Robert Inlakesh
The Palestine Chronicle / August 15, 2026
If the West Bank resistance gets their hands on FPV drones, this means small teams can run covert operations that target Jewish settlements and checkpoints.
Israeli army-backed settler militia assaults across the occupied West Bank are driving renewed speculation that the unbearable violence could lead to a significant escalation. Although there has clearly been an effort by the Israeli authorities to drum up violence, they also understand that there is a major risk involved in continuing on this trajectory.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, has ordered his military to draw up plans to officially hand over control of Israeli illegal West Bank settlers to the police. This would make hardline Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir responsible for managing security matters in the occupied territory, a man who just last month advocated for turning West Bank cities into Gaza.
Previously, the majority of Israel’s efforts at ethnically cleansing the territory were focused on what is known as Area C, constituting roughly 60% of the occupied West Bank. Area C is under full Israeli military occupation and is home to over 500,000 illegal settlers, whose “security” is provided by the Army. Around 300,000 Palestinians also live in this zone, created by the controversial Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early to mid-1990s. The total Palestinian population of the West Bank is currently around 3.5 million.
This system has been in place for decades now, during which the Palestinian Authority (PA) was supposed to have security and civil control in Area A (18% of the land) and civil control in Area B (22% of the land). What this enabled over time was for Israel to create a system, working hand in glove with their PA allies, to divide the occupied territory into dozens of isolated enclaves that were separated from one another.
Most Palestinians live in the major cities of the West Bank or the peripheries of those cities. Cities like Ramallah, Nablus, and Al-Khalil are supposedly therefore under PA Security Force control – although Israel enters whenever they choose and coordinates with the PA. The system has created bubbles under occupation, whereby most Palestinians conform to the Palestinian Authority. The PA also employs some 22% of the population.
Although settler attacks and settlement expansion have long been a major issue inside the occupied territory, the situation has rapidly deteriorated in recent years. The trend was already growing prior to October 7, 2023, but has since exploded. Now, there are dedicated armed and trained militias who run a coordinated campaign of mass displacement.
According to Israeli Human Rights Group B’Tselem, at least 64 Palestinian communities and towns have been entirely displaced with another 15 having been partially displaced, since October 7, 2023. Daily settler attacks have also made travel, particularly after dark, much more difficult in the West Bank. Routine pogroms are launched, using arson to burn down homes and agricultural lands. Israeli settlers also execute Palestinians, often as the Israeli Army watches on, without consequence. Currently, homes in the village of Qusra – located in Area B – are being besieged by Israeli settler militia forces, as the Israeli Army chose to help them and even ordered families to evacuate their village.
Area B is no longer safe and the PA has been transformed into a shameless subcontractor for the Israeli military, only there to coordinate their retreat from areas that Israelis choose to invade and arrest, or even kill, Palestinians who choose to pursue armed resistance.
Palestinian Resistance factions began rising from the Jenin Refugee Camp, Nour al-Sham Refugee Camp and the Old City of Nablus in 2021, with the trend initially spreading to surrounding areas and refugee camps across the territory. The Palestinian Authority’s Security Forces decided to collaborate with Israel to murder countless fighters and have others arrested; in a series of cases, they did Israel’s dirty work for them directly.
The Israeli Army then ethnically cleansed Jenin Refugee Camp and Nour al-Shams Refugee Camp, displacing tens of thousands, before turning these areas into mini Gazas. Israel has even created a specialized settler-run military unit called the Desert Frontier.
Since the beginning of the Gaza Genocide, the West Bank unemployment rate has skyrocketed from around 12% to roughly 32%. The PA, despite being a collaborator that sought to blame Hamas for the fate of Gaza and refused to pursue a unified Palestinian front, has been deprived of its own tax revenues and is being held hostage by its Israeli bosses.
Although the West Bank population has done virtually nothing to rise up in support of their people in Gaza throughout the genocide, the rapid deterioration in their own living condition could end up resulting a major escalation. The PA is hopelessly corrupt and is widely viewed as a collaborator body in the West Bank, while inflation increases, roadblocks appear everywhere, villages are placed on lockdown, and settler attacks are constant.
Part of Israel’s plan has always been to engineer a situation that causes a major escalation, then use Palestinian retaliation as a pretext for a major ethnic cleansing campaign, but it cannot be carried out like it was in Gaza. What holds the Israelis back is one main issue: the safety of the settlements.
Previously, small localized Palestinian resistance cadres were only capable of defensive actions and a few offensive attacks on occasion. However, this situation could dramatically change with the introduction of a single weapon into the equation: First Person View (FPV) drones.
Israel has abysmally failed to combat FPV UAVs fired towards their position by Hezbollah, exposing a major weakness. In the occupied West Bank, these drones would represent a major game-changer.
In Gaza and Lebanon, FPV drones are limited by distance and so are only effective at targeting Israeli military forces as they enter these territories. In the occupied West Bank, it will change everything. One of the major issues that resistance factions have faced there is that they are quickly discovered if they participate in armed resistance and building rockets or more sophisticated weapons is a difficult task for such groups.
If the West Bank resistance gets their hands on FPV drones, this means small teams can run covert operations that target settlements and checkpoints, in addition to military vehicles or soldier gatherings, with ease and at a safe distance, enabling them to avoid detection. These drones are relatively simple to assemble, cheap and tracing the components in order to knock out production supplies is extremely difficult.
It has already been well established that there is an abundance of expertise in the West Bank when it comes to assembling explosive devices, which is the only other component needed to make a deadly weapon that Israel cannot shoot down. This potential threat has already caught the attention of the Israeli security establishment, because there is no solution to this problem.
Amidst a major escalation erupting in the occupied West Bank, the introduction of the FPV drone to the battlefield is extremely likely. If managed correctly, it could end up redefining the nature of the armed struggle in occupied Palestine. Such a UAV strategy, considering the terrain and proximity of Palestinian resistance groups to settlements, could take some time, however, as it must be implemented in the correct manner and timed well.
Considerations for the groups would include factors such as the number of cells at their disposal, training, secure supply of the drone components and the size of the arsenal they will prove capable of building. Secrecy will be key, as one of the biggest challenges of the West Bank for any armed group is the hostile environment, having to evade not only the Israelis, but also the Palestinian Authority.
Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker
