Huckabee warns settler violence damaging Israel’s global standing as attacks mount

His warnings come as Israeli authorities confront evidence that extremist violence has become more frequent.

By Gabriel Ostrovsky, The Algemeiner

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee warned Friday that violence by a small fringe of Jewish extremists in Judea and Samaria is increasingly damaging Israel’s reputation abroad, renewing unusually sharp criticism from one of the Jewish state’s staunchest American supporters.

“It’s not just damaging the reputation of all of the people—of the Israelis who legally, safely, and quite frankly, very responsibly live in Judea and Samaria—but it’s really damaging the image of Israel as a nation and a people,” Huckabee told Israel’s Kan public broadcaster.

“And I find that unfortunate because right now, Israel needs to have all the friends it can get,” he added. “It doesn’t need any more enemies. And the actions of a tiny minority can stain the reputation of people that deserve to be respected and appreciated.”

Huckabee, a longtime defender of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, simultaneously defended Israel’s right to build in Area C of the West Bank under the Oslo Accords and stressed that the perpetrators constitute only a tiny fraction of roughly half a million Israelis living there.

“Violence is violence. It doesn’t matter who does it—it should be condemned,” Huckabee told The Jerusalem Post in a separate interview published Thursday.

The comments represent his latest warning over a problem that has drawn growing alarm from Israeli military officials, conservative commentators, and other prominent supporters of Israel.

Last month, Huckabee branded extremists preventing Palestinian families from reaching their homes in the village of Qusra as “Israeli terrorists,” an extraordinary description from an ambassador who has long rejected efforts to portray Jewish settlement in the territory itself as illegitimate.

Since then, the ambassador has become a particular target of the extremists he condemned.

Graffiti reading “Regards to Huckabee from the terrorists” was sprayed beside a mosque reportedly torched this week in the Palestinian village of Bizzariya.

Huckabee responded that it was “truly sad that someone would take pride in being a terrorist,” while again emphasizing that the perpetrators did not represent the overwhelming majority of Israelis in Judea and Samaria.

His warnings come as Israeli authorities confront evidence that extremist violence has become more frequent.

Shin Bet data reported by The Algemeiner last month showed Jewish extremists carried out 660 attacks against Palestinians during the first half of 2026, compared with 440 during the same period in 2025—an increase of 50 percent.

Many of the attacks have involved Judea and Samaria settlers physically assaulting Palestinians—including elderly women and children—along with torching Palestinian homes, vehicles, and mosques. The figures also recorded 45 attacks against Israeli security forces.

The violence remains smaller in scale than Palestinian terrorism targeting Israelis, but senior Israeli security officials have increasingly warned that it nevertheless constitutes a distinct threat to Israeli security and the settlement enterprise itself.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir has called attacks on Palestinians and Israeli soldiers “morally and ethically unacceptable” and warned that they cause “extraordinary strategic damage.”

Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, head of the IDF Central Command and himself a resident of a settlement, has described extremist violence as “organized and systematic” and said it undermines Israel’s security.

In March, the IDF was forced to redirect an infantry battalion earmarked for operations against Hezbollah to Judea and Samaria amid unrest there.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last weekend likewise condemned what he described as a “handful of rioters,” saying their criminal behavior did an injustice to the broader “law-abiding settler public.”

Israeli authorities have also stepped up arrests in recent days.

Police detained eight Israelis on Monday over suspected arson and assaults against Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills, followed by several additional arrests this week, including a 19-year-old suspected of participating in the Qusra attack and an IDF conscript suspected of involvement in extremist violence.