The Biden administration issued an executive order against Israeli settlers who have been attacking Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, sources said Thursday.
Biden has spoken out against retaliatory attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel. The president has pledged that those responsible for the violence will be held accountable.
Biden's order establishes a system for imposing financial sanctions and visa restrictions against individuals who are found to have attacked or intimidated Palestinians or seized their property, two senior Biden administration officials told reporters.
United Nations figures show that daily settler attacks have more than doubled in the nearly four months since the Hamas attack and Israel's relentless attacks on the Gaza Strip.
The order freezes any U.S. assets of those targeted and generally bars Americans from dealing with them. The State Department on Thursday also planned to announce the first four individuals hit by the order, the officials said.
Biden and other senior U.S. officials have warned repeatedly that Israel must act to stop violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.
"These actions pose a grave threat to peace, security, stability in the West Bank, Israel and the Middle East region, and they also obstruct the realization of ultimately an independent Palestinian state existing side by side with the state of Israel," one of the senior officials said.
Biden has raised the issue directly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the official said, as Biden seeks a path to a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians once the Gaza conflict ends.
The West Bank, among the territories where Palestinians seek statehood along with Gaza, has experienced a surge of violence in recent months amid expanding Jewish settlements and a nearly decade-old impasse in U.S.-sponsored peacemaking.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the far-right pro-settlement party Religious Zionism, was defiant in a statement on the Biden order, audaciously pulling the anti-Semitism card:
"The 'settler violence' campaign is an antisemitic lie that enemies of Israel disseminate with the goal of smearing the pioneering settlers and settlement enterprise, and to harm them and thus smear the entire State of Israel," Smotrich said.
In December, the United States began imposing visa bans on people involved in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Attacks by Israeli settlers have intensified since the war started, and some Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian authorities. Rights groups say settlers have torched cars and attacked several small Bedouin communities, forcing evacuations to other areas.
The international community, including Israel’s closest ally, the United States, considers settlements illegal and opposes construction on occupied territories claimed by the Palestinians for a future independent state.
Israel evacuated the four settlements and unilaterally pulled out of Gaza under the 2005 legislation. The prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, argued that Israel would not be able to keep the settlements under a future agreement with the Palestinians.
Since then, Israeli citizens have been officially banned from returning to those locations, though the Israeli military has allowed activists to visit and pray there – a ban that has now been revoked.
Netanyahu’s government has put settlement expansion at the top of its agenda and has already advanced thousands of new settlement housing units and retroactively authorized nine wildcat outposts in the West Bank.
The Palestinians seek the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an independent state, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel has occupied those territories since the 1967 war.