A shooting in broad daylight last month on a dry, rocky hillside in the West Bank barely registered in the Israeli press and has not led to legal consequences. But it might signal the opening of yet another front in the cascading wars unleashed by the October 7, 2023, attacks.Jewish settlers from Carmel, an outpost that is illegal under Israeli law, approached the nearby Palestinian Bedouin village of Umm al-Khair in a large construction digger and began to damage an olive grove, residents of the village told me when I recently visited.When residents tried to stop them, some by throwing rocks, Yinon Levi, a settler who runs a demolition business that contracts with the Israel Defense Forces, fired several rounds from a handgun, killing the 31-year-old activist Odeh Hathalin.I spent the past week traveling across Israel and the West Bank, meeting with officials from the Israeli government, military, and opposition, as well as Palestinian political leaders and activists. I left believing that Israel is closer to triggering a second war with West Bank Palestinians than it is to ending the disastrous conflict in Gaza.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could have emerged from the depths of October 7—when he told President Joe Biden that “in the Middle East, if you’re seen as weak, you’re roadkill”—in some triumph, having vanquished virtually all of Israel’s enemies, culminating with the recent bombing of Iran. But he failed to seize the opportunity to stop the fighting in Gaza.Instead, nearly two years into a war they did not choose, Israeli officials still have not found, and may not even be genuinely seeking, a way out. They have set requirements for ending the war that they do not seem able to achieve on the battlefield, at least at anything close to an acceptable cost both to their own military and society and to innocent Palestinians.Although Israel may finally be close to a third temporary cease-fire that would allow some of the hostages to come home—a very welcome development—even that might not end the war. When the last cease-fire collapsed, in March, officials made a disastrous strategic and moral mistake by letting more than two months pass with no food entering Gaza, leaving hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation. That choice has so horrified the rest of the world that a half dozen countries, with few other options to demonstrate their outrage, have declared their intent to recognize a Palestinian state.And today, the UN-backed body that monitors food insecurity declared, for the first time since the conflict began, that there is a famine in the district around Gaza City that is “entirely man made.” Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a response accusing the report of being based on “Hamas lies,” and of lowering its usual thresholds for such a declaration.For now, instead of freeing all of the 20 or so Israeli hostages believed to still be alive, withdrawing the IDF to the perimeter of the Gaza Strip, enabling a surge of humanitarian assistance to people in need, and reserving the right to target what’s left of Hamas’s leadership later—Israeli officials are betting that expanding the war will lead Hamas to capitulate or collapse.But it is unclear how another round of fighting would accomplish what 22 months of intense combat has not. And with the world’s attention focused on Gaza, the situation in the West Bank is sliding toward another crisis.A majority of Israelis now say they want to end the Gaza war and bring the hostages home, even if Hamas remains armed and its leaders able to exert control over the Strip. The more than 100,000 demonstrators who pack Habima Square and Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on Saturday nights have shifted their focus to demanding a full and immediate cease-fire.Having once recoiled at U.S. pressure, many Israelis now openly court it. On a recent evening, hundreds wore MAGA-style red hats, aimed at getting the attention of the Trump administration, that read End This Fuc*!ng War.And it’s not just the activists. Last week, more than 600 former Israeli security officials, including the heads of many top spy and military agencies, wrote President Donald Trump a letter asking him to intervene against their own government and declaring that “it is our professional judgment that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel.”After October 7, the Biden administration was right to embrace Israel in the wake of the worst day in its history, and to support what I consider to have been a just war against the Hamas terrorists who were responsible. But I also believe that we did far too little, far too late to limit the truly catastrophic civilian harm that Israel’s response inflicted and, after Israel’s core military objectives had been achieved, try to end the war.Waiting for an intervention from Trump—who has reversed what modest pressure Biden placed on Israel and offered virtually unqualified support for its actions in Gaza—feels futile; after Israel’s cabinet voted earlier this month to expand the war into Gaza City, he said that the decision is “pretty up to Israel.”Although it remains true that Hamas is responsible for starting this phase of the conflict by murdering more than 1,000 Israelis and that the group could end the war tomorrow by releasing the hostages and disarming itself, that, too, seems highly unlikely. Fairly or not, that puts the ball back in Israel’s court.Earlier this month, I spoke with Shachar Shnorman, a kibbutznik who had returned home to Kfar Aza, where at least 62 residents were murdered on October 7, as he recounted the sounds of his neighbors being shot dead and the smell of the cigarette smoke from Hamas fighters seated on his porch as he hid a few feet away, on the other side of a shaded window.He wants the war to end, he said. While we talked, drones buzzed overhead, and every 10 minutes or so, a new explosion could be heard coming from Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, the black plumes of smoke rising a couple of miles away.Before the attack, Kfar Aza was known as a left-leaning commune. But Schnorman told me that most of his neighbors have not returned home, and many have “moved to the right.”Despite an Israeli military assessment that Hamas’s capacity as an organized force is more than 90 percent degraded, Israeli officials for now seem determined to hold out for total victory.They often invoke the full surrenders of Germany and Japan, arguing that stopping now would hand Hamas an undeserved victory and that international pressure to do so only hardens Hamas’s negotiating position. “There is a little devil sitting on every Israeli’s shoulder saying that all the Palestinians basically love Hamas, and the whole world basically hates the Jews,” one centrist political adviser told me.Israeli officials argue that Hamas must be disarmed and removed from power, pointing to the thousands of remaining Hamas fighters. (One Israeli official said Hamas still has as many as 20,000, a staggering number given that estimates before the war ranged up to 30,000.) Although Israel agreed to a cease-fire in Lebanon last year that was widely celebrated, even though it left Hezbollah in place, Israeli officials insist that the situations are distinct. “If Hezbollah had done October 7, the IDF would be in Beirut to this day,” one told me.[Gershom Gorenberg: The two extremists driving Israel’s policy]All of which leads to speculation here about why Israel won’t stop. Most Israelis believe that the war continues less because of Gaza than the preservation of Netanyahu’s fragile governing coalition.At least two ministers have threatened to pull the support of their parties and trigger elections if a cease-fire is reached, arguing instead for returning Jewish settlers to the Strip for the first time since Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005.The only real deadline will come in October 2026, before which elections must be held, because the government’s mandate expires.“The strategy in Gaza is ongoing war. The war is the strategy,” former Air Force General Nimrod Sheffer, who has joined a prominent opposition party, told me. “That serves Bibi. It may serve the coalition. It doesn’t serve anyone else.”Mahmoud Sleem / Anadolu / GettyAn aerial view of the destruction, taken after the ceasefire agreement came into effect in the Gaza Strip on January 21, 2025.Meanwhile, with far less international scrutiny, Israel has launched a campaign across the West Bank that risks igniting a second front that is far closer to Israeli population centers and much harder to contain.After the end of the Second Intifada, in 2005, the West Bank experienced a period of relative calm compared with Gaza, where Israel has waged five wars since the IDF withdrew from the territory that same year, forcibly evicting thousands of Jewish settlers who lived there. Immediately after October 7, the IDF began a counterterrorism crackdown in the West Bank that has so far kept a lid on attacks against Israelis while claiming the lives of nearly 1,000 Palestinians fighters and civilians.The scale of the Israeli operation in the West Bank is massive, even if dwarfed by the scale of the conflict in Gaza. At the start of this year, an assault dubbed the “Iron Wall” in three northern West Bank refugee camps displaced 40,000 people, the largest number since Israel first occupied the territory in 1967. One security official who had visited the camps—which, despite that label, look more like cities—showed me photos of entire blocks reduced to rubble, describing it as a “Nagasaki-like” level of destruction.Violence against Palestinians by Jewish settlers—the roughly 500,000 Israeli civilians who live in the West Bank, beyond Israel’s internationally recognized border—has increased dramatically, from fewer than 90 incidents a month at the start of this year to more than 200, according to the same official. Fatal attacks, which were once exceedingly rare, are becoming regular occurrences.President Biden, in whose administration I served as deputy national security adviser, repeatedly warned Netanyahu about settler violence, sometimes publicly, and became the first U.S. president to impose sanctions on violent Israeli settlers and the organizations that support them. Upon taking office, Trump immediately removed all of the sanctions and has said virtually nothing about the West Bank since.Although only a small minority of settlers commit violence, they are the vanguard of a religious and political movement that claims all of the West Bank as Israel’s birthright and that has navigated in recent years from the Israeli fringe to the mainstream. Few violent settlers are stopped before attacks are carried out. Fewer still face any real accountability after attacks occur.Netanyahu has at times expressed concern over settlers’ conduct, but members of his own cabinet provide settlers with political cover—particularly National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom have been accused (and Ben-Gvir convicted) of crimes tied to their efforts to preserve and expand Israel’s occupation.On a broiling recent afternoon in the South Hebron Hills, the family and neighbors of Odeh Hathalin, the Palestinian man killed last month, sat under a tarp beside a dried puddle of his blood on a concrete floor. They had been waiting for more than a week to receive his body from the IDF so they could hold a proper burial. Some had begun a hunger strike. A day later, his body was finally returned.Umm al-Khair has long been targeted because many of its structures were built without official permits—which the Israeli government, which controls the permitting process, virtually never issues.Just last year, Hathalin, who was featured in the recent Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” wrote about an IDF operation that destroyed homes.Videos of the more recent attack, including one taken by Hathalin himself, were quickly posted online. Levi, the settler accused of the killing, had been sanctioned by Biden and exonerated by Trump. But after briefly being placed under house arrest, he is reportedly now free.At least two American citizens are among those killed in a spate of attacks over the past month, and five since October 7.The security official described one of the killings to me, in which armed settlers rounded up residents in the village of Sinjil, fired in the air to disperse the crowd, and then chased down Saifullah Musallet, a 20-year-old from Tampa who was visiting relatives, and beat him to death. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called it a “criminal and terrorist act,” using unusually (and admirably) strong language, but neither the U.S. nor Israel have held his killers accountable.When I asked both Israeli officials and settler leaders about the increase in settler violence, they were largely dismissive.“There is not settler violence; there is settler vandalism,” one prominent settler leader said, before launching into a long explanation of the threats settlers face from the more than 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank.Another settler leader attributed reports of violence to the acts of “disadvantaged youths” who come to the West Bank from Israel.Smotrich has taken the damaging step of regularly refusing to transfer to the Palestinian Authority customs revenues that Israel collects on goods entering the West Bank, to which Israel has no legitimate claim. During the Biden administration, Smotrich regularly sought to leverage the funds for policy concessions from Netanyahu or even from the U.S.As a result, the PA, which administers about 40 percent of the West Bank under a deal reached with Israel in the 1990s, has, since April, been unable to pay salaries for many of its security forces, which work closely with the IDF despite strong disapproval from most West Bank residents.Crime has surged across the West Bank since October 7, leading to frustration among residents and renewing long-standing concern that the PA, widely believed to be corrupt and out of touch, could collapse.Many Israeli officials talk of the PA, which for all its flaws is committed to nonviolence and recognition of Israel, as if it is no different than Hamas. “As far as I’m concerned, let the PA collapse,” Smotrich has said. “It is an enemy.” Another Israeli official described the PA as “poisonous,” pointing to charges that its school curricula incite hatred of Jews.Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior PA official, said he has invited Israeli and U.S. officials to review new textbooks and the implementation of other long-demanded reforms, such as an end to the “pay for slay” program, through which the PA subsidizes families of terrorists imprisoned by Israel.For his part, Ben-Gvir last month established what the Israeli press has called a “quasi-police force” in the West Bank, comprising settler volunteers.Tellingly, a security official said, by far the quietest period for settler violence since October 7 was the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, when Israel imposed a severe lockdown on the West Bank. That provides at least some evidence that the state, which did not want distractions during that time, can exercise more control when it chooses to.Driving around the West Bank these days can feel like watching a crime scene unfold in plain sight. Settlers fence off land that isn’t theirs, raise Israeli flags, plow and plant fields. Not long ago, such acts involved a cat-and-mouse game with the army, which would thwart them if it could. No longer.More than 80 Palestinian West Bank communities have been emptied entirely since October 7, replaced by more than 100 Israeli outposts, makeshift settlements that are illegal even under Israel law.“I’ve worked in the West Bank for 23 years, and we’ve never had anything like this,” Dror Etkes, a longtime Israeli analyst and peace activist, told me. Riding across the northern West Bank in his beaten-up Jeep, he pointed out to me days-old construction or cultivation. “It is a totally different world.”He and others who pay close attention to events in the West Bank believe that the territory is a tinderbox. “You have no idea how many guns there are in the West Bank,” one Palestinian official said. “We are lucky things haven’t gotten crazier.”There is no shortage of candidates that could ignite a broader conflict.Settlers are placing relentless pressure on the northern West Bank community of Duma, home to nearly 3,000 residents and the site of an infamous 2015 arson attack that killed an 18-month-old boy and both of his parents. When I drove past Duma, I could see that it is also a strategically located bulwark, preventing a string of settlements that expand west to east from completely bisecting the northern West Bank. A few days later, a settler who was on short-term leave from his IDF unit shot dead a Duma resident named Thameen Dawabsheh, 35, during a clash in which two settlers were lightly wounded.But perhaps the most likely flashpoint is Jerusalem, the city holy to three faiths that is incendiary in the best of times.The day after I arrived in Israel, on the Jewish holiday of Tisha b’Av, Ben-Gvir escorted more than 3,000 Jewish worshippers to pray in the most sensitive part of the Old City, on what Jews call the Temple Mount and Palestinians call the Haram al-Sharif.It is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which dates to the eighth century. It was previously the site of the First Temple and of the Second, whose destruction almost 2,000 years ago Tisha b’Av commemorates.Ben-Gvir’s visit would, until recently, have been unthinkable.For hundreds of years, prayer by Jews at the site has been exceedingly rare, proscribed both by many rabbis concerned about the sanctity of the site and, more recently, by an Israeli policy called the “status quo,” which allows Jews access to the site but only Muslims the right to pray there. Established by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan after Israel occupied all of the Old City in 1967, the policy is aimed at preserving order.Tamir Kalifa / GettyA demonstrator holds a photo of Palestinian activist Odeh Hathalin during a protest over his death, on August 3, 2025 in Tel Aviv, Israel.In 2000, a short visit to the site by then–opposition leader Ariel Sharon, who was given a tour by an archaeologist, triggered the yearslong Second Palestinian Intifada, which brought mass-casualty suicide attacks to Israeli cities. After that, even rare and furtive attempts by Jews to pray there—sometimes by feigning conversation with a fellow visitor or speaking into their phone—were generally halted by authorities, and were major news.Ben-Gvir’s visit received sparse coverage in the Israeli press, which, since October 7, has taken a light touch with provocative stories on settler violence and the carnage and starvation in Gaza. A few days later, I spent about half an hour at the site and watched three separate groups of Jewish worshippers openly praying, all under police protection.Elsewhere in greater Jerusalem, the eviction of Palestinian residents is surging in Sheikh Jarrah, the same neighborhood where similar actions in 2021—coinciding with disruptions of the status quo at the Temple Mount—prompted Hamas rocket fire that started an 11-day war in Gaza.Last week’s second major event was more bureaucratic than ostentatious, but could be no less consequential—the final hearing on an infamous settlement project known as E1. U.S. administrations (other than Trump’s) have strongly opposed E1 since the 1990s because it would complete the encirclement of East Jerusalem with Jewish enclaves, separating the West Bank from the city that Palestinians expect to be the capital of their future state.This week, Smotrich announced that the hearing had given the final green light and made clear that construction tenders would be issued shortly. The project, he said, would “bury the idea” of a Palestinian state. Once construction begins, the move will be extremely difficult to reverse. The longtime Jerusalem watcher Daniel Seidemann called it “Netanyahu’s greatest ‘fuck you’ to the int’l community, Israel’s closest supporters and the prospects of any two state outcome.”Proponents of such steps have long argued that they are essential to Israel’s security. But signs that recently popped up around the Jewish Quarter of the Old City proclaiming Make Gaza Jewish Again, are among several indications of the growing ethno-religious justifications for Israel’s provocative policies.[Yair Rosenberg: Israel’s settler right is preparing to annex Gaza]The divide between religious and secular Jews has become Israel’s deepest political fault line. Religious parties—many of which joined Netanyahu’s coalition—have diverse and sometimes divergent agendas. The ultra-Orthodox parties tend to prioritize the preservation of funding for their separate educational system and of a controversial exemption from service in the army, a dispute over which might be the likeliest thing that could bring down Netanyahu’s government.The national-religious movement takes a different approach. Many of its adherents live in settlements and pursue their expansion. They disproportionately volunteer for combat units in Israel’s security services, long the country’s foremost secular institutions, with many serving near the West Bank settlements where they live. As much as 40 percent of the incoming IDF infantry officer corps is now drawn from the national-religious movement. And the recent nomination of a controversial religious nationalist to head the Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the FBI, prompted resignation threats from other agency officials.Christians and their holy sites have also come under threat. In Jerusalem, a cable-car project linking a Jewish neighborhood with the Old City cuts across the Mount of Olives, where Jesus is believed to have ascended. And for the first time, some church-owned land is being subjected to taxation—municipal officials in Jerusalem recently froze the bank accounts of the Greek Orthodox church over unpaid taxes.In the West Bank in recent weeks, settlers have attacked a Catholic church in the Christian town of Taybeh and erected an outpost on the grounds of a Greek Orthodox church in the larger city of Jericho.The religious dimensions of these disputes can add to an already overwhelming sense of intractability. “A conflict driven by politics can be resolved by politicians and diplomats,” Seidemann told me. “A religious conflict, only God can sort out.”Considering the largely unforeseen landmark events of the past two years—the Gaza war, the destruction of Hezbollah, the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the bombing of Iran—no one can say with confidence where all of this is headed.In Israel, the discussion always returns to domestic politics, which were largely put on ice after October 7, as Israelis rallied around the flag. Netanyahu’s main rival at the time of the attacks, the former IDF chief Benny Gantz, even joined him in a unity government.The political détente that followed October 7 now shows signs of unraveling. Pressure is mounting on the government to name an official commission of inquiry to investigate how the October 7 attacks happened and why it took nearly two days to quell the Hamas onslaught.For a year, polls have shown that Netanyahu’s coalition would win fewer than than 50 Knesset seats, well below the 61 needed for a majority. Current odds favor a strange-bedfellows coalition, perhaps led by the right-wing former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett but including the centrist former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, as well as what’s left of the left and maybe even one of the Arab parties.One wild-card scenario—more coffeehouse conjecture than reality for now—is that Netanyahu, after the culmination earlier this summer of his quarter-century quest to attack Iran’s nuclear program, might step away from politics entirely, perhaps in exchange for a pardon from President Isaac Herzog that would resolve his various corruption-related legal cases. But betting against either Netanyahu’s staying power or his ability to outmaneuver political opponents, whatever the polls say, has long been a losing proposition.A near-term election could yield a different approach to Gaza. Many opposition leaders I met with now argue for ending the war through a clean deal—a cease-fire in exchange for the release of all the remaining hostages, a position taken publicly by Eyal Hulata, the national security adviser to Prime Ministers Bennett and Lapid.Whether it would lead to a different approach to the West Bank is far less clear. The so-called change government led by Lapid and Bennett, who once chaired the umbrella organization that represents all settlers, produced no less West Bank–settlement activity than the Netanyahu governments that preceded and followed it.Indeed, there is little public pressure for a different approach to the West Bank, even from young Israelis. This summer, less than a third of all Israelis—and less than a quarter of Israeli Jews—said they support a Palestinian state, according to Tel Aviv University’s Peace Index Survey. Even before October 7, when views in Israel hardened, almost 90 percent of Israelis ages 15 to 21 believed that Israel can remain a democracy while controlling Gaza and the West Bank, where residents cannot vote in Israeli elections, according to the Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin.That Palestinians are more and more invisible to most Israelis is partly responsible for this view, exacerbated by steps that Israel has taken to try to shield its population from terrorism, such as erecting a 440-mile-long separation barrier dividing Israel proper from the West Bank, or dramatically reducing work permits that once brought many thousands of Palestinians to Israel every day.Palestinians are increasingly invisible to Americans too—U.S. officials from both parties spend far too little time engaging Palestinians, especially compared with the hours spent with Israeli counterparts.All of this has eroded the decades-long bipartisan consensus on treating occupied areas such as the West Bank differently from the rest of Israel, or even using the word occupied at all, in spite of it being widely used in Israel.Recent congressional delegations have visited, and even celebrated, settlements that the U.S. once condemned. Last week, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson met with settlers in Hebron and had dinner with Netanyahu in Shiloh, part of a string of settlements like Ariel, which Johnson also visited, that are making the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state nearly impossible.Over time, U.S. policy has evolved accordingly.When E1 was first proposed, the Clinton administration reacted so negatively that the plan was shelved, at least for a while. As a journalist in 2008, I visited an outpost called Shvut Ami, which the IDF forcibly emptied on the eve of a visit by President George W. Bush after he called on Israeli leaders to “honor their commitments” and “get rid of unauthorized settlements.”When I served as chief of staff to Secretary of State John Kerry, during the last direct peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, friction over West Bank settlements was still a standard facet of U.S.-Israel relations, peaking in late 2016 when President Barack Obama declined to veto a UN Security Council Resolution that declared settlement activity illegal. And even as the first Trump administration pursued the Abraham Accords, a genuine diplomatic breakthrough that normalized relations between Israel and its neighbors, it made Israel agree not to annex the West Bank.But that administration otherwise paid little attention to settlements, despite the establishment of more than 30 new outposts and the first tenders for Givat Hamatos, a major development separating Jerusalem from the West Bank city of Bethlehem.[Assaf Gavron: What settler violence is doing to Israel]The Biden administration imposed sanctions on settlers who incited or engaged in violence, an important breakthrough. But we should have gone further, as we debated doing, and sanctioned Israeli officials who champion such violence too.We also should have sooner restored the long-standing U.S. position, left in place from Trump’s first term until 2024, that settlements are inconsistent with international law. And we somehow never reversed Trump’s inexplicable requirement that imports to the U.S. from the West Bank be labeled Made in Israel.In his second term, as Trump reversed Biden’s settler sanctions, resumed shipments of the largest bombs we sell to Israel, and stopped hectoring Israeli officials hour by hour to increase humanitarian assistance, conditions in both Gaza and the West Bank have gone from very bad to even worse.Israeli political and security officials are dismissive of the idea that the West Bank is on the verge of erupting; they point to a decrease in Palestinian terrorist attacks since they began their post–October 7 operations.Historically, though, the Palestinian hope for a future state has been considered a counterweight to violence. But the most recent direct peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians were more than a decade ago, the longest such period since the early 1990s. Biden was the first U.S. president since George H. W. Bush not to name an envoy for peace negotiations, and, in his second term, Trump has followed suit. And neither U.S. officials nor Israeli politicians, including those on the left, talk much about a Palestinian state anymore.For their part, given all of these dynamics, Arab citizens of Israel now openly debate suspending their political participation amid what they consider to be a genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by their neighbors. Several I met argued for boycotting the next election, although they were fully aware that that could bolster the performance of parties they strongly oppose.West Bank Palestinians, who have not been afforded the opportunity to vote for their leaders since 2006, are similarly disillusioned. With rampant inflation and unemployment rising to more than 30 percent last year, support for both the PA and its longtime president, Mahmoud Abbas, has plunged in opinion polls.A more troubling harbinger is that support for Hamas is far stronger. A majority in the West Bank believes that the decision to launch the October 7 attacks was “correct” and opposes the disarmament of Hamas in order to stop the war, according to data from the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki.The U.S. has rightly told Palestinians for decades to eschew what some call “violent resistance” to Israel’s occupation. But the failure of both Palestinian politics and peacemaking diplomacy leaves few remaining avenues for Palestinians to pursue legitimate grievances.There is no end in sight for the Gaza war. The West Bank teeters on the brink. Israel, for the foreseeable future, seems launched on not just one but two dangerous paths.