Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi told JNS this week that the taxpayer-funded Kan News should not refer to Judea and Samaria as the “West Bank” in media reports.
“One would expect a channel funded by the Jewish state to recognize that the entire West Bank belongs to the people of Israel, that Judea and Samaria are the land of our forefathers,” Karhi, a lawmaker for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, told JNS.
“But frankly, I expect little else from an editor who turns Makan 33 into a platform for anti-Israel broadcasts,” the minister added, in reference to Kan‘s Arabic-language channel, which came under fire some four years ago for ridiculing normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
Karhi’s comments referred to a Jan. 19 Kan News article about Religious Zionism Party lawmaker Zvi Sukkot’s visit to a Palestinian factory in the Jericho area that was causing severe air pollution in the Jordan Valley.
The headline initially read, “Zvi Sukkot Visited a Factory in the West Bank. IDF: ‘The Visit Was Not Coordinated With Us.’” The text of the article likewise claimed that the lawmaker had toured the “West Bank.”
Both references were later changed to read “Judea and Samaria.”
JNS reached out to the broadcaster’s spokesperson for comment on Thursday but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
On Jan. 5, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich expressed support for renaming the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) office to the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea and Samaria.
“An interesting idea—I’ll talk to him,” Smotrich said, responding to JNS’s question about Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan’s appeal to Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz to formally change the body’s name.
Israel has controlled Judea and Samaria since liberating it from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, and the Jewish population in the region has since grown to over 500,000, amounting to over 5% of the Jewish state’s total.
Nearly 70% of Israeli citizens want Jerusalem to extend full legal sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, according to a 2025 survey.
Fifty-eight percent of Israeli Jews believe that communities in Judea and Samaria contribute to the security of the country, according to a survey the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) published in March 2025.
