Escalating settler attacks, settlement expansion entrench annexation & forced displacement in West Bank
Illegal settlers, covering their faces with masks, attack Palestinian farmers, journalists and foreign activists with sticks and stones in Beita, West Bank on 8 November 2025
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor writes on 9 November 2025:
The escalation of settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, which intensified during the olive harvest season, is occurring without any deterrence or accountability, and often under the direct protection of the Israeli army. This forms part of a deliberate and systematic policy that uses settler violence to reinforce Israeli control, alongside rapid settlement expansion and land expropriation to impose de facto annexation and displace Palestinian residents.
The systematic escalation forms part of a broader effort to consolidate Israeli control over the West Bank by depopulating it and expanding the territorial and operational influence of settlements. This includes turning settlers into practical extensions of the army in attacks and land seizure operations, while imposing new patterns of field control that entrench separation and isolation between Palestinian communities, undermining any possibility of establishing a contiguous or independent Palestinian entity.
Euro-Med Monitor’s field team has documented a marked increase in settler attacks against Palestinians in recent weeks, particularly farmers. These attacks have included physical assault, theft of olive harvests, burning of trees, destruction of property, and preventing access to agricultural land. Dozens of incidents took place under the direct protection of Israeli forces, with soldiers participating in some of them, clearly indicating an integrated system aimed at persecuting and displacing Palestinians.
On 3 November, Euro-Med Monitor documented the killing of Palestinian Ahmad Rebhi al-Atrash by an Israeli settler on Road 35 near the entrance to Ras al Jura, north of Hebron. Israeli authorities attempted to justify the killing by alleging, without evidence, that he was trying to steal the settler’s car. Israeli forces prevented a Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance crew from reaching him, causing him to bleed to death, then withheld his body before handing it over the following day.
The killing of al-Atrash raises the number of Palestinians killed by settlers to 13 since the beginning of 2025 and 37 since October 2023, an unprecedented toll that reflects a dangerous escalation in violence, shifting from attacks on property to the direct taking of lives.
Euro-Med Monitor documented 324 settler attacks over 39 days, from the beginning of October until the evening of 8 November, averaging eight attacks per day. Settler violence during the current olive harvest season is the highest in years, with approximately 163 incidents resulting in injuries to more than 143 Palestinians and the destruction of over 4,200 trees and saplings across 77 West Bank villages.
The attacks carried out by organised, militia-like armed settlers who launch from settlements and illegal outposts throughout the West Bank have become a systematic practice of armed violence against Palestinian civilians. These groups operate in close coordination with, and under the protection of, the Israeli army, raiding Palestinian villages and towns, attacking homes and vehicles, assaulting residents, and threatening them with expulsion. This is part of a policy aimed at spreading fear and forcibly displacing residents living near settlements, alongside the erection of tents on Palestinian agricultural land to establish new outposts that serve as bases for further attacks and expand Israeli control over the land.
On Saturday evening, groups of armed settlers attacked Palestinian homes in Raba village, southeast of Jenin, and assaulted residents under the protection of Israeli forces. Settlers also stormed Horvat Maon, east of Yatta in Hebron, where they attacked and beat residents and released their livestock onto agricultural lands belonging to the Makhamra family before assaulting family members present on their land. Israeli forces joined the attack and detained three young men from the family after beating them. In another incident, settlers cut down 20 productive olive trees on land belonging to a farmer from the Ajaj family in Deir Jarir, east of Ramallah.