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Did Ben Gvir hand out machine guns to West Bank settlers?

“Ben Gvir authorized the release of larger numbers of high-caliber firearms. So virtually all the adults in the West Bank would have qualified for a kind of machine gun.”

The volume is real and the criticism of it is real. Ben Gvir loosened the eligibility criteria and compressed the process, and announced 100,000 new licences by March 2024 against a pre-2023 rate of roughly 8,000 a year. Haaretz put the figure at 157,000 by April 2025 in an investigation titled “Gun Uncontrolled,” which documented licences issued through a remote screening process and then barely tracked afterwards. By March 2026 Ben Gvir was claiming more than 240,000.

That is a genuine story about a minister flooding a country with legal firearms and losing count of them. It is not the story told in Channel 5’s “Occupied Palestine,” which is that machine guns were distributed to West Bank settlers as a militia arming programme.

Three errors in one sentence

Section titled “Three errors in one sentence”

“A kind of machine gun.” Israeli civilian licences cover handguns. Automatic weapons are not privately licensed to civilians in Israel. The long guns visible on settlers in West Bank footage are, in the main, M16 or Tavor rifles issued by the army to the kitat konenut, the standby squad each settlement maintains under IDF authority, whose members are called up, registered and answerable to a military chain of command. Whether those squads are adequately supervised is a fair question. It has nothing to do with the licensing ministry.

“Virtually all the adults in the West Bank.” Read literally, that includes the roughly three million Palestinians living there, who cannot obtain an Israeli firearms licence under any government. Read as intended, it means Israeli residents of settlements, who are a fraction of the licence pool. The expansion ran to Tel Aviv and Beersheba and Haifa, in a country where the number of armed civilians in a shopping centre is a live policy question because of what happened on 7 October 2023.

“No such attack would ever occur.” The narration says the West Bank threat Ben Gvir cited never materialised. In 2024 alone the Shin Bet reported 1,040 major attacks thwarted in the West Bank and Jerusalem and 231 significant attacks carried out. Attacks that killed Israelis in the period include the al-Funduq shooting of 6 January 2025, in which gunmen fired on a bus and two cars and killed three people, and the Gush Etzion Junction attack of 10 July 2025, in which two men stabbed a security guard and used his weapon on shoppers.

Israel’s own courts moved first

Section titled “Israel’s own courts moved first”

The strongest evidence against the militia-arming picture is where the pushback came from. Israeli petitioners took the licensing surge to court, and an Israeli court ordered Ben Gvir to re-examine licences issued after 7 October 2023. The most damaging investigative reporting on the programme, the one this page cites for its numbers, ran in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, in Hebrew and English, naming the minister.

A state that is arming a settler militia does not have its own supreme court telling the minister to go back through the files, and does not have its largest liberal daily running the audit that supplies the numbers his critics abroad then use.

They had an argument that was working, and traded it for one that collapses

Section titled “They had an argument that was working, and traded it for one that collapses”

A minister with a criminal record for incitement and for supporting a banned organisation was handed the police portfolio and the firearms authority, and issued a quarter of a million permits at speed while the oversight system fell behind. Israeli commentators, Israeli police officials and Israeli courts have all said exactly that, on the record, in Hebrew, and they have been winning the argument.

“Machine guns for settlers” throws that away. It collapses the second anybody looks up what an Israeli licence actually permits, and it takes the real complaint down with it, because a listener who catches you on the weapon type is not going to sit through the part about oversight. The version Israelis are making can change the policy. The version in the documentary can only travel.

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Sources

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