel systems, and Hamas networks with active plans for coordinated attacks across Judea and Samaria and into Israel proper.
More than 100 terror operatives were killed, 320 wanted suspects arrested, and 450 weapons seized in the northern West Bank alone.
This wasn’t a military operation targeting a civilian population. It was targeting an armed infrastructure that had been deliberately embedded in a civilian population. Which happens to be a war crime under international law, committed by the people who built it there: Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Iran.
Since October 7, 2023, through early February 2026, 62 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks or armed clashes within Judea and Samaria and inside Israel.
That number comes directly from the UN human rights office’s own records, not Israeli government figures. Sixty-two people, and not a single UN emergency session. It hasn’t produced international sanctions or international condemnations. It hasn’t even trended on social media.
Compare that to the coverage generated by Israeli military actions in the same territory over the same period. Why the double standard?
The Israeli civilians driving to work through Gush Etzion, dropping their kids at school near Ariel, stopping at the junction near Nablus, are moving through a territory where more than a thousand attacks were planned against them in a single year. Most of those people will never know how many times something was stopped before it reached them.
That invisibility is by design, on the part of those who want the world to see only one side of what’s happening there. And the media ecosystem that has decided which casualties are worth covering and which are not is fully complicit in that.
The fact that Israeli casualties don’t get a second of coverage makes it obvious who’s actually driving this conversation. The question worth asking is why.
Because here’s what gets lost when only one side of this story gets told. Terror attacks, whether carried out by Palestinians against Israelis or by Israeli extremists against Palestinians, don’t just kill and injure people. They kill the possibility of anything better. Every attack hardens what each side believes about the other. Every attack that goes unacknowledged by the world hardens it further.
The cycle of violence feeds on exactly this…the sense that your dead count and theirs don’t, or theirs count and yours don’t. That asymmetry doesn’t move anyone toward peace. It moves everyone toward the next attack.
Honest accounting isn’t just a journalistic standard. It’s the only foundation on which any real dialogue between these two peoples could ever be built. You can’t get to good neighborly relations by deciding in advance whose suffering matters. You get there, if you ever get there, by refusing to look away from any of it.