What the Yesha Council actually is
The settler umbrella group that's lobbied the Knesset since 1980, and the West Bank incident that got its own members called terrorists.
The Yesha Council was founded Dec. 24, 1980, as the successor to Gush Emunim, the Religious Zionist movement that pushed Jewish settlement in the territory Israel captured in the 1967 war. It's an umbrella body of roughly 25 elected mayors and council heads representing municipalities with about 500,000 Israeli residents across the West Bank, headquartered in Jerusalem's Ramat Eshkol neighborhood. It describes its own job as acting as "the political arm of the Jewish residents of Yesha": lobbying the Knesset and government, managing municipal and security matters for settlements, running infrastructure and tourism projects, and organizing public campaigns and protests on settlers' behalf. Yisrael Ganz, who also heads the Binyamin Regional Council, has chaired the Council since May 2024. 1
That lobbying role is why the Council's response mattered after what happened in Qusra, a Palestinian village in Area B south of Nablus. Israeli settlers from the Tel Talpiot outpost erected structures blocking the entrances to Palestinian homes there, then cut electricity cables and damaged water pipes, trapping families inside. Israeli forces demolished the structures and detained one Israeli by Wednesday night. 2
U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee called the people responsible "Israeli terrorists" and said the IDF and Israel Police had gone in "at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this." He later posted: "'Settlers' are not the problem in Judea/Samaria. 'Unsettlers' are." Ganz, as chair of the body that lobbies on settlers' behalf, put out his own statement calling the episode "serious" and saying it did not "reflect our values or our way of conducting ourselves." 2