U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s office on Tuesday dismissed as “completely false” reports that he raised concerns about anti-Palestinian violence in Judea and Samaria during talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The vice president’s discussions over the last week with the prime minister have been solely focused on Operation Epic Fury,” the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, tweeted Vance’s press secretary, Taylor Van Kirk.
“The subject of this article was not even discussed,” she added.
Van Kirk’s X post was referring to an Israel Hayom article claiming that “the tone escalated” after Vance raised recent incidents of anti-Arab riots in Judea and Samaria during a phone call with Netanyahu.
Israel Defense Forces Central Command head Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth during a meeting with Judea and Samaria mayors on Tuesday “commended the involvement of municipal leaders in preventing incidents of nationalist crime” in the wake of reported attacks targeting Palestinians, according to a military statement.
Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter told Ynet on Wednesday that “there are 600,000 people [in Judea and Samaria] who respect the law, respect their neighbors and wake up every morning wanting only to do good.”
“There is a small group of a few hundred guys who have fallen through the cracks, who are tarnishing an entire enterprise,” he said.
Leiter said neither the White House nor the Jewish state’s allies on Capitol Hill had criticized the matter, and denied the report that Vance raised the issue in his two phone calls with Netanyahu.
However, he said, “there are people in Washington who are definitely distancing themselves from Israel because of this.”
Leiter noted Netanyahu “banged on the table” during several meetings over the issue, including one held at Israel Defense Forces Central Command headquarters in Jerusalem on Friday, and demanded broad action.
“The very fact that, in the middle of a war, he comes to Central Command to discuss this shows he takes it very seriously,” said Leiter.
The IDF reported earlier this year 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, 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,” he said.
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 last 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.
