Over the past decade, Israel has expanded its civilian arming system, raising the number of gun-licence holders from 155,000 in 2022 to 350,000 in 2026, an increase of about 126%. The expansion included personal pistols, assault rifles held by readiness units and military weapons kept in reservists’ homes, while high proportions of licence holders were concentrated in West Bank settlements.
The shift began before the 7 October 2023 attack, but accelerated significantly under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who turned the policy of expanding arms ownership into a large-scale project. Since 2023, about 180 towns and areas have been added to the areas whose residents meet the criteria to apply for gun licences.
The government presents the policy as an additional layer of “civil defence”, based on the participation of citizens and local readiness units in dealing with security threats. But the wider spread of weapons, particularly in settlements, has raised questions about oversight and state institutions’ ability to monitor their use in settler attacks, domestic violence, crimes and thefts.
Licence criteria expanded since 2018
The institutional turning point came in 2018, before Ben-Gvir took office, when then Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan decided to broaden the licensing criteria. The new criteria included army veterans qualified as “07 rifle carriers” or above, as well as officers, non-commissioned officers, police personnel and volunteers in rescue services.
The expansion of eligibility coincided with a reduction in the initial training required for a licence, from 9 hours to 4½ hours. This followed a long period in which the proportion of licence holders among the population declined, from 4.14% in 2001 to 1.62% in 2019, before subsequent policies reversed the trend.
The expansion accelerated most sharply after the formation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government. In 2023 alone, more than 135,000 people were added to the ranks of gun-licence holders. The National Security Ministry told the Knesset, during a session held on 10 June 2026, that 50.4% of licence holders had obtained them on the basis of service in the security forces.
The increase also extended to women gun-licence holders, whose number rose from 8,300 in 2022 to more than 29,000 in 2026. The figures show that the expansion was not limited to restricted security or geographic groups, but covered broader sections after eligibility conditions were amended and application checks accelerated. The 7 October attack gave the project additional momentum.
Applications accelerate and licences reviewed after the war
Official data published on 8 June 2026 showed that more than 403,000 applications for gun licences had been submitted by June 2025. More than 217,000 applicants received conditional approval, while about 165,000 approvals became permanent licences. However, the speed of issuing licences was accompanied by oversight and legal problems.
In November 2024, the Supreme Court ordered a review of licences issued after the war began, amid questions about the authority of some people involved in granting them. Five former employees of Ben-Gvir’s office were also investigated in connection with the licensing process.
The Knesset’s Research and Information Centre revealed an additional monitoring gap: the police cannot produce comprehensive statistics identifying crimes committed with licensed weapons and classifying them by licence type. This is because the data are not stored in a way that allows them to be sorted automatically, limiting the ability to measure the effects of the licensing expansion accurately. The West Bank shows clear geographical disparities in the spread of weapons.
According to Interior Security Ministry data published on 30 January 2023, 86 of the 100 towns with the highest proportions of gun-licence holders were settlements in the West Bank. Licence holders accounted for about one-third of residents in the settlements of Adora, Kiryat Netafim and Negohot. The proportion reached 9.2% in Ariel settlement, compared with 6% in Ma’ale Adumim.
These proportions reflect a higher prevalence than that recorded in a number of other towns and communities inside Israel. A comparison with the ultra-Orthodox community highlights the effect of security and military service criteria in shaping the map of gun ownership. In January 2024, licence holders accounted for 0.75% of residents in Modi’in Illit and 0.99% in Rekhasim, while the figure reached about 1.89% in both Elad and Beitar Illit.
The comparison indicates that living in a settlement alone does not explain the higher rates of gun ownership. Making service in the security forces a key eligibility criterion favours communities with higher rates of military service, which applies more to sections of the religious Zionist public than to ultra-Orthodox communities.
Geographical distribution and political dispute over weapons
The licensing issue was politically contentious even before the war, amid debate over revoking gun licences from some protesters and simultaneous demands from the right to arm settlement groups. During the first half of 2023, at least 7 activists from the Brothers in Arms movement were notified that their licences would be revoked because of their participation in protests against the judicial changes led by Netanyahu’s government.
The community arming system is not limited to licensed private pistols, but consists of 3 main layers. The first comprises personal weapons carried by licence holders, while the second includes long assault rifles provided by the state to readiness units linked to the police, border guard or army.
The purchases included rifles from Israeli companies and others imported from abroad. On 8 January 2026, the Defence Ministry announced that thousands of Arad assault rifles produced by IWI had been distributed to readiness units, as part of a deal worth about 100 million shekels. The deal includes sighting systems and maintenance services lasting 10 years.
At the same time, the army began arming about 10,000 reservists from the David Division with M4 and M16 rifles and ammunition, allowing them to remain in the soldiers’ homes throughout the year. This adds a large military stockpile to the civilian weapons already kept in homes. The most sensitive implications emerge where the spread of weapons intersects with the settlement context in the West Bank.
Three layers for arming civilians and readiness units
The databases do not make it possible to determine how many Palestinians were killed specifically with licensed weapons issued under Ben-Gvir’s reforms, because the police lack a comprehensive classification of the weapon’s source and licensing status in each incident.
The databases on West Bank incidents focus more on the identity of the party that fired the shot than on the date the weapon used was licensed. Therefore, not all victims of settler attacks can be considered victims of licensed weapons, but the violence figures show the environment in which gun ownership is being expanded.
Data from the army and the Shin Bet internal security service, published on 14 July 2026, recorded 867 incidents classified as “nationalist crime” carried out by Israeli settlers in the West Bank during 2025, compared with 682 incidents in 2024, an increase of 27%.
By early September 2026, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs had recorded 23 Palestinians killed and more than 1,100 injured in settler attacks during the year. Earlier detailed data showed that settlers had directly killed 12 Palestinians from the start of 2026 to 11 May of the same year. By comparison, 13 Palestinians were killed by settlers in 2023, 3 in 2024 and 8 in 2025.
The figures do not prove that all the killings were carried out with licensed weapons, but they show that the expansion of arms ownership coincided with a rise in recorded settler attacks in the West Bank. The risks associated with the spread of weapons also extended into homes.
During the Knesset session in June 2026, officials said that 3 women had been killed since the beginning of 2023 with a licensed weapon, whether private or institutional, among 46 women killed with firearms during the same period. Data from the Michal Sela Forum, published on 7 June 2026, showed that 22 women and a 9-year-old girl had been killed with firearms by a relative since the war began, compared with 9 women during an equivalent earlier period.
In 2025, firearms were used in 52% of the domestic killings recorded by the forum. Earlier data submitted to the Knesset showed that all firearm killings of Jewish women between 2020 and 2022, in cases where the type of weapon could be identified, were carried out with licensed weapons. By contrast, illegal or weapons of unknown origin predominated in the killings of Arab women.
On 22 March 2026, Meret Lavi, a lawyer and researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, warned that licensed weapons were being used in family disputes, disagreements between neighbours and road incidents. Her warning was issued under the title “More weapons, less control”, referring to the difficulty of containing the consequences of wider gun ownership outside security institutions.
The growing stockpile of weapons creates an additional channel through which some can reach the illegal market via theft. The Knesset’s Research and Information Centre documented about 660 gun-theft cases over 5 years. Some 76% of these thefts, or about 500 cases, occurred at private homes or residential buildings.
These figures become more significant as the number of weapons stored in homes rises, because a stolen weapon leaves the legal oversight system and becomes available for resale. Stolen weapons are one source of supply for the black market and criminal networks, although this does not mean that every stolen weapon necessarily reaches a criminal gang.
Official army data published on 18 August 2026 showed that the number of stolen military weapons rose from 18 in 2023 to 75 in 2024, an increase of about 316%. The number had been 28 in 2021 and 27 in 2022. The stolen weapons included M16, M4, Arad and Micro Tavor rifles, as well as heavy machine guns.
The data recorded 20 thefts from military bases and 15 outside them. Southern Command topped the list with 19 incidents, followed by Northern Command with 13 and Central Command with 12. It is difficult to determine how many military weapons actually entered criminal networks, as the army acknowledged that data on stolen ammunition, grenades and explosives were no longer recorded in a computerised and systematic manner.
This shortcoming limits the ability to measure the contribution of military thefts to supplying the illegal market or to identify the routes taken by weapons after leaving storage facilities and homes. The expansion of armed civilian groups has also raised fears of internal clashes, although there is no data proving that Israel is inevitably heading towards civil conflict.
On 22 October 2023, then Police Commissioner Yaakov “Kobi” Shabtai warned during a session of the Knesset National Security Committee against allowing independent armed groups to operate. Shabtai said the police “will not allow any militia group to operate”, stressing that field command must remain in the hands of the police.
He linked his warning to the possibility that large numbers of armed people in one location, in the absence of clear leadership, could lead to them shooting at one another. In April 2024, Yael Litmanovitz and Meret Lavi, a doctor and a lawyer from the Israel Democracy Institute, warned that the activity of armed civilian groups in mixed cities could lead to “an escalation that gets out of control”, particularly when the boundaries of authority, training and leadership are unclear.
The warning coincides with the findings of the Israeli Democracy Index 2025, which showed that the tension between the right and left had become, in the view of the Jewish public, the most prominent form of internal tension. The spread of weapons among civilians and readiness units adds a security dimension to existing political and social divisions.
The arming policy that began before Ben-Gvir and expanded during his tenure has thus developed into a system involving 350,000 licence holders, tens of thousands of long rifles and readiness units distributed across towns and settlements, alongside military weapons and ammunition stored in thousands of homes.
Data on violence, domestic killings and thefts show that the expansion of “self-defence” is, in turn, creating growing challenges for state institutions’ ability to monitor weapons and control their use.
