Violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has recently flared dramatically and Israeli settlers have called for attacks to “erase” Palestinian towns.

 

On the morning of July 24, more than 20 Israeli settlers from the illegal Havat Gilad settlement attacked Palestinians’ homes on the eastern edge of Tal, southwest of Nablus in the occupied West Bank.

 

Residents initially drove them back, but the settlers returned shortly afterwards, protected by the Israeli soldiers.

 

Four Palestinians from the Ramadan family were killed in the ensuing violence. A settler and an Israeli soldier were also killed.

 

In the days since, the retaliation from Israeli forces and settlers alike has been overwhelming, with the occupied West Bank gripped by armed attacks, raids, demolitions, road closures and arson.

 

Every now and then, settlers enter a Palestinian village, violence follows, and Israeli military operations rapidly expand.

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his final months in power before elections, this recent violence escalated well beyond the already grim baseline.

 

Hours after the killings in Tal, Netanyahu ordered a “wide-scale military operation”, including demolishing the alleged Palestinian attacker’s home, revoking work permits in villages he called “terror hotspots”, reinforcing army units and accelerating the “regularization” of settler farms and outposts, which are illegal even under Israeli law. All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law.

 

Members of his government, including the far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, have said the response would be an “iron fist” and called for annexation of the West Bank, territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

 

Far-right National Security Minister Ben-Gvir went further in calling for airstrikes on Palestinian villages threatening that "for every Jew murdered, the enemy should lose land and homes. This is the language of the Middle East. Just as we spoke it in Gaza, it is time to speak it in the West Bank."

 

Israeli public radio reported later that 26 army battalions were deployed across the occupied West Bank.

 

Israeli forces returned to raid Tal nightly over the next several days, arresting roughly 30 to 50 residents and searching some 70 homes.

 

The campaign was also carried out across Jenin, Tubas, Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, Tulkarem and occupied East Jerusalem.

 

In Nablus, about 5km (3 miles) from Tal, Israeli forces stormed the hospital, handcuffing doctors and nurses before detaining a wounded patient shot during the Tal attack.

 

Four new Israeli settlement outposts appeared overnight next to Tal and the nearby villages of Awarta, Qusra and Jabal Ubayd.

 

This adds to the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission’s count of 42 new illegal outposts built across the occupied West Bank in the first half of 2026, most of them agricultural, concentrated in the Hebron, Ramallah and Nablus governorates.

 

The killings in Tal were the spark for settler violence that, in the days since, has engulfed numerous villages across the West Bank.

 

Israel’s Army Radio later counted 30 separate settler attacks across the territory.

 

In Sarra, southwest of Nablus, settlers burned six Palestinian homes , five vehicles and beat three villagers.

 

When settlers tried to storm the village again later , Israeli forces followed to protect them and fired tear gas, leading to Palestinians and journalists suffering from tear gas inhalation.

 

In Farata, east of Qalqilya, settlers set fire to a woodworking shop, two homes and farmland, wounding five Palestinians with gunfire, stones and shrapnel, and emptied the water tank of a civil defense truck responding to the blaze.

 

Moreover, before dawn on 26 July, settlers set fire to two mosques in so-called “price tag” attacks (retaliatory attacks by Israeli settlers and nationalists against Palestinians).

 

One was the Al-Rahma Mosque under construction in Qusra, where Hebrew graffiti reading “revenge for Benayahu” – the Israeli settler killed in Tal – was sprayed on the walls.

 

The second was a mosque in Kour village near Tulkarem, which was defaced with racist slogans.

 

Israeli forces also sealed roads across the northern West Bank, closing entrances to Sinjil, erecting a checkpoint at Nabi Saleh, and repeatedly shutting gates around Jerusalem, while settlers established rolling roadblocks near Nablus and Ramallah.

 

The West Bank has been effectively besieged, with Palestinian cities and villages increasingly cut off from each other while land seizure orders accompanied the violence.

 

Moreover, Israeli authorities issued new orders to uproot olive trees and seize land in in the Jenin governorate, as well as additional land in Tubas.

 

Settler attacks on Palestinians surged 63 percent in the first six months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, Israeli Army Radio reported.

 

Data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) shows that between January 1, 2025 and June 31, 2026, there were 3,033 Israeli settler attacks.

 

The Ramallah and Al-Bireh governorate recorded the highest-ever number of settler attacks for the same time period, with 881 incidents, followed by Nablus with 660 and Hebron with 497.

 

The developments come amid growing international concern over rising settler violence and exceeding establishment of settlements in the West Bank with the expanding scope of Israeli military operations, which Palestinians say are increasingly targeting civilian areas under the pretext of security operations.

 

Over the past weeks, Palestinians in the West Bank have lived under daily pressure: land seizures, settlement expansion, military raids, road closures, intimidation, expulsion of local communities and settler violence.

 

The settlement movement has always tried to make its presence in the West Bank look normal and the more Israel protects settlements, the more settlers expand and the more Palestinian space shrinks.

 

Israel turned settlements into protected facts, and allowed settlers to move through Palestinian land with confidence, while Palestinians move through their own land with fear.

 

Settlements have become the engine of violence with no end in sight and without strong international pressure, nothing will change.