Israel is allocating tens of millions of shekels to a newly-created “Hills Administration” that will seek to combat anti-Arab violence in Judea and Samaria by some 300 Jewish rioters, Ynet reported on Sunday.
The initiative, which is being promoted by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and was first reported in November, calls for the creation of a new unit within the Israeli Defense Ministry to coordinate a response for at-risk youth.
Under the plan, the Defense Ministry would receive two million shekels (about $500,000) annually through 2028 to fund the new unit, in addition to six million shekels ($1.6 million) for programs focused on pre-military preparation and encouraging military enlistment among at-risk youth.
The Israeli Education Ministry will run a dedicated youth program with a budget of approximately 36 million shekels ($10 million), alongside increased funding for social workers and initiatives to halt violence, totaling more than 20 million shekels ($5 million), Ynet reported.
Meanwhile, Israel’s National Security Ministry will allocate five million shekels a year ($1.4 million) through 2028 to bolster policing involving the youth, while the Ministry of Settlement and National Missions will establish a national center by the name of “The Next Generation.”
The Labor Ministry will allocate some 50 million shekels ($14 million) until 2028 for vocational training and professional development tools.
The Israel Defense Forces reported last month that in 2025, around 870 anti-Arab hate crimes were recorded across Judea and Samaria, a 27% increase from 2024. Of these, about 120 were classified as severe.
In response, the military said it established a task force in May, bringing together the IDF, Israel Police, and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) to investigate and prosecute incidents of Jewish nationalist violence.
Speaking with Fox News late December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected any “false symmetry” between Arab terror and rare “vigilantism” of a small group of Jewish teenagers “from broken homes.
“They do things like chopping olive trees and sometimes they try to burn a home—I can’t accept that; that’s vigilantism,” continued the premier.
“But they put a false symmetry between these teenagers and over a thousand terrorist attacks against the settlers: families, mothers on the roads there with their children—boom, they’re attacked, they’re slain.”
However, Netanyahu said, “even if it’s not symmetrical, I want peaceful coexistence between the Israelis and the Palestinians who live in Judea and Samaria, which is part of our ancestral homeland.”
Palestinian terrorists targeted Israeli Jews in Judea and Samaria at least 5,051 times in 2025, according to figures published by the Rescuers Without Borders (Hatzalah Judea and Samaria) NGO this month.
Twenty-four Israelis were murdered in Judea and Samaria in 2025, and more than 400 others were wounded, the NGO said in its annual report.
The data, which were cross-checked against official data from the Jewish state’s security agencies, included 3,299 instances of rock-throwing, 458 attacks with Molotov cocktails, 655 attempts to blind drivers with laser pointers, 286 explosive charges and 19 terrorist shooting assaults.
