Israel has intensified its assault on the occupied West Bank. According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 1,111 Palestinians, at least 243 of them children, have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the start of the war in Gaza, at least 65 of them since the beginning of 2026.
Violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property has surged to record levels. OCHA documented more than 1,800 attacks in 2025 that resulted in casualties or property damage across about 280 communities in the West Bank—an average of five incidents a day, the highest daily rate since records began in 2006. Attacks are up more than 50 percent in the first six months of this year.
The latest clash was provoked by armed settlers on Friday night, in which two Israelis and four Palestinians were killed. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) arrested dozens of people around the village of Tell near the West Bank city of Nablus. Troops carried out mass raids in Jenin, Ramallah, Tulkarem and the southern West Bank, setting up checkpoints and closing gates across the West Bank. The IDF said it was bolstering its forces in the West Bank by five companies and cancelling weekend leave for troops.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu backed the settlers, pledging he would take “powerful action” in response, including demolishing the home of the family of one of the Palestinians involved and accelerating the approval of construction of more Israeli settlements in the area. In so doing, he acknowledged that settler violence, far from being the work of a “few bad apples” is nothing short of a state-backed policy in pursuit of ethnic cleansing.
Last week, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced plans for $400 million in funding for the construction of dozens of new illegal settlements in the West Bank, as Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government rushes to expand its control of land in the West Bank and drive out Palestinians before elections scheduled for October.
This comes amid an unprecedented surge in Israeli settlement activity. According to the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR), the number of new settlement outposts—illegal even under Israeli law—has soared in recent years. The number has jumped from around eight a year between 2012 and 2022 to 32 in 2023, then 62 in 2024, reaching 86 in 2025.
Armed settlers, protected by the Israeli military, continued their pogroms over the weekend, rampaging through more than a dozen villages across the northern West Bank. Hundreds of Israelis hurled stones, set fire to homes, two mosques and several vehicles, wounded more than a dozen Palestinians. They sprayed graffiti claiming “revenge” over the killing of an Israeli, and setting up another four illegal outposts.
Hellbound and Down 