Six countries acting in tandem announced a range of sanctions against extremist violent settlers and organizations in the West Bank on Tuesday in response to “the deteriorating situation in the West Bank”.
A joint statement by the foreign ministers of the UK, France, Norway, Canada, and Australia promised to “hold extremist settlers accountable for the horrific levels of settler violence against Palestinian civilians.” New Zealand also took similar action without signing the statement.
The move represents the sharpest coordinated Western response yet to settlement expansion. However, it also exposes a gap that runs through all six countries’ positions: sanctions on named individuals and organisations sit alongside guidance, warnings, and moral appeals to businesses, without the trade bans or legal prohibitions that critics describe as the only measures with teeth.
The foreign ministers stated that violent settlers have long operated with “near impunity,” backed by “the support and facilitation of the Government of Israel,” in some cases acting “under the protection of Israel’s security forces.” They called on Israel to investigate every attack, move against the outposts enabling violence, and “stop the incitement of violence.”
The UK targeted a range of organizations and individuals. These include the Farms Association, which provides financial and organizational support to Israeli settler farms and outposts in the West Bank; Ahavat Gilad, which serves as the Farms Association’s financial conduit; Artzenu, which promotes, finances and resources settler farms and outposts associated with violence against Palestinians; and Shivat Zion, the financial arm of Artzenu.
Also sanctioned by the UK were individual fundraiser Ari Yshag, construction company Eyal Hari Yehuda, and its owner Itamar Yehuda Levi, the last two for being “hired on construction and demolition jobs in the West Bank to destroy Palestinian land and property, as well as physically attack, shoot and kill Palestinians, which has led to the wider displacement of Palestinians.”
France placed sanctions on four settler leaders and 21 individuals, as well as banning Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from entering its territory. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Smotrich “actively promotes the annexation of the West Bank, which he openly claims, the creation of new settlements in the West Bank, the re-colonization of Gaza, the economic collapse of the Palestinian Authority and its harmful consequences for the Palestinian population.”
The move against the Israeli minister follows the May banning of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for his treatment of detained activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla.
UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said Tuesday in the House of Commons that “British citizens and businesses should not conduct any economic or financial activities in illegal Israeli settlements.” She also instigated an “investigation into evidence of UK charities having links to illegal settlements.”
During the parliamentary debate, MPs pressed the government on what enforcement, if any, backs its updated guidance telling British citizens not to conduct economic activity in illegal settlements.
In particular, MPs referred to the Great Israeli Real Estate Event in London this weekend. As Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson Calum Miller put it, “Properties in illegal settlements in Gush Etzion are being marketed alongside properties in Israeli cities. This is Palestinian land being advertised, bartered and sold on the streets of our capital.”
In response, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper did not announce a ban or new enforcement powers, instead stating that businesses “have a moral responsibility not to support the illegal settlements.” The invocation of moral responsibility rather than legal obligation was itself a concession: no mechanism currently exists to compel them.
Similar sanctions against extremist and violent settlers were introduced by Australia and New Zealand last week. Norway banned “20 violent settlers” from the country, while Canada imposed a fifth round of sanctions on “facilitators of extremist settler violence against Palestinian civilians in West Bank.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry responded to these actions, saying “Israel firmly rejects the disgraceful measures adopted by foreign governments against Israeli citizens, entities, and a government minister.”
The sanctions come as findings by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry frame settler violence in the West Bank not as isolated attacks, but as part of a broader, systematic project. Settler violence, the report says, “functions as a means of implementing Israeli State policy,” with the state and violent settler groups “working towards the same strategic objectives: entrenchment of Israeli settlements, annexation of Palestinian territory, and displacement of Palestinians from their land.”
The commission said the violence is structured to terrorize families and force them off their land, through the destruction of crops, attacks on people in transit, and threats, including sexual abuse, that make daily life untenable, especially for women and children.
The figures point to a sharp escalation. In 2025 alone, at least seven Palestinians were killed and 832 injured by settlers, marking a 133% increase in killings and a 130% increase in injuries compared with 2024.
But the numbers capture only part of what the report documents: organized, masked groups attacking Palestinian villages and farmland, often with Israeli soldiers present; the army recasting settler-initiated assaults as Palestinian attacks, with soldiers opening fire on that basis. The report describes this as “a de facto collapse of the distinction between settlers and soldiers.”
The report also characterized state involvement as active, rather than merely permissive. Israeli ministers, it found, explicitly “permitted or condoned settler violence as an instrument to achieve a broader agenda,” while government funding went to farms and outposts linked to attacks.
Through the expulsion of at least 59 shepherding communities between October 2023 and March 2026, and cases involving the abduction and abuse of Palestinian children, including a 12-year-old girl and her 3-year-old brother who were dragged at knifepoint and tied to an olive tree, the commission says the violence amounts to a sustained campaign of “forcible transfer.”
Against this backdrop, the coordinated sanctions announced Tuesday target seven named entities and a handful of individuals. They are, by the UK governments’ own admission, a beginning; one that stops well short of the trade bans, arms embargoes, or legal prohibitions that would match the scale of what the commission describes.
The question hanging over every carefully worded joint statement is the same one British MP Emily Thornberry put to her government in Parliament: if the settlements are illegal, why is the response still voluntary?
