How Palestinians in the West Bank became so vulnerable to Israeli settler terror
Israeli soldiers prevent displaced Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin from getting back to their homes in the Jenin refugee camp, on 19 February 2025
Qassam Muaddi writes in Mondoweiss on 30 July 2026:
Palestinians in the West Bank are at their weakest point in history, and today they’re staring down Israel’s accelerating campaign to ethnically cleanse the rest of Palestine, with the ghost of a second Nakba looming over the territory’s villages.
Israeli settler pogroms reached an all-time high late last week as settlers terrorized Palestinians across villages and towns from Nablus in the north to Masafer Yatta in the south, including in areas under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Time and again, the Israeli army — present at most settler rampages — has made clear that intervening to halt settler violence is not among its functions. If anything, it is ready to inflict harsh collective punishment against any Palestinian community that dares to defend itself in response. Now the army is gearing up to launch a wide-scale military operation across the entire West Bank in tandem with the ongoing pogroms.
These escalations come days after a settler raid on the Palestinian village of Til, south of Nablus, left four Palestinians and two Israelis dead after one Palestinian resident snatched a rifle from one of the attacking settlers and shot him, while nearby Israeli soldiers also opened fire. It remains unclear whether the second settler killed in the same melee died at Palestinian or Israeli hands.
Yet immediately after the events at Til, the Israeli government and several Israeli politicians rallied public opinion behind the narrative that the settlers were killed in a Palestinian “terrorist attack” on Israeli “hikers,” demanding large-scale military action to “dismantle terrorist infrastructure” across several Palestinian towns, according to a joint statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz.