With arson and land grabs, Israeli settler attacks in West Bank hit record high

Boston Globe

a day ago

'Before the war, they harassed us, but not like this,' said Muhammad Sabr Asalaya, 56, the junkyard owner. 'Now they're trying to expel as many people as they can and annex as much land as they can.'
Such attacks were on the rise before Hamas led a deadly raid on Israel in 2023, setting off the war in Gaza, and they have since become the new normal across much of the West Bank. With the world's attention on Gaza, extremist settlers in the West Bank are carrying out one of the most violent and effective campaigns of intimidation and land-grabbing since Israel occupied the territory during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.
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Settlers carried out more than 750 attacks on Palestinians and their property during the first half of this year, an average of nearly 130 assaults a month, according to records compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. That is the highest monthly average since the UN started compiling such records in 2006.
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The Israeli military has recorded a similar surge in settler violence, though it has documented only 440 attacks in the same period, according to unpublished internal records reviewed by The New York Times. The military, which is the sovereign power in the occupied territory, says it tries to prevent the attacks, but a Times investigation last year found that Israeli authorities have for decades failed to impose meaningful restraints on criminal settlers. While Israel usually prosecutes Palestinians under military law, settlers are typically charged under civil law, if they are prosecuted at all.
For this article, reporters for the Times visited five villages recently attacked by settlers, reviewed security footage of several episodes and cellphone footage of others, and spoke with residents of the afflicted villages as well as Israeli military officers and settler leaders.
Our reporting found that masked settlers typically sneak into Palestinian villages in the dead of night, setting fire to vehicles and buildings. In some cases, they enter during the daylight hours, leading to confrontations with residents. Sometimes the clashes have involved the Israeli military, leading to the killings of several Palestinians, including a Palestinian American. In one daytime attack, settlers threw a firebomb into a child's bedroom, the child's family said.
The vast majority of the 700,000 Jewish Israelis who have settled since 1967 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem— in settlements considered illegal by most of the international community — are not involved in such violence. Mainstream settler leaders say they have a right to the land but oppose attacking Palestinians.
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Hard-line settler leaders acknowledge that their aim is to intimidate Palestinians into leaving strategic tracts of territory that many Palestinians hope may one day form the spine of a state.
'It's not the nicest thing to evacuate a population,' Ariel Danino, a prominent settler activist, said in an interview with the Times in 2023. 'But we're talking about a war over the land, and this is what is done during times of war.' In a recent call, Danino said he stood by the comments but declined a second interview.
For several years, the settlers had focused their intimidation on tiny, seminomadic herding communities along a remote chain of hilltops northeast of Ramallah, the main Palestinian city in the West Bank. That campaign has largely succeeded, forcing at least 38 communities to leave their hamlets and encampments since 2023, according to records compiled by B'Tselem, an Israeli rights group.
That has eroded the Palestinian presence there and ceded the surrounding slopes to settlers, who have seized the chance to build more small settlement outposts, or encampments.
Since the start of 2023, settlers have built more than 130 outposts, mostly in rural areas of the West Bank, that are technically unauthorized but often tolerated by the Israeli government. That is more than they had built in the previous two decades combined, according to research by Peace Now, an Israeli group that backs the creation of a Palestinian state.
Now, settlers have expanded their scope. They are increasingly targeting a cluster of wealthier, larger, and better-connected Palestinian villages closer to Ramallah — villages like Burqa and its neighbor, Beitin.
Before the junkyard attack in Burqa, masked settlers had, in fact, begun to rampage in Beitin. Just after 1 a.m., Abdallah Abbas, a retired teacher in that village, woke to find his sedan on fire and a Star of David sprayed on the wall of his garden.
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Roughly an hour later, security footage showed, two masked arsonists stole into the yard of Leila Jaraba's house, a few hundred yards away on the edge of the village. One sprayed the hood of Jaraba's car with something flammable, and his accomplice set the car on fire.
'We knew our turn would come,' said Jaraba, 28, who was cowering inside with her husband and two sons, ages 2 and 4 months. 'They want to take this land; they want to kick us out.'
About an hour later, masked settlers entered Burqa and attacked Sabr Asalaya's junkyard. Villagers said in interviews that they suspected the same group of settlers might have moved from place to place, wreaking havoc. This sequence of attacks was just a snapshot of a broader pattern of violence in the area.
In the first half of 2025, there were an average of 17 attacks a month in this approximately 40-square-mile area, according to the UN. That was nearly twice the monthly rate in 2024 and roughly five times as many as in 2022.
The attacks have occurred against the backdrop of intensifying efforts by the Israeli government, which is partly led by longtime settler activists, to entrench its grip on the West Bank.
Since entering office in late 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have authorized more than 30 settlements, some of which were previously built without government permission and have been granted retroactive authorization. It is the largest wave of government-led settlement activity since before the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.
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Simultaneously, the Israeli military has captured and demolished key urban neighborhoods in the northern West Bank that are technically administered by the Palestinian Authority, a semiautonomous institution that oversees civil governance in Palestinian cities. The military has also installed hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints across the territory.
The Israeli military defends its actions as a means of containing Palestinian militant groups that launch terrorist attacks on Israelis. But it has further complicated the lives of most Palestinians in the West Bank, stifled the economy, left tens of thousands of people homeless, and made it even harder for most Palestinians to journey to nearby cities.
In villages like Burqa, settlers' attacks make life especially untenable. Repeated arson attacks have damaged scores of used cars that Sabr Asalaya, the junkyard owner, said he had bought from dealers in Israel.
'We are encircled,' Sabr Asalaya said. 'We can't even herd our cattle. We're locked in.'