West Bank

The West Bank is the landlocked territory west of the Jordan River that was captured by Israel from Jordan during the Six-Day War of June 1967. Its largest city is Jerusalem (East Jerusalem), followed by Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah, and Bethlehem. The territory is home to approximately 2.8 million Palestinians and, as of 2024, approximately 500,000 Israeli settlers in settlements considered illegal under international law. The Gaza Strip and the West Bank together constitute the territory over which the Palestinian Authority (PA) claims jurisdiction.¹

Israeli Occupation and Shin Bet

Israel's military administration of the West Bank following the 1967 war was accompanied by the deployment of Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) as the primary intelligence and internal security force. Shin Bet's West Bank operations included the running of Palestinian informants within political and militant organizations, the arrest and interrogation of suspected members of the PLO and later Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and counterterrorism operations.

The use of "moderate physical pressure" - later found by the Israeli Supreme Court to constitute torture - in Shin Bet interrogations of Palestinian detainees was documented in the 1987 Landau Commission report, which authorized certain interrogation methods while prohibiting others. Former Shin Bet directors later acknowledged that the interrogation guidelines had been systematically exceeded. The 2012 documentary film The Gatekeepers featured six former Shin Bet directors discussing the agency's West Bank operations in unprecedented frankness.¹

Oslo Accords and PA Security

The 1993 Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority and divided the West Bank into Area A (PA full control), Area B (shared), and Area C (Israeli full control). The PA's security services - particularly Preventive Security (Amn al-Wiqaiya) under Mohammed Dahlan in Gaza and Jibril Rajoub in the West Bank - cooperated with Israeli security services and the CIA in counterterrorism operations against Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which both Israeli and Palestinian Authority officials opposed.²

The CIA's Terrorism Warning Group and later CTC (Counterterrorism Center) maintained close coordination with PA security services from the Oslo period onward. American security coordinators were stationed in the West Bank to facilitate this coordination.

Settlements and International Law

Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank - which accelerated after the Oslo period despite international pressure - is universally considered a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention's prohibition on an occupying power transferring its civilian population into occupied territory, though Israel disputes this legal interpretation. The settlement enterprise has been the subject of repeated UN Security Council resolutions, almost all of which the United States has vetoed.¹