The evening Israel declared war on Hamas in Gaza, armed Jewish settlers descended on the Palestinian village of Wadi al-Seeq in the occupied West Bank.
The village’s children tremble with fear as their parents recount how the settlers dragged three men from their families, stripped them to their underwear, blindfolded them with their own T-shirts and took turns beating them. When Abu Hassan, a 58-year-old Bedouin goatherd, begged for mercy and pointed to a scar from a recent heart surgery, one of the Israelis slammed a rifle butt into his chest. Then, they urinated on him.
“Leave! Go to Jordan, go wherever,” he remembers them shouting. “Or we will kill you.”
The village’s 30 families gathered what they could and fled, setting up camp on an open plain two hours away near the town of Taybeh, their tents billowing in the wind. Driven from their home of 21 years, and still fearful of every approaching car, the patriarch of the family, Mohammed Arrarah, 68, wondered aloud: “What is to be our fate?”
As the Israeli army has waged war in Hamas-controlled Gaza, it has placed the West Bank, occupied since 1967, under a tight security blanket. In tactics last seen during the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising that began in 2000, it has closed off most travel between cities, blocked off exits from some refugee camps, and sent troops into the heart of Palestinian cities such as Jenin and Nablus, seeking to root out fledgling militias.
Gunfights erupt every few hours, and the Israeli military has had to rely on air support for the first time in years to buttress its ground incursions in refugee camps, where an active black market for weapons has gone into overdrive, according to one arms smuggler.
Israel launched an aerial and ground offensive into Gaza in response to Hamas’s devastating October 7 attack on Israeli towns and military posts, which Israeli officials say killed 1,400 people. It was the deadliest attack in Israel’s history and traumatised and enraged the nation. More than 8,500 people have been killed in the bombardment of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, according to Palestinian officials.
At least 125 Palestinians have also been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army and armed settlers in the weeks since, according to data from local health authorities and the UN. Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been forced from their villages by armed settlers, mostly in a wide swath of land dubbed Area C where the Israeli army has direct authority.
The tightened restrictions have triggered large protests, drawing several thousand people. But the visible presence of Israeli soldiers has kept many at home out of fear. “They’ve put us in a pressure cooker and lit a fire under us,” said Jamal, 28, who lost his job as a pharmacist in Jerusalem because he has been unable to leave the West Bank.
At the same time, armed settlers have stepped up their assaults on Palestinians, especially those in remote villages. The EU on Wednesday referred to these assaults as “settler terrorism”, asking Israel to rein them in.
UN data shows that assaults have doubled since the Hamas attack, and human rights groups such as Israel’s Yesh Din have documented a rise in cases where Israeli soldiers — including settlers who have been called up for reserve duty — either stood by, or have intervened only to aid the settlers.
“The settlers already know they have impunity as civilians, now they have it as soldiers too,” said Yahav Erez, the international advocacy co-ordinator at Yesh Din, noting how very few cases of settler or soldier violence were investigated, let alone prosecuted.
Yesh Din said it could identify one single Israeli who had been questioned for attacks on Palestinians — an arrest that came the day after US president Joe Biden said extremist settlers “have to be held to account”.
Meanwhile, 1,512 Palestinians have been arrested since October 7, according to prisons data given to Hamoked, an Israeli NGO. More than 700 are being held without charges.
The settlers gleefully share videos of assaults on Telegram channels with tens of thousands of subscribers. Abu Hassan’s beating was photographed by his attackers, and in another video from Hebron this week, men in Israeli military uniforms are heard laughing as they beat, bind and blindfold Palestinian men, several of them stripped naked.
As one of them bends over to kick a Palestinian, he can be seen wearing the broad knitted kippa favoured by religious nationalist settlers. The Israeli military said that “the conduct of the force that emerges from the footage is deplorable and does not comply with the army’s orders”, and that it was investigating the incident.
Israel Defense Forces spokesman Richard Hecht did not respond to detailed queries seeking comment on several other incidents. He had earlier stressed that the “IDF is the sovereign in Judea and Samaria”, using the Israeli expression for the occupied West Bank. As sovereign, the IDF is obliged by international and Israeli law to protect civilians, including Palestinians.
The IDF has also reported several violent incidents against settlers, including stabbings, car ramming and attacks, including an IED, on Israeli soldiers and border police in their incursions into Palestinian cities. In the occupied West Bank, one Israeli soldier has been killed since Oct 7.
The closures and restrictions have further depressed the West Bank’s economy. On the highway to Nablus, the normally vibrant market town of Huwarra is deserted, its streets taken over by stray dogs and Israeli soldiers. On the walls, posters have been plastered with a picture of a lion, quoting Talmudic scripture that Israelis have long used to justify pre-emptive killing: “Rise Up and Kill First.”
Moves by Israel’s far-right finance minister, a settler himself, to stop the transfer of about $500mn to the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank, will deliver a further economic hit. Israel collects the money from customs and other taxes on behalf of the PA, which uses the funds to pay salaries and run their limited administration.
“We [will not] transfer money to this despicable enemy,” Bezalel Smotrich said, referring to the PA, a rival to Hamas.
Cutting funds to the PA, choking the economy and the forced displacement of Palestinians, in addition to settlers stopping Palestinians from the annual olive harvest in October, creates an explosive situation in the West Bank, warn international observers and Palestinians.
“The West Bank is not going to remain calm at all — they are dividing us between the cities, the refugee camps and the villages,” said Jamal Tirawi, a one-time militant convicted of orchestrating a suicide bombing, and now a Palestinian politician with influence over the refugee camps. “We’re witnessing a new era here — the settlers see a chance to end the whole Palestinian project, to clip both wings of Palestinians, one in Gaza, and the other in the West Bank.”
The surge in violence has left Abdel Hakim Wadi, 52, mourning the loss of his brother and nephew. On October 11, after armed settlers shot four people in his village of Qusra, his brother Ibrahim and 26-year-old Ahmed decided to help with the funeral.
Both were scions of a proud political family, with photographs of their meetings with Jordan’s King Abdullah and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in their living rooms. Ibrahim was a chemist, and Ahmed, an avid traveller and law student.
They went to a nearby hospital in a small convoy, including ambulances to carry the dead, hoping to avoid the settlers living nearby on land confiscated from Qusra village. On their way back, said Wadi, they were asked by an Israeli military liaison to change their route.
They drove straight into an ambush, Wadi said, with the settlers blocking the road and burning tyres. Rifle and pistol fire came from a grove of olive trees nearby. “They were screaming, burn the ambulance, burn the bodies,” he said.
Dashcam footage at the chaotic scene shows Israeli soldiers firing near the Palestinians, as Wadi said his brother tried to create a path for the ambulances. He turned around to see Ibrahim crumple from a gunshot wound. His nephew ran for his car, but was shot dead before he reached it.
“It was all over in seconds,” Wadi said, his voice trailing off. “I don’t even support Hamas, and this is what they’ve done to me.”
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