Leader of the far-right Jewish Power party in Israel, national-security minister, and a member of Binyamin Netanyahu's coalition. He commands the police, including in the occupied West Bank, where he has repeatedly praised violent officers. He has been convicted by Israeli courts of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist group, and indicted dozens of times for inciting violence. In June 2025 Britain and other Western allies imposed personal sanctions on him and Bezalel Smotrich.
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have repeatedly called on Netanyahu to formally annex the West Bank. Under pressure from Arab countries, Donald Trump has publicly ruled out such a step.
As national-security minister Ben-Gvir oversees Israel's prison system. After Hamas's attack on October 7th 2023 he made good on a campaign promise to impose harsher conditions on Palestinian prisoners held on terror charges: cells have been stripped of furniture, rations cut to levels the Israeli Supreme Court ruled insufficient for "a basic level of existence", and detainees have been beaten and deprived of medical treatment and visits by lawyers or the Red Cross. According to Physicians for Human Rights, at least 98 Palestinian prisoners died in the first two years of the Gaza war. Ben-Gvir has prevented prison inspections required by Israeli law, but invited friendly reporters to film prisoners bound prostrate for hours with blaring music. Five soldiers were charged after a Sde Teiman sexual-assault investigation in July 2024; the army advocate-general who charged them was fired, then arrested for leaking video of the incident, and her successor dropped the charges. He briefly resigned in January 2025 over a short-lived Gaza ceasefire; Netanyahu kept the post open until his return two months later.
Comedy, like Medicine, was never meant to be practiced by the general public.