By Naqaa Hamed – Drop Site News
RAMALLAH, Occupied West Bank—As Palestinians in al-Fandaqumiya, a village south of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, celebrated Eid al-Fitr on Saturday evening, dozens of Israeli settlers raided the area, physically assaulting residents and torching homes and cars. “They attacked at midnight,” Ghassan Qararyeh, the head of al-Fandaqumiya village council, told Drop Site News. “It was Eid evening, so everyone was trying to feel any kind of joy under the overall difficult situation, but the attack destroyed that.”
Qararyeh described what happened as “rapid and horrifying.” The marauding settlers came from the Homesh settlement, located three miles from al-Fandaqumiya on the main road that connects Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus in the northern West Bank. At least 13 people were injured in less than an hour before the settlers moved on to neighboring villages, terrorizing nearby Palestinian communities in what has been a continuously escalating campaign of violence across the territory in recent weeks.
The weekend attacks were organized by settlers through public social media groups on Telegram and WhatsApp in apparent revenge for the death of Yehudan Sherman, an 18-year-old settler from the settlement outpost of Shuva Yisrael Farms, who was killed in a car accident earlier that day. Settlers also cited the Iran war and continued missile attacks as motivations. An online page for the Shuva Yisrael Farms outpost describes its mission as being “the spearhead for activities throughout northern Samaria with the goal of seizing the lands and leaving them in Jewish hands.”
The wave of settler raids spread into Sunday with at least 25 attacks reported across the West Bank with settlers attacking several villages near Nablus, including Beita, Qaryut, Deir Sharaf, Huwara, and Deir al-Hatab, which was described by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society as the most severe assault, with nine Palestinians injured. Settlers burned cars and homes, attacked residents, stole herds of sheep, pepper-spraying Palestinians while sleeping, and attacked a secondary school. In the village of Burqa, east of Ramallah, settlers attacked and burnt down a health care clinic during one of multiple attacks on the village.
Qararyeh says the wave of violence may have been sparked by Sherman’s death but that routine settler attacks had long been a feature of life in the West Bank. “This is not the first attack on our village, nor on the surrounding communities like Burqa and Beit Imrin,” he said, while noting that “these attacks have become frequent.” “They usually happen late at night, when people are asleep in their homes with their families,” he added. “They take advantage of that moment, when everyone is tired and resting.”
Violence by Israeli settlers and soldiers, that had already reached record levels in 2025 alongside the genocide in Gaza, has escalated further since the U.S. and Israel launched a war on Iran last month. Since the beginning of 2026 through to March 16, a total of 26 Palestinians, including six children, have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers, according to the UN, including 18 by Israeli forces and seven by Israeli settlers. More than 260 Palestinians have been injured by Israeli settlers alone.
More than half the killings and over 100 of the injuries were inflicted between February 28, when the Iran war began, and March 16. The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission (CWRC), a Palestinian governmental body, has documented over a thousand attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers from the beginning of January through to mid-March, with more than 200 of them occurring in the first two weeks after the Iran war began.
Since December 2025, Israeli authorities have unleashed a series of measures “deliberately designed to dispossess Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to make the annexation of the territory an irreversible reality,” according to Amnesty International. The measures include authorizing a record number of new settlements, expanding existing ones, and formalizing registration of land in the West Bank as Israeli state property in what Amnesty described as “turbocharged” and illegal efforts by Israel to dispossess Palestinians. “The accelerating expansion of unlawful settlements and the rise in state-backed settler violence and crimes across the occupied West Bank are a direct indictment of the international community’s catastrophic failure to take decisive action,” Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns, said in a statement.
The relentless violence has made life all but impossible for Palestinians in the West Bank. “I have a family of nine. They burnt my car, this is how I make a living,” Fadi Issa, a taxi driver, told Drop Site after a settler attack on his village of Qaryoot south of Nablus. “They came in one second and burned everything down, destroyed everything in a minute. They came at night and after the people around noticed them, it was already too late.”
Displacement of Palestinians from attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the first two and half months of 2026 has already reached about 95 per cent of the total recorded in the whole of 2025, the UN said. Israeli authorities have also severely intensified restrictions on movement since the start of the Iran war, effectively putting the West Bank on lockdown with more barriers and checkpoints, while settlers have also been closing entrances to many Palestinian villages and towns.
“I didn’t know what to do, should I stay with my family and protect them or go to put out the fire?” Issa said. “My children are in such a bad psychological condition, they are in constant fear, I keep distracting them, and comforting them but what do my words mean in front of the daily reality that they see?”
Israeli soldiers, who frequently attack Palestinian communities themselves, have stood by during settler attacks. Unarmed Palestinians have taken to trying to patrol their villages themselves to try and protect their communities. “The world has turned a blind eye—we were left alone long before the [Iran] war, these attacks especially here in Jaloud and Qaryoot were vicious and continuous, the settlers do whatever they want because they are supported. We have been left alone,” Issa said.
The situation is worse in the southern part of the West Bank. Hebron governorate has had the highest number of settler attacks, according to the CWRC, with 47 in the two weeks after the Iran war began. Many of those attacks are concentrated on Masafer Yatta, a cluster of Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills that has been turned into a place of “unbearable suffering,” according to Mohammad Rabai, the head of the Al-Twane village council. During a 10-minute phone interview, Rabai was interrupted five times by phone calls from people in the village reporting attacks.
In the Hawara area of Masafer Yatta, Adel Hamamdeh lives with his wife and children on land that has belonged to his family for 80 years. Settlers now attack communities in the area more than once a day, Hamamdeh said, trying to drive them off their land.
“Everyday we have attacks. We ask them why are you doing this? The attacks went through the roof after the beginning of the war. We are living in constant fear, and our children are terrified,” Hamamdeh told Drop Site.
“They use every tactic they can think of. They have pepper-sprayed us, beat us, detained us, taken my children’s IDs, beaten women, and stolen our sheep. They threatened to kill me and my family recently and told me I have a couple of days to leave to Mecca or Jordan as these lands have been promised to them by God.”