Armed colonists burn, beat, and kill with near-total impunity – because their violence serves a larger system of land theft and expulsion
Almost daily, there are updates on brutal attacks by armed Israeli settlers – really, colonists – against Palestinians. They shoot or ferociously beat – sometimes to the point of murder – Palestinian civilians, male and female, young and old, including entire families.
These attacks have been occurring for decades. I’ve written about them many times, including what I saw in different regions of the West Bank during my eight months there in 2007. Back then, the violence was already horrific. Now, the attacks are exponentially more frequent. The end goal is clear – drive the Palestinians permanently off their own land.
While many rightly note the increase of such attacks since 2023, and even more so following the Israeli-US attack on Iran, the drastic increase in colonist attacks began in 2021 and has continued to increase up to the present.
In November 2021, the Israeli publication Haaretz noted a 150% rise in settler attacks from 2019. A United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report posted in September 2023 likewise showed an increase in attacks from 2021 and throughout 2022. It noted, “Three settler related incidents per day occurred on average in the first eight months of 2023 compared to an average of two per day in 2022 and one per day the year before. This is the highest daily average of settler-related incidents affecting Palestinians since the UN started recording this data in 2006.”
The independent human rights organization and legal center Adalah reported in October 2023 on new regulations passed by the Israeli Knesset enabling still more Jewish Israelis to acquire and carry guns, an initiative put forth by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir. This is on top of the fact that illegal Jewish colonists have already carried and used guns against Palestinian civilians for decades.
Adalah noted, “By labeling Palestinians as ‘enemies’, Ben-Gvir, who does not conceal his racist views towards Palestinians, seeks to legitimize the blanket impunity granted to both Israel’s armed forces and ruthless Jewish-Israeli vigilantes for killing and injuring Palestinians.”
Arson crimes committed by colonists in recent months include setting fire to homes and vehicles in the southern community of Susiya; to homes in the Jenin region; setting fire to and burning the emergency room of a Palestinian Medical Relief clinic in the Nablus area; torching homes and vehicles in Tayasir village east of Tubas (and slashing open the forehead of a Palestinian resident) – to list just a handful of cases. Back in 2014, colonists kidnapped and deliberately burned a young teenager alive. In 2015, they firebombed a Palestinian home and burned to death a year-old infant inside.
In February, The Cradle reported that Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, downgraded attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians from ‘terror attacks’ to ‘serious incidents’.
In March, swarms of Israeli colonists raided Palestinian villages near an illegal colony between Nablus and Jenin, setting homes, vehicles, and property ablaze, according to Palestinians from the region who also said Israeli forces prevented the entry of firefighters and ambulances.
“Israeli forces’ jeeps came with the settlers. Israeli forces chased people and opened fire on them to ensure they couldn’t fight off the settlers,” an older resident testified.
From inside his burnt-out house, another man said, “The settlers surrounded the house, burned it by throwing Molotov cocktails. Israeli forces were nearby, a drone was filming. This went on for 30 minutes. I was on the roof with my children, under attack, while the house was burning.”
Israeli NGO Yesh Din noted in January 2026, “Ideologically motivated violence by Israeli citizens against Palestinians has reached a record high over the past two years; attacks against Palestinians and their property, some deadly, throughout the West Bank now occur daily.”
Since 2005, the organization has been documenting offenses committed by Israeli civilians, settlers, and others, against Palestinians in the West Bank. They noted, “Over twenty years of monitoring of the outcomes of investigations into ideologically motivated crime against Palestinians reveals that the State of Israel breaches its obligation under both Israeli and international law to protect Palestinians in the West Bank from harm.”
According to Yesh Din, since 2005, only 3% of the investigation files opened into such crimes against Palestinians led to full or partial convictions. They rightly maintain that this isn’t mere oversight, but rather “evidence that Israel intentionally enables the violence perpetrated against defenseless civilians.”
By mid-April, Yesh Din reported 378 incidents of “extremist settler violence against Palestinians and their property in the West Bank,” resulting in eight Palestinians shot dead and 200 injured by colonists during the 40 days of the US-Israeli bombardment of Iran alone.
Masafer Yatta: One region under sustained colonist attacks
I spent several months in the village of Susiya, in the Masafer Yatta region in South Hebron Hills, back in 2007. The tent settlement (an inadequate ramshackle replacement for the homes Palestinians were unjustly evicted from in the ’80s and ’90s) was constantly under attack from both Israeli settlers and soldiers. One of the elderly Palestinian grandfathers had been brutally beaten by a gang of seven in 2006, the attackers badly injuring his leg. In 2008, he and his wife were again savagely attacked and beaten by colonists, his wife hospitalized for several days as a result. The assailants were caught on video but were never held accountable.
Back then, we observed colonists stealing the farmland of elderly Palestinian deed-holders, constantly harassing and attacking the Susiya Palestinians, and Israeli military and police doing nothing to prevent the attacks.
Fast forward to recent years, and the attacks are more brazen and brutal, the army and police more complicit.
Palestinian activists from the region have filmed some of the extremely violent attacks. In July 2025, a gun-wielding colonist was filmed shooting wildly at Palestinians. Were the situation reversed, the shooter would be dead or rotting, tortured, in an Israeli prison. In February 2026, footage shows what locals said were more than 30 armed colonists carrying out a coordinated, attack on Palestinian families in Susiya, “throwing explosives at a home with a family inside, and smashing security cameras with stones to hide the crime.”
It is undeniable such attacks are an unofficial policy for Israeli illegal expansionism, as Yesh Din noted in January 2026, stating, “settler violence serves Israel’s objectives to expand its control over the occupied territory by terrorizing and exercising violence against Palestinians.”
The 2021 Haaretz article also cited a senior Israeli security figure saying, “These are not attacks by bored children. You have to call things by their name. In some of the cases it’s simply Jewish terrorism.”
Complete impunity
Palestinian Christian human rights advocate Ihab Hassan, in an April 2026 post about Israeli colonist attacks, noted, “If a Palestinian tries to defend his home from these terrorists, he will be killed or imprisoned for life. If settlers shoot and kill Palestinians in their own homes, nothing will happen to them. What should we call a system that punishes victims and grants criminals full impunity based on religion, race, and nationality?”
Indeed, in April, Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem reported on an Israeli colonist invasion of a Palestinian village “as part of ongoing efforts to take it over,” noting, “Residents who tried to fend them off with stones came under heavy fire from a settler on military reserve duty who joined his friends as reinforcement. One of the bullets fatally hit Ali Hamadneh, 23, in the back while he was running away and posed no danger, as is evident in footage of the incident.”
B’Tselem noted that the Israeli army spokesperson later claimed that a reservist soldier carried out a “suspect-arrest procedure that included firing in the air and then firing at one of the stone-throwers.”
Recently, the Italian magazine L’Espresso published a disturbing cover photo featuring a sneering Israeli soldier taunting a Palestinian woman. Aptly titled ‘Abuse’, the image was widely shared on X, sending indignant Israeli propagandists into overdrive. They tried to claim the image was fake, but that matter was settled when L’Espresso released the accompanying video of the soldier menacing the woman.
The Israeli ambassador to Italy claimed the photo was “anti-Semitic.” This claim was widely contested with still further examples of crazed-looking Jewish colonists harassing Palestinian civilians.
For Palestinians who have been enduring the hateful, often deadly, settler attacks for decades, it is good that the wider world is finally becoming aware of both the settlers’ crimes and the Israeli police and army’s complicity. But awareness isn’t enough. Israel will never hold them accountable, much less stop them. They do the dirty work of Israeli expansionism.
In January 2026, Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Evangelical Lutheran pastor in Ramallah and director of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice, posted, “Yesterday, Zionist settler thugs attacked the village of Birzeit, near Ramallah… When one woman from the village dared to shout at them and confront them, the settlers attacked her.” The woman ended up in intensive care and was eventually stabilized. But, according to Isaac, instead of arresting the attackers, Israeli forces arrested her son, who tried to defend his mother. Isaac then writes: “Let us call this what it is: Zionist terrorism. The problem is not only the settlers. The problem is the system that empowers them. The problem is the immunity they enjoy. Lord, have mercy.”
He is correct. It is the system which enables and encourages illegal Israeli colonists to attack, maim, and kill Palestinian civilians. The question is when, or if, these criminals will ever be stopped, much less held to justice.
