All eyes on Gaza, but West Bank bloodshed and violence spike amid deadly settler attacks

Daily Maverick

28-04-2025

With Donald Trump continuing his support for Israel, the deaths and destruction in Gaza continue unabated. But Israeli military and settlers are doing much the same to Palestinians elsewhere too.
Over the past 18 months Israel has destroyed most of Gaza's infrastructure, including parts of its last functioning hospital on Sunday, 13 April. Israel claimed yet again, without providing any evidence, that Hamas was using the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital as a command centre.
US President Donald Trump enforced a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on 19 January. It provided momentary relief to Gazans as aid could enter the territory unrestricted by the Israeli military, and it brought a temporary halt to the unrelenting bombardment of Gaza, which has left well more than 50,000 people dead, most of them civilians.
Israel, however, violated several terms of the ceasefire by continuing to kill Gazans, albeit on a limited scale, and refusing to allow the entry of heavy mechanical equipment for clearing rubble, as well as temporary housing units to house some of the hundreds of thousands of homeless. Tel Aviv officially resumed its onslaught on the besieged territory on 2 March and no aid has entered since.
Israel's opposition parties, Israeli intelligence and the families of the hostages have accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government of deliberately violating the ceasefire because he wants to stay in power as he faces corruption charges.
The resumption of the war followed Hamas's refusal to allow an amendment to the original ceasefire agreement, which had been agreed to by both Israel and the US. Instead, Hamas insisted on moving on to phase two of the agreement, which involved the release of all living Israeli hostages, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and negotiations to end the war.
Despite enforcing the temporary ceasefire, Trump has endorsed and greenlighted Israel's resumption of its military campaign without any restrictions. He has approved the renewed delivery of two-thousand-pound bombs to Israel, reversing a temporary restriction on them by his predecessor, Joe Biden.
The Biden administration, despite its strong support of Israel, had been concerned about the indiscriminate use of these bombs, which have obliterated entire neighbourhoods in Gaza, slaughtering thousands of civilians in the pursuit of Hamas members.
Both the former Biden administration and Trump's have bypassed the US's Leahy Law, which prohibits the sale of weapons to countries that are in violation of human rights abuses. Trump recently signed a new $13-billion arms deal with Israel despite a plethora of human rights groups outlining serious human rights violations in both Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
His administration has also supported Israel's ban on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency by not reversing Washington's defunding of the organisation despite other Western countries resuming theirs.
The UN agency provides medical, educational and other relief services to millions of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. Israel accused it of being involved in Hamas's 2023 attack, but investigations by the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services found that only nine out of more than 30,000 employees in the Middle East (3,000 in Gaza) had possibly been involved.
Washington has also provided moral support for Israel's war crimes. Most recently, a Trump spokesperson blamed Hamas for the deaths of 15 Palestinian medics and relief responders after Israeli troops opened fire on their convoy, killing them and crushing their vehicles before burying them in a mass grave, along with their vehicles. The spokesperson ignored a survivor's eyewitness account as well as those of a UN team working on the ground.
Israel's government has widely welcomed Trump's support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the removal of the population to create a new Mediterranean real estate landscape. In fact, the Israeli Intelligence Ministry argued for the mass expulsion of Palestinians at the beginning of the war.
Israel has already started implementing plans for what it calls the 'voluntary transfer' of Palestinians. But it has wiped out swathes of Gaza, destroying most of its infrastructure, implementing security zones and increasingly limiting the spaces Gazans are allowed to be in, so nothing about it seems voluntary.
The Dahiya doctrine, formulated by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of general staff Gadi Eizenkot during a previous war with Lebanon, argues for the use of disproportionate force to pressure the civilian population into turning against Israel's enemies. It explains Israel's approach in Gaza.
Trump has also greenlighted Israel's continued occupation of parts of southern Lebanon in violation of the ceasefire with Beirut, as well as the IDF's expanded presence in Syria beyond its illegal occupation of the Golan Heights.
It's not just Gaza
Although the situation in Gaza has been covered extensively by the international media, the bloodshed and violence against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as well as their mass displacement, have been getting less attention. And yet it has continued unabated as Israel has vowed to annex the illegally occupied territory.
Even before Hamas's 2023 attack, Israeli settler attacks, with the protection and support of the Israeli army, on Palestinians and their property had escalated.
'Since early 2023, the area of Masafer Yatta in the south Hebron hills has seen a sharp and sustained escalation in settler violence, resulting in both casualties and widespread property damage,' reported the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
This year, between 25 March and 7 April, the OCHA documented 44 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. These attacks resulted in casualties or property damage in 35 Palestinian communities across the West Bank, leading to the injury of 25 Palestinians, including five children and one foreigner.
During the past few weeks alone the OCHA reported at least nine incidents – some occurring more than once in the same community – involving settlers breaking into Palestinian communities, homes or animal shelters, often at night or in the early hours. At least 10 homes and 290 trees and saplings have been vandalised or uprooted and six vehicles, a chicken coop and agricultural equipment were completely or partially burned.
Some of the attacks have included Israeli settlers slitting the throats of animals, beating them to death with clubs, poisoning them, stealing or deliberately running them over, leaving dying and injured animals in the streets.
Since the beginning of 2009, Israel has destroyed thousands of Palestinian structures, including those built by the international community, and displaced thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank.
The territory is divided into three areas, A B and C. Area C, which comprises 60% of the territory, is where Palestinians are restricted. It is reserved almost exclusively for Israeli settlement despite the International Court of Justice ruling Israel's West Bank occupation is illegal.
Since the Gaza war started, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced from several refugee camps and surrounds in the northern West Bank as the Israeli military carries out the extensive destruction of homes and buildings to prevent Palestinians from returning.
Life and death in the West Bank
More than 900 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank between 7 October 2023 and 6 April 2025, including at least 17 children. Omar Rabea, a 14-year-old Palestinian-American boy, was shot dead about two weeks ago in the village of Turmus'ayya, north of Ramallah, by Israeli forces after they accused him of 'terrorism' and throwing stones towards a nearby highway. Omar died in a hail of bullets and two other teens with him were seriously injured.
He is one of a number of Palestinian-Americans shot dead by Israeli soldiers in highly disputed circumstances. After Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in 2022, former Israeli defence minister Benny Gantz said Israel would not participate in an investigation into her death. But several investigations by CNN and others found that she had been deliberately shot in a targeted killing.
Palestinian children have also regularly been targeted by Israeli forces. They include two children, aged 12 and 13, who were shot in the back earlier in 2025. The Palestinian arm of the NGO Defence for Children International has said children are regularly targeted.
This reporter has just spent several months travelling around the West Bank and witnessing some of the daily humiliations and dangers Palestinians face. These have included regular military raids in camps and at water tanks, where soldiers shot indiscriminately at people, arrested young men and forced them to sit in the sun with their hands zip-tied for many hours before releasing them without charges.
This reporter has also watched long queues of cars being held up for hours at checkpoints without being searched or checked, especially during Ramadan, as tired and hungry Palestinians waited to break their fast. Heavy military armoured vehicles deliberately smashed into parked cars and at other times crashed into moving vehicles, killing and injuring drivers and their passengers.
Other incidents involved the regular theft of money and jewellery from homes, car tyres being slashed and homes trashed in places such as Jenin and other refugee camps where Israeli soldiers had set up base. One house was badly damaged, with faeces left on the bathroom floor after the toilet and cupboards were smashed.
In addition to Israeli soldiers and settlers' harassment of Palestinian and foreign journalists, Israeli and foreign activists have been shot dead, deported or held and beaten as they tried to bear witness. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.