‘The fire devoured everything’: Israeli settlers unleash wave of arson attacks
Ahmad Mousa Al-Mash’ala next to a van torched by Israeli settlers during an arson attack in the West Bank village of Jaba, 18 November 2025
Basel Adra reports in +972 on 18 November 2025:
On Monday [17 November] evening, shortly after Israeli authorities carried out a rare evacuation of an illegal settler outpost, dozens of settlers stormed the eastern edge of Jaba, a Palestinian village near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. They arrived by car, then fanned out on foot in coordinated groups, torching property and spraying graffiti reading, “Death to Arabs,” “Revenge,” and “A Jew doesn’t evict a Jew” — the latter likely in reference to the evacuation and recent police arrests of settlers.
The attack lasted only minutes, but the damage was severe: eight cars burned or smashed and seven homes vandalized, several of them set ablaze.
In the compound of 50-year-old Ahmad Mousa Al-Mash’ala, settlers torched three vehicles — including a work van belonging to a friend — and attempted to set two homes on fire. “We saw more than 50 settlers,” Al-Mash’ala said. “Two reached the balcony [of my home]. One sprayed a chemical, the other lit it. The fire caught instantly.”
He and his sons raced to pour water from inside, managing to stop the flames from reaching the house. In his son’s adjacent home, metal window bars prevented a burning object from landing inside.
Below, a settler shouted at them, “We’ll do to you what we did to the Dawabsheh family.” Palestinians have learned to interpret this threat literally: In July 2015, settlers firebombed two homes in the village of Duma, killing Sa’ad and Reham Dawabsheh and their 18-month-old son Ali.