At three in the morning, Ahmed Abu Mahmoud heard men outside al-Rahma mosque in Qusra. By the time the 64-year-old stepped into the darkness, the unfinished mosque was burning. On its walls, Israeli settlers had left two explanations in Hebrew: “Revenge Benayahu” and “the land of Israel is redeemed with blood.” Abu Mahmoud called for help because the fire was too large to fight alone. The army arrived, looked at what had been done, and left. By then, another mosque had been attacked in Kur, where surveillance footage showed three people setting off an explosion at its entrance. In the West Bank, even the house of God is expected to understand that the settlers have arrived with title deeds written in fire.

 

Benayahu was Benayahu Mellet, a security guard from the nearby settlement of Havat Gilad who had been killed two days earlier in Tal, southwest of Nablus. The violence did not begin with his death. On July 18, about 40 masked settlers raided Tal and burned a Palestinian home, displacing a family of five. The following night, more than two dozen settlers attacked al-Tuwani, burning a mosque, two homes and a women-run dairy factory. On July 24, another group, some of them armed, entered Tal on what Israel described as an unauthorized “hike.” Residents said the settlers tried to enter homes. Video showed an armed settler pushing Palestinian men back with his rifle before a struggle began over the weapon. By the end, four Palestinian cousins, Farouk, Ibrahim, Jawad and Imran Ramadan, were dead, along with Mellet and an Israeli army officer, Major Yuval Ezra.

They attack and kill people without consequences – it feels like there is no justice for us, like our lives don’t count.

Salam Yousef, MSF staff member in Jerusalem

Israel responded to an armed settler incursion into a Palestinian village by declaring the Palestinian village the source of terrorism. Soldiers sealed roads around Nablus, raided homes, entered a hospital to arrest wounded Palestinians and detained dozens of Tal’s residents. One man later said numbers had been written on the detainees’ foreheads. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for homes to be razed, Palestinian weapons collected and work permits revoked. He also demanded new settlement outposts. Apparently the cure for settlers invading a Palestinian village is to build them another settlement closer to it.

 

The reprisals spread across the West Bank. Israel’s Army Radio counted 30 settler attacks over the following weekend. In Sarra, settlers burned six homes and five vehicles and beat three residents. In Farata, they set fire to two homes, farmland and a woodworking shop, wounding five Palestinians; when a Palestinian civil defence crew arrived, settlers emptied the water from its truck. In Qusra and Kur, they burned the mosques. Israeli forces, meanwhile, arrested more than 70 Palestinians and expanded raids across Nablus, Tulkarm, Jenin and Salfit. The settlers brought the fire, and the army brought the handcuffs for those whose houses were burning.

A week later, more than one hundred settlers marched toward Tal while Israeli forces kept the village sealed. Reuters reporters saw soldiers allow the march to continue as settlers looted Palestinian property and vandalized a cemetery. The occupation does not leave Palestinians alone even underground. On August 9, the Israeli military declared Taybeh closed to nonresidents after repeated settler attacks on the historic Christian village. This was presented as protection. Israel arms the people terrorizing a village, fails to stop them, then turns the village into a military zone and expects gratitude for the administrative elegance.

These weeks have been especially violent, but they are not an aberration. As of July 20, the United Nations had recorded 18 Palestinians killed in incidents involving settlers in 2026, already more than during all of 2025. By July 23, about 880 Palestinians had been injured in the context of settler attacks, 720 of them by settlers themselves, an average of more than three injuries every day. More than 3,200 Palestinians had been displaced this year through settler attacks and Israeli demolitions. Since January 2023, at least 123 Palestinian communities have been partially or completely displaced, 47 of them emptied altogether. A village does not need to be massacred in a single afternoon to disappear. Sometimes its water is cut, its sheep stolen and its children frightened night after night until the final family loads its life into a truck.

 

Calling this “settler violence” can obscure the state standing beside it. Amnesty International documented settlers raiding homes with soldiers, wearing military uniforms, carrying government-distributed weapons and attacking the livelihoods that allow Palestinian communities to remain on their land. Since October 2023, Israel has activated settler-only reserve units across the West Bank and expanded armed settlement security squads. In Tal, Mellet was not merely a resident out for a walk; he belonged to Havat Gilad’s security squad. Ezra was an army officer who arrived with the Israeli response. The border between settler and soldier is carefully blurred whenever Israel needs more rifles, then miraculously restored whenever a Palestinian tries to defend his home.

At the same time, Palestinians are being told that disarmament is the road to peace. Hamas has accepted a United States-backed plan requiring it to surrender its weapons in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Netanyahu rejected the plan’s sequencing on August 9, insisting Israel will not withdraw until Hamas is first “genuinely disarmed.” The proposal remains alive, according to the US-led Board of Peace, though its central promise appears to be that Palestinians must relinquish their means of defence before Israel decides whether to relinquish anything at all.

The West Bank already shows what this arrangement means: after Tal, Israel did not propose disarming Havat Gilad’s security squad, collecting rifles from the settlers who invaded Palestinian villages or dismantling the outposts from which they descend. It proposed disarming Palestinians, demolishing their homes and building more settlements. Israeli weapons are treated as furniture, an ordinary feature of the landscape; a Palestinian weapon is treated as the reason the landscape must be destroyed. Disarmament, in this language, does not mean fewer guns. It means ensuring every gun belongs to the same side.

For three decades, the Palestinian Authority has coordinated security with Israel while settlements multiplied around the cities it was permitted to administer. Most Palestinian villages facing settler attacks have no army to call and no authority capable of protecting them. They are instructed to telephone the Israeli military while settlers approach, though the soldiers may be standing beside the settlers; to document the attack, though everyone has already seen the videos; to wait for international condemnation, preferably somewhere the flames cannot reach them. This is called restraint when Palestinians practice it and regrettable escalation when they finally refuse.

What Palestinians are being asked to surrender is not simply a rifle. They are being asked to surrender the ability to interrupt their own removal. The acceptable Palestinian victim is patient enough to remain unarmed and preferably dead before anger can make him politically inconvenient. He may be mourned after the settlement has been built over him, provided nobody asks what he was supposed to do when armed men reached his door. In Qusra, the army arrived, saw the burning mosque and left. In Tal, the villagers did not leave. Between those two facts lies the entire promise of unilateral Palestinian disarmament: Israel and its settlers may keep the weapons, while Palestinians are granted the peace of dying quietly.

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