Why the UK allows Israeli settlers to terrorise the West Bank
A Palestinian farmer confront an Israeli settler during the olive harvest in the village of Silwad, in the occupied West Bank, on 29 October 2025
Peter Oborne writes in Middle East Eye on 30 October 2025:
Imagine you are a farmer living in a village in the occupied West Bank. You wake up one morning and notice a couple of caravans on a nearby hill: an illegal settlement.
The settlers move down the hill. They are armed. Many wear military uniforms. At first, they harass and threaten you. They fire warning shots if you go out to cultivate your fields.
More caravans turn up, and the settlers invade your village. They destroy your agricultural equipment, steal your livestock, and shoot holes in the water tank.
Then they beat you with iron bars. They might beat your wife, too, and intimidate your children. They enter your home. They rummage through your possessions. They steal your money, papers, jewellery and household appliances. If you have a car, they burn it. They steal your water.
If you call the police, nobody comes. If you resist, settlers call in the Israeli army. The soldiers arrest you, and treat the settlers as victims.
Forcible displacement
Your family has thrived in the slopes and grazing grounds of the West Bank hills since time immemorial. You refuse to be pushed out by this group of violent thugs from Brooklyn or eastern Europe.
Another outpost appears. More intimidation. More harassment. Eventually, you surrender. You and your family move out. Now you are scraping a living, if you are lucky, on the edges of a town. Your memories, your history, your songs and your culture have disappeared. You have no hope, no livelihood, no future. It’s another settler victory.
Stories like these happen every day across the occupied West Bank.
According to a brilliant report by Hagar Shezaf in Haaretz (upon which I have drawn heavily for this piece), more than 80 Palestinian communities have been erased since 7 October 2023.
The United Nations says that in the first half of this year, 757 settler attacks resulted in Palestinian casualties or property damage – around four a day on average. And that’s likely an undercount, as many incidents go unreported. Since 7 October 2023, Israeli demolitions have displaced more than 2,900 Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, according to the UN, while “a further 2,400 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, have been forcibly displaced as a result of the actions of Israeli settlers”.
The UN grimly notes: “Permanently displacing the civilian population within occupied territory amounts to unlawful transfer, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention and, depending on the circumstances, may also amount to a crime against humanity.”