Settler violence spreads across the West Bank: ‘The situation is becoming more and more dangerous’

A convoy of Israeli Border Police jeeps and a private 4x4 stops at the crossing leading to Al-Mu’arrajat, a Palestinian Bedouin village located a few kilometers north of Jericho (West Bank), in the Jordan River Valley. From the top of the rocky hill, Mohamed Mlihat, 60, views the scene, sitting at the door of his house, and immediately jumps out of his plastic chair. “Here they are!” he warns. Almost at the same time, his daughter Aaliyah, 28, runs inside the house and comes out a few seconds later with a video camera. It is the tool with which she usually records evidence of the constant attacks they suffer from Jewish settlers protected by Israeli uniformed men. After a few seconds, the line of cars moves away. “They are heading to Zohar Sabah Farm,” she explains, referring to an illegal facility named after a settler sanctioned in 2024 by Joe Biden and now pardoned by President Donald Trump along with other violent Israeli activists in favor of the occupation of Palestinian territories.

“The general mood after Trump came to power is that anything is possible, and that is why we see repeated attacks in the areas of the Palestinian Authority,” says Waleed Alhwashla, the only Bedouin with a seat in Israel’s parliament, a member of the conservative and Islamist Joint Arab List. “If the American and Israeli policy towards the settlers does not change, the extremists will continue to impose their policy and aggression. And things could get worse,” he predicts in written responses.

Coinciding with the month-long ceasefire in Gaza, the Israeli siege has tightened in the West Bank. On the one hand, with prolonged and devastating military incursions in towns such as Jenin and Tulkarem, where Israeli forces killed a 23-year-old woman eight months pregnant a few days ago, according to health sources from the Palestinian Authority (PA). On the other, with attacks on Palestinian vehicles, crops and property by settlers. This offensive is a way for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to compensate the supremacist sector of religious nationalism that is opposed to the ceasefire, but which supports the government coalition.

On Sunday, February 2, Al-Mu’arrajat was the scene of yet another attack. At 1:53 a.m., two youths set fire to the village mosque. Everything was recorded — with date and time stamps— by a camera installed in one of the corners of the precarious metal construction, which is the only place of worship for the residents, something the attackers were well aware of. They also burned a tractor, as shown by Suleiman Mlihat, 44, Mohamed’s brother, who was the one who raised the alarm in the village that night, when the flames were already out of control. Standing next to the half-burned vehicle, Suleiman demands that the settlers “be held accountable as a group,” while deploring the fact that the complaints they lodge at the police station — manned by the Israeli police — yield “zero results.”

“It was just another attack,” sighs Mohamed, who also has cameras installed outside his home, although the recordings only serve to denounce the systematic harassment on social media and in the press. Attacks on communities like this have increased since the war in Gaza broke out in October 2023, according to reports from various humanitarian organizations, some of which are Israeli. Mlihat also fears that the spiral of violence will worsen under Trump, as it will give wings to supremacists like the “terrorist” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler. Proof of this is the aforementioned repeal of sanctions, which the new U.S. president carried out on his first day in the White House. Other countries, including Spain, maintain them.

Cattle theft and poisoning

The Mlihats also complain of threats, shootings, and the theft and poisoning of livestock, especially sheep, the main source of income for a community of about 200 people. Zohar Sabah’s name is repeated, accused of being the leader and instigator. In dozens of videos shown by Aaliyah, scenes can be seen in which Jewish attackers intimidate neighbors, pray between the houses in the village, or arrive armed with soldiers and menacingly wave their rifles just a few centimeters from children and adults. “We will rebuild our mosque until we die,” says Aaliyah resolutely. A UN vehicle arrives at the site, with personnel inspecting the interior of the vandalized building, before explaining that they are trying to document each attack.

A short while later, 60-year-old Ben Z. Eshel, an Israeli settler for a quarter of a century who has now become an activist against the occupation, looks out from one of the soot-covered windows. Now wearing a keffiyeh (the traditional Palestinian scarf) around his neck, he is trying to atone for what he calls “shameful” years of his life.

His memories range from entering a “very radical” yeshiva (religious school) in Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, to having a friend who pulled out his gun and shot Palestinian workers returning home near Bethlehem. “He was sentenced to six years and spent four in prison. Today, he wouldn’t even go to prison. Israel belongs to them,” he says, referring to the growing power and influence of radical settlers. Eshel is accompanied by two other Israeli activists who are filming videos of Border Police vehicles driving past Al-Mu’arrajat. “The funniest thing is that I know the Torah much better than they do,” he says jokingly, referring to the biblical demand used by violent settlers to expel Palestinians from their land.

“Genocidal desires” are spreading throughout Israeli society, especially during the war in Gaza, explains Dror Etkes, an Israeli with the NGO Kerem Navot who has extensive experience in settlements, via telephone. The return of Trump to power adds “a certain legitimacy” to this spiral of violence, and cases such as that of Zohar Sabah “are scary.” “I never imagined that we would reach the level of violence we have today,” laments Etkes. Since last December alone, the Israeli authorities have promoted the construction of more than 4,000 homes in settlements in occupied Palestine, where the number of settlers — more than 500,000 in the West Bank alone today — has never stopped increasing, according to the Israeli organization Peace Now.

“We are trying as much as possible to put pressure on government officials to stop the settler attacks,” but “there are parties with Netanyahu that provide cover and do not prevent these violations, and that is why I think things are difficult under this government,” says Alhawashla. “Moderate voices” in the administration “do not speak about the situation in the West Bank for fear of their political future,” he adds.

“Settler violence against Palestinians is part of the strategy employed by the Israeli apartheid regime, which seeks to seize more and more land in the West Bank,” said Shai Parnas, spokesman for the Israeli organisation B’Tselem, which has been monitoring and denouncing these abuses for years and which recognizes the risk of deportation suffered by the inhabitants of Al-Mu’arrajat, as well as dozens of other Palestinian communities. “The state fully supports and assists these acts of violence, and its agents sometimes participate in them directly,” he added, in a policy aimed at “making living conditions miserable and intolerable so that residents leave, apparently of their own free will.” Creating this breeding ground for them to give up and eventually abandon their land is something similar to what the Israeli authorities, now spurred on by Trump, are seeking with the inhabitants of Gaza.

At midday, the track leading back from the Al-Mu’arrajat school is a stream of children returning home. They are all precarious buildings that dot the hills between solar panels, under which chickens seek shade. The school they have just left was the scene of an attack on September 16, which was also recorded on video. Scenes of terrified students can be seen in the footage, locked in classrooms as their teachers attempt to calm them.

In the courtyard, a group of settlers, some hooded and carrying sticks and an axe, took over the premises and attacked some of the school’s employees, causing several injuries, as reported by the media and in the B’Tselem report. Israeli agents arrested two of the school’s staff, including the director, who had to be hospitalized, but they were later released. In an uncommon occurrence, five settlers were arrested — two minors and three adults — among them Zohar Sabah. They were charged with assault, kidnapping (they tried to take the director), breaking and entering, and threatening Palestinians and activists.

“The aim is to expel us,” says Aaliyah, recalling the events just a few meters from where her father feeds the hundred or so sheep that, she explains, help Mohamed pay for his children’s education. “The situation is becoming more and more dangerous and the Israeli government has no control over the settlers,” adds the man as he spreads a sack of grain in the trough. Part of the institutional persecution is also the ban on building new homes, under threat of demolition. Despite everything, they will try to hold out in the village. “It is impossible for us to accept moving elsewhere,” says Aaliyah.

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