Nablus – Before dawn on Saturday, Israeli military forces entered the village of Tal, an agricultural community southwest of the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank. Within hours, soldiers had raided about 70 homes, dragging residents into the streets for questioning. By the time the operation ended, nearly 50 Palestinians had been arrested, Palestinian officials confirmed, in what Israeli authorities described as a security crackdown following a shooting incident the previous day.
What Israeli authorities did not describe was the simultaneous activity on the surrounding hills: crowds of settlers moving through multiple villages in the West Bank, setting homes and vehicles on fire. The two phenomena came together: the military operation and settler violence. They have arrived with increasing frequency since the start of the Gaza genocide.
The immediate impetus for Saturday’s operation was a shooting on Friday near Havat Gilad, an Israeli settlement outpost in the northern West Bank. Four Palestinians were killed in the incident, in addition to two Israeli soldiers. Israeli officials said the military operation in Tel was a response. No connection, if any, between village residents and Friday’s shooting had been determined at the time of the arrests.
The arrests extended beyond the village of Al-Tall. Palestinian health and civil authorities reported arrests in Jenin, Tubas, Al-Faraa Camp, Farata, Aqabat Jaber Camp in Jericho, and Kubar in Ramallah Governorate. Eight Palestinians were injured during the operation that took place in Fara’ta. The scope of the raid indicated a large-scale military response in the northern and central West Bank, rather than a targeted operation against the identified suspects.
Settler violence accompanied and preceded military operations. On July 18, a group of settlers attacked Al-Tall village, burning a family home with its residents still inside. Saturday’s raids came one week after this attack, with settlers once again active in the same towns while the army provides operational cover. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, did not escape saying: “Massacres against defenseless civilians are taking place across the West Bank, while Gaza is under fire.”
The word is not casual. In international law, massacres carry a connotation of state-sanctioned societal violence against protected populations. Albanese’s use of the term comes after her repeated descriptions of Israel’s behavior in Gaza as genocide, a position she has maintained against continued Israeli government pressure to sack her. Her analysis of the West Bank, which is consistent with her findings on Gaza, places the current violence within a single, coordinated campaign against Palestinian civilian life.
Sarah Sanbar of Human Rights Watch provided a forensic account of the reasons settlers were able to launch attacks. “Years of chaos and impunity for attacks have turned the West Bank into a powder keg,” Sanbar said, noting a pattern in which settler perpetrators of attacks are rarely charged and never convicted. US lawmakers have tried to apply pressure. Representative Ro Khanna himself was arrested by armed settlers during a visit to the West Bank, an experience that led him to introduce House Resolution 1092 calling for Magnitsky sanctions on Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. The decision did not move
The cumulative losses make the risks clear. Since January 2026, at least 87 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in the West Bank, of whom 21 were killed by settlers rather than by army or police forces. The number of settler deaths represents a sharp acceleration and coincides directly with Benjamin Netanyahu’s inclusion of the far-right settler parties into his ruling coalition. Netanyahu, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes related to Gaza, does not face similar accountability for what is happening in the West Bank, where his political survival depends on the settler movement driving the current violence.
His coalition partners, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, have for years called for the annexation of the West Bank and the expulsion of its Palestinian residents. Crowds of settlers are now enacting this agenda on the ground in villages like Al-Tal while the army secures the perimeter of the area. Whether Netanyahu endorses this pattern or merely allows it, it has become a distinction that the families arrested in Saturday’s pre-dawn operation are unlikely to find meaningful.
The daily fabric of occupation in the West Bank extends beyond settler attacks. Ahmed Zeid, a three-month-old Palestinian infant, died at an Israeli military checkpoint earlier this month after soldiers denied his family access to a waiting ambulance. The same structures that close gates and impose restrictions on movement provide the legal and logistical framework within which settler violence operates and goes unpunished. The burning of houses in Tal is inseparable from the closing of the doors of Deir Ammar. They are expressions of the same occupation, imposed with different intensities.
Saturday operations According to what was reported by Al Jazeera satellite channel in the West BankIt continued until Saturday afternoon with no sign of stopping. What remained unknown at the end of Saturday was whether any settlers had been arrested in connection with the arson attacks, whether suspects in Friday’s shootings had been identified, and whether Hill Village residents arrested in the pre-dawn operation would face charges or administrative detention. In the West Bank, there is no time limit for administrative detention and does not require any judicial procedures.
