Terror in Judea and Samaria: what Israel’s own numbers show

Nineteen attacks a day, across Judea and Samaria and Israel inside the Green Line. That is what Israel’s security service recorded in 2024. If you want to talk about Judea and Samaria, the area many international outlets call the West Bank, start with the numbers. Here are the published Israeli figures, each tied to a named source. Read them carefully: the tallies measure different things, so they cannot be added together into one official total.

What the 2024 counts include

In February 2025 the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv published a summary of Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) reporting for 2023 and 2024. INSS recorded 6,828 attacks in 2024, including stone-throwing and Molotov cocktails, against 3,436 in 2023. That is roughly nineteen incidents a day. The series covers attacks in the West Bank and inside the Green Line. It does not include fighting on the Gaza or Lebanon fronts, or the October 7 massacre itself.

Mind the scope. If you quote 6,828 as a Judea-and-Samaria-only figure, you overstate what INSS claims for that area alone, and you hand your opponent an easy correction. INSS is explicit that the rise is in the combined West Bank and Israel-proper count, driven largely by stones and firebombs. Why count a stone as an attack? Because Israeli security bodies record what those stones and firebombs do: they regularly injure people on roads and at junctions.

The same INSS note separates out “significant” attacks: shootings, stabbings, vehicle rammings and explosive devices. In the West Bank and Jerusalem it counted 231 of them in 2024, down 44 percent from 414 in 2023. Mapped significant attacks in the West Bank clustered in the Nablus district (43), then Jenin (31), Ramallah (28), Hebron (24) and Tulkarm (23). Another 82 significant attacks in 2023–2024 were recorded inside the Green Line. Israeli casualties from terror in 2024, outside the northern and southern war fronts, stood at 46 dead and 337 injured, according to INSS.

The attacks you never hear about

Completed attacks are only part of the picture. The rest is what the Shin Bet stopped. INSS, citing the agency, reported 1,040 significant plots thwarted in the West Bank and Jerusalem in 2024, almost unchanged from 1,032 in 2023. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, summarizing the Shin Bet’s Hebrew year-end report, put the 2023 and 2022 figures at 1,032 and 472, and 351 in 2021. FDD broke the 2024 foiled plots down as 689 involving firearms, 326 explosive devices, 13 stabbings, nine car-rammings, two suicide attacks and one attempted kidnapping. Thirteen of the threats were serious enough to require airstrikes. FDD, again citing the Shin Bet, also recorded 46 Israelis and foreign nationals killed in terror attacks in 2024 and 337 injured, matching the INSS totals for that year outside the Gaza and Lebanon fronts.

Fewer successful shootings and bombings, alongside more than a thousand foiled plots a year: what does that tell you? It points to heavier Israeli operations after 7 October. It does not tell you the terrorist groups stopped trying. That is also why one annual total is a poor substitute for reading the definitions underneath it.

A narrower Israeli series

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, which monitors attacks in Judea and Samaria, uses a tighter definition than the Shin Bet’s all-attacks series. In its weekly reporting a significant or critical attack is one involving shooting, stabbing, a vehicular attack, an improvised explosive device, or a combination of them; stones and Molotov cocktails are not in that category. In a later 2025 review it recorded 113 terrorism-related events in 2024, 90 of them carried out by Arab attackers from Judea and Samaria, against 31 such events in the first nine months of 2025, 22 of them from the same origin.

That series is a useful count of the more serious completed incidents. It is not the Shin Bet all-attacks series INSS uses, and it is not a log of every stone or firebomb on the roads. The datasets cover the same subject with different methods, different coverage and different definitions of an attack. Do not sum them, and do not line them up year by year as if they were one table.

What changed in 2025

On 19 January 2026, FDD’s Long War Journal reported figures published by IDF Central Command, which is responsible for Judea and Samaria and parts of central Israel. Central Command recorded about 78 percent fewer terror incidents in 2025 than in 2024, and about 85 percent fewer attacks involving firearms. The army credited Operation Iron Wall, launched in January 2025, and roughly eighty brigade-level operations in which Israeli forces killed hundreds of terrorists and took apart their infrastructure. The same release, as FDD summarized it, said forces confiscated more than 17 million shekels designated for terrorist activity, seized over eight tons of dual-use material, shut 17 weapons-manufacturing sites and took 1,370 weapons components.

An earlier FDD flash brief, drawing on Israeli security reporting in May 2025, already showed a steep monthly decline: an average of 214 West Bank attacks a month in 2023, 115 a month in 2024, and 57 a month in 2025 through that spring, with 46 attacks in April 2025, only three of them judged significant, the lowest monthly total in five years. The Jewish Virtual Library dates the start of Iron Wall to 21 January 2025 in Jenin, later expanding into Tulkarm, Nur Shams and other parts of northern Samaria.

Deaths of Arabs in Judea and Samaria are counted on a different ledger, and we state it rather than hide it. FDD, citing IDF figures reported by Israeli media, wrote that Israeli forces killed 240 Arabs in Judea and Samaria in 2025, after 500 in 2024 and 504 in 2023. The IDF said that over the three years fewer than 4 percent of those killed were uninvolved civilians; that in 2023 and 2024 roughly 70 percent were armed with firearms or explosives; and that in 2025 that share fell to about 40 percent, with the rest classified as stone-throwers or other suspects. Those classifications are the army’s own, not a census of every other organization’s categories.

The same Central Command assessment, as FDD reported, said attacks on Arabs in Judea and Samaria by extremist Israelis rose about 27 percent in 2025. That is a different phenomenon, recorded by a different desk, and it does not cancel the drop in shootings and bombings against Israelis. The IDF puts it in its own tables. A serious reader should know it is there.

Limits of these numbers

The sources here are Israeli security bodies, a Tel Aviv University-affiliated think tank, the Meir Amit center’s attack definitions, and research summaries of Shin Bet and IDF releases. The Israeli series measure attacks on Israelis and plots against them; the IDF’s fatality briefing for Arabs killed in Judea and Samaria uses its own involvement categories. Some tables fold in Jerusalem or Israel inside the Green Line; others do not. Stone-throwing is an attack in Shin Bet and IDF logs and is left out of ITIC’s significant-attack definition, which is the main reason the headline totals differ by thousands.

None of these datasets is independently audited the way a statistical agency audits a labour-force survey. Definitions shift at the edges, especially for stones, firebombs and people killed during arrests. Use each number inside its own named series. Do not turn it into a single body count for the territory.

What the numbers add up to

Behind every drop in these tables is a plot that was stopped and a road that stayed open. Recorded attacks, stones and firebombs included, roughly doubled in 2024 even as significant attacks fell; the counter-terror effort grew to meet them. Naza: The Real Story covers the war in Gaza, not Judea and Samaria, but it is built the same way: officers identified by role, with the record beside them. It is free to watch with English subtitles.