‘Darkness, flames, screaming’: Palestinian village terrorized by Israeli settlers
Fire damage to a home following an Israeli settler pogrom in the Palestinian village of Tuba, Masafer Yatta
Basel Adra reports in +972 on 7 August 2026:
The WhatsApp message arrived at 9:50 p.m. on Wednesday. It was a desperate plea for help from Hamza Abu Jundiya, a 22-year-old from the village of Tuba in Masafer Yatta: “The settlers are setting the houses on fire.”
At 10:11 p.m., another message: “Send ambulances and firefighters. There are injured children and houses are burning.”
Those few words captured the terror unfolding that night in the small village, located along the southern edge of the occupied West Bank. It has been the target of arson attacks by Israeli settlers before, but this appeared to be on a different scale.
Getting to Tuba is never easy. The dirt road leading to the village has been left damaged and eroded by winter rains because Palestinians are forbidden from repairing it; any such action would be considered “illegal construction” in an area where permits are impossible to come by. In the best-case scenario, the journey takes around 30 minutes.
From my own village of At-Tuwani, it once took only five to 10 minutes. But the establishment of the Havat Ma’on outpost and Ma’on settlement cut off our access to the direct road, leaving Tuba increasingly isolated whenever violence erupts.
For the families trapped inside their homes that night, every passing minute felt endless. Rana Maghnam, 37, was sitting in the guest room with her 7-year-old stepdaughter, Razan, when the attack began.
“I looked through the window and saw a group of settlers running down the hill,” she recounted. “I stepped outside, and the first settler who reached our house came straight toward us. He was carrying a stick and immediately started beating me while the girls hid behind me. “We ran into another room to protect ourselves, but the settler followed us,” Maghnam continued. “Razan was struck by a stone thrown from outside the house that hit her nose and upper lip. Then the settler caught up with us again and beat me on my head and my arm.”
The assault left Maghnam with fractured fingers in her right hand and a deep head wound that required eight stitches. She was evacuated to a hospital in the nearest city of Yatta, where she received emergency treatment. But long after the wounds had been stitched up, the memories of that night remained impossible to erase.
She still struggles to describe the fear of seeing dozens of Israeli settlers raiding her village. “It was a terrifying night. The sounds of screaming, crying, people being beaten, and windows shattering echoed all around. Flames rose from the [guest] room where we had been sitting, and smoke seeped into the room where we hid after they set fire to the chairs, sofas, and wooden furniture outside the house.”