Justice Without Vengeance: What the Church Asks After an Attack near Hebron Closes the West Bank

On Friday, two Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint outside Hebron. Within hours, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had sealed the city, ordered the army to prepare a closure of the entire West Bank, and promised an operation on a scale Israel hasn’t seen since 1967. Most of the coverage since has weighed what the attack means for Tuesday’s election in Israel. The Church puts a question underneath the politics: when a State answers a crime, where does justice end and revenge begin?

The News Story

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the city of Hebron sealed off on Friday, October 23, and told security forces to prepare a full closure of the occupied West Bank, after two Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint outside the city. He also announced plans for a military operation across the territory on a scale, he said, “not seen since the Six-Day War.” Israelis vote in a national election on Tuesday, October 27.¹

The attack took place Friday morning at a temporary checkpoint near Yehuda Junction, on the outskirts of Hebron. According to the Israel Defense Forces, two men armed with an assault rifle and a handgun reached the position and opened fire, setting off a gun battle that lasted about 20 minutes. Soldiers killed both attackers. The dead soldiers were Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, of the 775th Ari Battalion. Three other soldiers were wounded. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said a large quantity of ammunition was found in the gunmen’s car, and the army said its preliminary finding was that the men meant to attack civilians on a nearby highway. Israeli media identified the attackers as two 27-year-old men from the same Hebron family. Hamas praised the attack but did not formally claim it, and Israeli agencies said they were still investigating whether the men belonged to a larger cell.²

Netanyahu convened an emergency meeting of the Security Cabinet and blamed Hamas. In a statement after a security assessment, he said residents of the neighborhoods where the attackers lived would be evacuated, troops would search homes one by one, and what he called “terrorist infrastructure” would be destroyed, using “the successful and aggressive model we used in the refugee camps.” Of Hebron, he said, “we will act to destroy this place, to change it completely.” He said he and the defense minister would decide the timing of the wider operation, and no start date was announced. Defense Minister Israel Katz said Iran and its allies were trying to influence the election through attacks. Israeli authorities have not said Tehran directed this shooting.³

The military sent reinforcements, including the headquarters of its 98th Division, and cordoned off Hebron and nearby Halhul. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said heavy machinery was already demolishing unauthorized structures near the city. On Saturday, Israeli forces raided at least 15 towns in the northern West Bank, including areas near Nablus, Jenin, Tubas and Qalqilya, and detained dozens of Palestinians, according to Al Jazeera. The Associated Press reported that this was the fourth time in a month Israel had imposed West Bank-wide restrictions, closing gates and checkpoints between Palestinian villages and main roads. Roads used by Israeli drivers, including settlers, remained open.⁴

Reactions split sharply. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called for Israel to take full control of the West Bank and said the attack showed that Palestinian freedom of movement must be restricted. Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, said the closure turns every city and village into “a small prison” and warned that collective punishment “will lead to explosions.” Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine praised the shooting and called for more confrontation. None of the outlets reviewed reported a response from the Palestinian Authority.⁵

The shooting came one day after Palestinian groups reported 36 arrests across the West Bank and 17 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers on Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest. Tuesday’s vote is Israel’s first national election since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, and Netanyahu canceled campaign events after the shooting.⁶

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

A Checkpoint Outside Hebron

On Friday morning, two men drove up to a temporary army checkpoint near Yehuda Junction, on the edge of Hebron, and opened fire. The gun battle lasted about 20 minutes. When it ended, Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, were dead, three other soldiers were wounded, and both gunmen had been killed. The army says their car held a large stock of ammunition and that they meant to reach civilians on a nearby highway.⁷ Two young men in uniform died stopping it.

Within hours, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Hebron sealed and told the army to prepare a closure of the entire West Bank. He promised an operation “unlike any seen since the Six-Day War,” and he said of Hebron, “we will act to destroy this place, to change it completely.”⁸ By Saturday, Israeli forces had raided at least 15 towns and detained dozens of people; bulldozers had demolished a three-story building in Hebron, and hundreds of families in the Ein Deir Bahha area had been told to leave their homes.⁹ This is all happening as Israelis prepare to vote on Tuesday.

A crime this grave demands an answer. What matters now is what kind of answer: justice, which the State owes its people, or revenge, which it may never take.

Condemned Without Qualification

Start with the attack, because the Church does. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says, “Terrorism is to be condemned in the most absolute terms. It shows complete contempt for human life and can never be justified, since the human person is always an end and never a means.”¹⁰ Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine all praised the shooting and called for more of the same.¹¹ A movement that cheers the killing of a 20-year-old at a checkpoint has told the world what it intends next.

The same paragraph is just as clear that Israel may defend itself: “there exists, therefore, a right to defend oneself from terrorism.”¹² Roytman and Svilem were exercising that right when they died. So is the army when it searches for weapons and checks whether the two men belonged to a larger cell, as it says it is doing.¹³ Those actions are justified under Catholic Social Teaching.

The Compendium also describes what terrorism is designed to do to the people it strikes. It “sows hatred, death, and an urge for revenge and reprisal.”¹⁴ That last phrase is the trap. A terrorist wins twice if the answer to his crime is a reprisal, because the reprisal makes the next recruit. They are expecting a disproportionate response, as that response helps galvanize their movement.

Punishment Has a Purpose

The Church takes punishment seriously. Public authority “must exercise the right and the duty to inflict punishments according to the seriousness of the crimes committed,” and in a State ruled by law, “the power to inflict punishment is correctly entrusted to the Courts.”¹⁵ Punishment defends public order and the safety of persons, and it aims at something more: “a justice that reconciles, a justice capable of restoring harmony in social relationships disrupted by the criminal act committed.”¹⁶

Revenge aims at something else, however. The Catechism draws the line in a single sentence: “To desire vengeance in order to do evil to someone who should be punished is illicit,” but it is praiseworthy to impose restitution “to correct vices and maintain justice.”¹⁷ St. Thomas Aquinas explains why. Punishment is lawful when the one who inflicts it aims at a good, “that the sinner may amend, or at least that he may be restrained and others be not disturbed, that justice may be upheld.” When the intention “is directed chiefly to the evil of the person on whom he takes vengeance and rests there,” it is “altogether unlawful,” because pleasure in another’s harm “belongs to hatred.”¹⁸

Notice that the test is the intention, and that it binds governments as much as men. A State can do the very same act, a raid or an arrest, for justice or for revenge, and the difference shows in what the act is aimed at and where it stops.

Where Justice Stops

Justice stops at the guilty. The two gunmen are dead. Some of what Israel is doing still serves justice: tracing their contacts, seizing weapons, arresting people it suspects of belonging to armed groups. A Catholic can support that work and pray it is done well. The Jerusalem Post reports that the gunmen’s homes are being mapped for sealing and possible demolition, subject to legal proceedings, and a court that weighs evidence is the right place for that question.¹⁹

Revenge does not stop. A closure of the whole West Bank, the fourth in a month, shuts gates and checkpoints between Palestinian villages and the main roads while Israeli drivers keep using them.²⁰ It falls on every family in every village it closes off, nearly all of whom did nothing on Friday. So does an order for hundreds of families to leave their homes. Ezekiel heard the principle from the Lord six centuries before Christ: “The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20). Earlier this month I wrote about the Church’s teaching that criminal responsibility “is always personal, and therefore cannot be extended to the religions, nations or ethnic groups to which the terrorists belong.”²¹ Punishment aimed at a whole people fails that test, and it fails Thomas’s test of intention too. It cannot correct the innocent, and it restores no harmony.

Words Before Deeds

Pope Leo XIV asks all of us to “examine our conscience regarding the words we use, the prejudices we have and the explicit or implicit aggression that lies within them.”²² “We will act to destroy this place” is a sentence about a city full of people. Spoken by a head of government four days before an election, it tells every family in Hebron what to expect, whatever it did or did not do on Friday.

Leo also saw the pattern behind it. In Magnifica Humanitas he warns of “the temptation to forge a collective identity in opposition to an enemy, fueled by narratives in which each party portrays itself as a victim entitled to retribution.”²³ Hamas calls the shooting a response to settler violence and the war in Gaza. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir calls for Israel to take full control of the West Bank and says the attack proves Palestinians must lose their freedom of movement.²⁴ Each speaks as the injured party, and each asks that a whole people pay.

Leo names what gets lost when that happens. “The principle of proportionality in responding to aggression,” along with “respect for the lives of civilians, especially children,” comes to be regarded, he writes, as “naïve relics of the past.”²⁵ And he takes the Church’s teaching on force a step past the older tradition: “without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense,” the “just war” theory, “which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.”²⁶ The older framework asked whether a response was proportionate once force was underway. Leo asks Catholics to begin from self-defense in its strictest sense. Hunting a cell that may still be planning attacks fits that description. An operation on the scale of 1967, aimed at a whole territory, does not fit that description.

The Compendium adds a practical warning: “the recruitment of terrorists in fact is easier in situations where rights are trampled and injustices are tolerated over a long period of time.”²⁷ Mustafa Barghouti said this weekend that collective punishment “will lead to explosions.”²⁸ A teenager in Hebron who watches his neighbor’s house come down for a crime the neighbor didn’t commit is exactly who Hamas will try to recruit next.

What I’d Watch

Watch whether the full closure actually takes effect, and how long it lasts after Tuesday’s vote. Watch whether the demolitions reach beyond the gunmen’s own homes, and whether a court reviews each one. And watch the olive groves, where Palestinian groups reported 17 attacks on farmers in a single day before the shooting.²⁹

And, as always, pray. Pray for Ron Yonatan Roytman and Yuval Shai Svilem, for their parents, and for the three wounded soldiers. Pray for the families in Hebron and across the West Bank who did nothing on Friday and cannot leave their towns this week. Pray for Prime Minister Netanyahu, for every candidate on Tuesday’s ballot, and for the leaders of the Palestinian factions, that they seek justice and leave vengeance to the Lord (Romans 12:19). And pray, as the psalmist asks, for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6).

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This story turns on the difference between justice and vengeance: the State must punish crime, but only to restore order and correct the guilty, never to make a whole people pay.

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Notes

1. ↑ “Netanyahu Orders Full West Bank Closure After 2 Israeli Soldiers Killed,” Associated Press via Spectrum News, October 23, 2026, spectrumlocalnews.com; “Benjamin Netanyahu Signals Massive West Bank Operation After Hebron Attack, Days Before Election,” Breitbart, October 23, 2026, breitbart.com; “After Hamas West Bank Shooting Attack Wounds Five, Benjamin Netanyahu Blocks Off Travel,” Jerusalem Post, October 23, 2026, jpost.com.
2. ↑ Associated Press, “Netanyahu Orders Full West Bank Closure”; Breitbart, “Netanyahu Signals Massive West Bank Operation”; Jerusalem Post, “Netanyahu Blocks Off Travel”; “Benjamin Netanyahu Seizes on Hebron Attack to Mount Major West Bank Offensive,” ABC News (Australia), October 24, 2026, abc.net.au.
3. ↑ ABC News (Australia), “Netanyahu Seizes on Hebron Attack”; Breitbart, “Netanyahu Signals Massive West Bank Operation”; Associated Press, “Netanyahu Orders Full West Bank Closure.”
4. ↑ Breitbart, “Netanyahu Signals Massive West Bank Operation”; “Israel Raids Towns, Detains Dozens of Palestinians in Occupied West Bank,” Al Jazeera, October 24, 2026, aljazeera.com; “Israel Orders Closure of West Bank After Soldiers Kill 2 Men Behind an Alleged Attack,” Associated Press via OPB, October 23, 2026, opb.org.
5. ↑ Associated Press, “Netanyahu Orders Full West Bank Closure”; Al Jazeera, “Israel Raids Towns”; “Israel Preparing Full Lockdown of Occupied West Bank After Hebron Gunfight,” Al Jazeera, October 23, 2026, aljazeera.com.
6. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Israel Preparing Full Lockdown”; Breitbart, “Netanyahu Signals Massive West Bank Operation”; ABC News (Australia), “Netanyahu Seizes on Hebron Attack.”
7. ↑ Associated Press, “Netanyahu Orders Full West Bank Closure”; Breitbart, “Netanyahu Signals Massive West Bank Operation.”
8. ↑ ABC News (Australia), “Netanyahu Seizes on Hebron Attack.”
9. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Israel Raids Towns.”
10. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 514, vatican.va.
11. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Israel Preparing Full Lockdown.”
12. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 514.
13. ↑ Jerusalem Post, “Netanyahu Blocks Off Travel”; Breitbart, “Netanyahu Signals Massive West Bank Operation.”
14. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 513.
15. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 402.
16. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 403.
17. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2302, vatican.va.
18. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 108, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
19. ↑ Jerusalem Post, “Netanyahu Blocks Off Travel.”
20. ↑ Associated Press, “Israel Orders Closure of West Bank.”
21. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 514.
22. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 214, vatican.va.
23. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 202.
24. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Israel Preparing Full Lockdown”; Associated Press, “Netanyahu Orders Full West Bank Closure.”
25. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 203.
26. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 192.
27. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 514.
28. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Israel Raids Towns.”
29. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Israel Preparing Full Lockdown.”

Books Cited

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• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)