In a gun shop in the West Bank, a salesman laid a collection of unloaded handguns on the counter and invited a group of men gathered around him to pick them up and see how it felt to squeeze the trigger. His advice was soundtracked by a staccato of automatic rifle fire from the adjacent shooting range, and the occasional rhythmic sound of shots from a handgun.
“Everyone comes in here wanting a Glock,” he told the group, “but really you just need something that feels comfortable when you hold it in your hands.”
The group of men, some from Israel’s religious Jewish communities, others dressed in T-shirts and smaller kippas, looked at the salesman as he talked them through choosing a handgun.
“I applied for my licence a month ago, and if the attack hadn’t happened, I’d have postponed this training – I wasn’t in a rush. Instead I decided to do it immediately,” said 29-year-old Yonatan Elbaz, a resident of the nearby Beitar Illit settlement. Elbaz chose an Israeli-made handgun because he “wanted to buy a gun from Eretz Yisrael”, he said, using a biblical name for Israeli people.
Since the unprecedented attack by Hamas militants on a string of Israeli towns near the Gaza border on 7 October that killed at least 1,400 Israelis, applications for gun licences across Israel have soared. Amid questions about the failure of Israel’s famed intelligence services and how the army failed to protect its citizens living near the Gaza border, growing numbers of Israelis have applied for a gun licence or rushed to buy a gun, citing a sense of unease and feeling a need to take matters of defence into their own hands.
Zin Levy, who had come to the shop to stock up on bullets and renew his gun licence ahead of schedule, pulled up his shirt to reveal a holstered Smith & Wesson. He had owned a gun for decades and had considered getting rid of it prior to the attack, he said. Now he carries it everywhere.
“I guess it serves as a kind of protection, as a deterrent. There’s a general feeling of insecurity,” he said. Among local groups in his neighbourhood in Jerusalem, he added, there was a request that anyone licensed to carry a gun bring their weapon to prayers at their local synagogue.
The gun shop, with its glass counters decorated with shiny spent bullet casings, sits within Caliber 3: a complex of firing ranges, a martial arts training room and a synagogue on the fringes of the Gush Etzion settlement, in the hills of the West Bank south of Bethlehem. Outside, teams of frowning Israeli soldiers waited to enter an adjacent firing range, standing in line next to hordes of citizens who had come to the centre for the day of training required to obtain a gun licence.
“Normally we have three training sessions per week for new licences, but right now, since 7 October, we are doing two per day,” said Yael Gat, the director of Caliber 3.
“A lot more people are coming – everyone wants a gun now. They’re shaken and they don’t feel secure. There’s a completely different feeling now; they want guns to protect themselves.”
Two days after Hamas attacked, Israel’s extreme-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, launched what his ministry called an “emergency operation to enable as many civilians as possible to arm themselves”. Any eligible Israeli citizen wanting to acquire a gun, he decreed, could undergo a telephone interview instead of an in-person one and be issued a firearms licence within a week.
Those already interested in getting a gun found that their applications were fast-tracked. Daniel Yashua, a 25-year-old member of the religious Haredi community that was rarely associated with Israeli military service or gun ownership in the past, leaned against a glass-fronted cabinet as he described how quickly he was able to obtain a licence for a personal weapon. The pistol at his waist, he explained, was from his job as a security guard at a religious boys’ school, but he wanted a weapon for personal use.
“I put in my paperwork a week before 7 October. Normally, with the system we have in Israel, this would take months. But right now it takes a few days,” he said. “I was always planning on doing it anyway, but I want to be safe.”
Nearby, a woman who lives in the Gush Etzion settlement and declined to give her name browsed the pistol selection while bouncing a toddler on her hip and looking at her phone.
“I’m a single mother and I have two kids,” she said. “I don’t really want to have a gun, but I want to have the option to protect my little girls.”
Gat said: “Right now everyone feels they need the security of a gun, especially women, as the men are away in the army at the moment. Everyone just wants to feel secure.”
Not all of those training and shopping at Caliber 3 live in the Israeli settlements covering the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law and are where incidents of settler violence towards Palestinians are on the rise.
The head of the Samaria regional council in the West Bank distributed 300 assault rifles to “civilian security squads” last week, in coordination with Ben-Gvir’s ministry and the Israeli military.
Above the display cases lining the gun shop floor, a wall-mounted television played a reel of CCTV footage of attacks accompanied by the words: “Israel is under attack: on roads, at bus stops, on trains, everywhere.”
“For us, the attack on 7 October was obviously bigger in scale, but it’s not new,” said Gat. “What we do at Caliber 3 is about helping people feel secure … The Israeli military can’t be everywhere all the time.”
