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west bank
'This Is Our Land,' Says the Israeli Settler
Israel has killed at least 26 Palestinians in the West Bank since the beginning of the year, of whom at least eight were murdered by settlers.
Mar 24, 2026
As Muslims around the world celebrated an end to the holy month of Ramadan over the weekend, Palestinian communities across the West Bank were violently assaulted by Israeli settlers in what witnesses describe as coordinated attacks.
Masked settlers—many under military protection—carried out raids in at least 12 locations, according to multiple reports and video footage. They burned cars, homes, and used weapons, including guns, grenades, rocks, live fire, and pepper spray, to inflict pain on Palestinians.
The West Bank is one of two enclosed regions where Palestinians live under Israeli control, the other being the war-torn Gaza Strip. But Israeli settlers, with the support of a far-right government and the silent complicity of many Israelis, have sought to take this land. Israel has killed at least 26 Palestinians in the West Bank since the beginning of the year, of whom at least eight were murdered by settlers.
On Monday, the widespread violence continued. In Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers detained six Palestinians, including a journalist, after raiding and vandalizing their homes. The Israel Defense Forces also set up checkpoints around the city and surrounding villages, “closing multiple main and secondary roads with iron gates, concrete blocks, and earth mounds,” according to the Palestinian News Agency Wafa.
How can Israel dispute the facts of genital mutilation reported in none other than the Times—a paper often accused of holding sympathy for Israel? I guess just like Donald Trump: by doing it.
Attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers have become more brazen since America and Israel escalated their war in the region. The United Nations estimates that Israeli soldiers and settlers have murdered at least 15 Palestinians since the start of the Iran war in late February.
In a brutal report in The New York Times March 18, for example, a Palestinian man had his genitals mutilated—in front of his family—and 400 sheep stolen by some 20 Israeli settlers. The account is almost too harrowing to put to words.
Imagine you are a Bedouin: a nomad, a villager in the Middle East. In Israel, this often means you are looked on as a peasant—and there’s no doubt you are Palestinian. You’re a woman, a mother. You live in a tent. Your life is seen as a threat by men across a border they built—the separation wall enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank.
A group of settlers arrives. Some 20 men beat you, slap your children, pull you out of your tent—your home—by your hair. They demean you for existing. They tie up your husband, strip him naked, cut his boxers with a knife, and tie his penis with a zip tie. Imagine that. Can you?
That’s the story of Suhaib Abualkebash, 29, in the report I mention above in the Times. “This is slow death,” Niama Abualkebash, 28, said of the attack on her husband. “Doing this to a man is to kill him.”
Human rights activists staying in the Bedouin community—a common tactic used to deter settler attacks in the past—were among those beaten by the settlers. Ava Lang, a 24-year-old American activist, recalled what the settlers said: “They were asking our names, where we’re from, saying, ‘We’re going to kill you,’ and ‘This is our land; we’re Jewish.’”
After beating the family, including a 3 year old, the settlers stole family wedding rings, cellphones, cash, and identification papers. The brother of the man who had his penis mutilated, Muhammad Abualkebash, 40, recalls what the settlers said next.
“They said; ‘If you don’t leave, we will burn you. We’ll hit you. We’ll take your children, and we will rape your women,” he said to the Times. “‘Go to America, go to Jordan or anywhere else, but go.’”
Israel has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—in Gaza since October 2023. About 1,000 have been killed in the West Bank, where, as the UN has reported, young men and boys are at a higher risk for harassment and mistreatment by Israeli settlers and soldiers.
How do Israelis feel about this? From what journalists have observed in the country, only a small portion of Israelis openly oppose violence against Palestinians.
A new poll featured on Israel’s Channel 12 reveals that first-time Jewish Israeli voters, between 18 and 21 years of age, are more right-wing and religious-nationalist in their outlook than older voters. The poll found that 75% of voters described themselves as “right-wing” compared with 68% among older voters. The self-identified “left” accounts for only 5%.
Justice is unlikely for the Abualkebash family—or any of the Palestinians harmed, intimidated, and mutilated by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Let’s not forget: beyond murder, abuse can extend to injuries, displacement, and destruction of Palestinian homes and farmland.
“Most of the international community views Israel’s presence in the West Bank as illegal,” wrote The Times of Israel on March 17, “though the US under President Donald Trump has been more tolerant.”
Also on March 17, the UN unveiled an investigation into settler violence in the West Bank, covering a 12-month period up to November 2025, warning of an “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis. The report denounced the Israeli government’s role in aiding settler expansion in the West Bank.
“The Israeli government has accelerated unlawful settlement expansion and annexation of large parts of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, forcibly displacing over 36,000 Palestinians and increasing violence by Israeli security forces and settlers,” UN Human Rights spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said at a briefing in Geneva.
Israel, responding in their usual tone, via the Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva, accused the UN of being anti-Israel. “It does not function as an impartial and neutral human rights office, but as the epicenter of vile anti-Israel activism,” the mission said in a statement.
How can Israel dispute the facts of genital mutilation reported in none other than the Times—a paper often accused of holding sympathy for Israel? I guess just like Donald Trump: by doing it.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, where it’s been less than six months since the so-called ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was brokered, some 680 Palestinians have been killed.
On Sunday, four Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza. At least 10 others were wounded. And last week, the military killed 12 Palestinians in an urban refugee camp. One family of four was among the slain, including a woman who was pregnant with twins.
“We were sleeping and got up to the strike of a missile. The strike was strong,” said Mahmoud al-Muhtaseb, a neighbor. “There was no prior warning.”
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The People of Iran Are the Latest Victims of American 'Help'
What Washington calls help is often disastrous for the countries it intervenes in.
Mar 24, 2026
After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” On February 28, the US and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes began dropping bombs on a country of some 93 million people. Trump soon put out a video address, telling Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Around the time that video appeared, Iranians in the city of Minab were sorting through the corpses of more than 165 people killed in an airstrike on an elementary school for girls.
That same day, an airstrike killed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an 86 year old who was supposedly already in poor health. Throughout the ensuing days, American and Israeli attacks struck hospitals, historic sites, and more schools. In response, Iran aimed its drones and missiles at American military bases and allies across the Gulf region.
What kind of help, exactly, did Trump mean?
What Washington calls help is often disastrous, and the US has a long history of offering (and refusing) to help Iran. During the Abadan Crisis of 1951 to 1954, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized the country’s oil industry, which had been under near-complete British control for decades. The United Kingdom responded with a crushing economic embargo, legal challenges, and a naval buildup off the Iranian coast. Mosaddegh repeatedly appealed to Dwight D. Eisenhower for help, but the American president declined to step in.
Many Trump voters hoped he would avoid foreign entanglements. Instead, he has deepened the US involvement in conflicts abroad, while deploying federal troops domestically to fight what he’s called an “invasion from within.”
Some two weeks later, the CIA toppled Mosaddegh’s government with the backing of the British intelligence agency MI6. In effect, that coup d’état—one of at least 72 the US facilitated or attempted to facilitate globally in the Cold War years—opened the path for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, to reinstall his monarchical autocracy. In his private diary, Eisenhower reflected that “we helped bring about… the restoration of the Shah to power in Iran and the elimination of Mossadegh… The things we did were ‘covert.’ If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear.”
The CIA wouldn’t publicly acknowledge its role in the coup until several decades later, but Iranians had little doubt. During his quarter-century reign, the Shah outlawed most political parties, jailed dissidents, and made liberal use of torture. In 1979, a revolution unseated the Shah, but the Islamic Republic that followed only continued his practice of mass repression, torture, and extrajudicial killings. Later, when Iran and Iraq went to war in 1980, the US clandestinely gave each side enough support to ensure neither could win. Worse yet, at the tail end of that conflict, American intelligence officials provided the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with the positions of Iranian soldiers, despite Washington’s knowledge that Hussein intended to use chemical weapons on them.
Donald Trump has long styled himself as distinctly anti-war, but both of his administrations have kept Tehran squarely in their crosshairs. An American president, after all, is still an American president. Since returning to office in January 2025, he has relaunched the long, lethal American tradition of military intervention abroad. “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” he said during his inaugural speech. Over the next year, though, he proceeded to bomb seven countries, threaten a slate of nations from Latin America to Europe, and even kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. All the while, he bragged of supposedly ending eight wars.
One of the wars the president insists he ended was Israel’s two-year assault on the Gaza Strip. By the time a US-brokered ceasefire came into effect there in October 2025, Israeli attacks on the coastal enclave had, according to the Gaza health ministry, killed more than 70,000 people. The truce, however, proved to be distinctly one-sided. As of early March of this year, the United Nations estimated that more than 600 Palestinians had been killed and more than 1,600 wounded in Gaza since the ceasefire was implemented. In Lebanon, where a ceasefire went into effect in November 2024, the United Nations had tallied more than 15,000 Israeli ceasefire violations and hundreds of deaths as of late February.
In the United States, war is, of course, a bipartisan affair. The Biden and Trump administrations would, for instance, send Israel more than $21 billion in military aid during the first two years of the war in Gaza. On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump would lean into anti-interventionist rhetoric, warning that a Kamala Harris presidency would drag the US into World War III. Harris’ silence on Gaza evidently cost her a significant number of votes, and Trump returned to the Oval Office.
Many Trump voters hoped he would avoid foreign entanglements. Instead, he has deepened the US involvement in conflicts abroad, while deploying federal troops domestically to fight what he’s called an “invasion from within.”
So, the war machine now chugs ahead here and elsewhere, with Trump tightening his authoritarian grip at home, while searching for new conflicts abroad. When Iranians rose up in January, their regime killed thousands of protesters. Trump decried the “killers and abusers” in Tehran even as his masked immigration agents were assaulting protesters and immigrants in Minnesota and beyond. In fact, just a few weeks after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally opened fire on the poet, protester, and mother Renee Good in Minneapolis, Border Patrol officers shot and killed a protesting nurse, Alex Pretti, in the same city.
That the president doesn’t care about human rights is obvious, but he took that position a step further when, around the time of Pretti’s death, his administration forced about a dozen Iranians onto a deportation flight back to the very country he had criticized for wanton murder in the streets.
Some help.
Arrests, Torture, and Abuse
“Every empire,” the late Palestinian academic and literary critic Edward Said once wrote, “tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” As someone whose family had been among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians violently displaced and forced into exile by Israel’s 1948 establishment in what Palestinians called the Nakba, or catastrophe, Said was speaking from personal experience.
For nearly eight decades, Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation have paid the price of American “help.” Since 1948, the US has sent an estimated $300 billion (when adjusted for inflation) in foreign aid to Israel, much of it in the form of weaponry to the Israeli military. At the same time, the US Agency for International Development gave the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority more than $5.2 billion between 1994 and 2018, and the CIA worked closely with Palestinian security agents.
While living in Palestine from 2011 until 2015, I often thought about the constant flow of American financial and military aid into the region. I worked then as a journalist and, for part of the time, taught at a Palestinian high school in Ramallah. Wherever you looked, the human fallout of what Washington calls “help” was plain to see. For Palestinians in the West Bank, threats came from every direction. Israeli soldiers shot and killed Palestinians on the streets, at protests, or at checkpoints like the ones many of my students had to pass through every day to reach school. More than 730,000 Israeli settlers live in colonies across the territory, and the most hard-line among them routinely attack Palestinians, vandalizing their homes and burning down their olive fields. (In one case in 2014, a group of settlers kidnapped and burned to death a Palestinian teenager named Mohammed Abu Khdeir.) Even the Palestinian Authority, ostensibly meant to represent Palestinians, arrests and tortures political opponents, even in some cases carrying out extrajudicial killings.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed to Iranians in late February, it brought my mind back to my time in Palestine. Netanyahu urged them to “cast off the yoke of [their] murderous regime,” denouncing that country’s security forces for killing “thousands of children, adults, and elderly people in cold blood.” Then he added: “Tens of thousands [of Iranians] were arrested, tortured, and abused. And why? Simply because they sought lives of freedom and dignity.”
I thought, freedom and dignity? What about arrests, torture, abuse, and cold-blooded killing?
From the time he first became prime minister in 1996, Netanyahu has served a combined total of more than 18 years in office, while presiding over 4 of the 5 wars in Gaza since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in late 2008. The first four of those wars alone killed more than 4,000 Palestinians in the Strip.
Netanyahu was serving his second term as prime minister in 2014, when the nonprofit rights watchdog Defense for Children International-Palestine hired me to research and write a report about the situation of Arab children living near Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. For several months, when school let out each day, I rushed off to travel around the territory, interviewing children and their families and listening to their experiences of arrest, torture, abuse, and cold-blooded killings.
In East Jerusalem, a 14-year-old boy filled me in on how Israeli intelligence had arrested him a year earlier. They accused him of throwing stones, a charge he denied, and set about interrogating him. While trying to coerce a confession, the boy told me, one interrogator grabbed a broomstick and threatened him. “You want me to shove this stick up your ass, so you’ll feel pain and tell me the truth?” the interrogator said (according to the child). The boy finally confessed when the interrogator vowed to have his family’s home demolished.
About 20 miles south of East Jerusalem, I visited a family who lived in Hebron’s Old City. The area is home to several Israeli settlements and a large military presence that severely restricts Palestinian movement there. One of the children, a young girl, recalled a day when she was seven. As she made her way home from school, a group of settlers snatched her off the street. They held her down and set her hair on fire. A year passed before she could sleep through a full night, her parents told me. Two years after the attack, she still wore a hat wherever she went. Her brother, who was then 12, had similarly disturbing stories. A year earlier, an Israeli soldier had stopped him at a checkpoint and accused him of throwing stones. The soldier then slapped him, the boy said, and threatened to kill him. Noticing that I was shaken, his father put his palms up. “Everyone in this house has been attacked before,” he said.
Such stories piled up by the dozens: Molotov cocktails and stones crashing through the windows of Palestinian schools; soldiers firing tear gas and rubber-coated bullets at children; families rushing their young kids from their burning homes in the middle of the night. Then, one day in May 2014, not long after I finished the report, several of my students showed up to class wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the face of a Palestinian teenager who had been shot and killed the week before. His name was Nadim Nuwara, and he had been 17 when a bullet hit him at a protest near Israel’s wall on the West Bank. (Another teenager, 16-year-old Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, was shot and killed in nearly the same spot around an hour later.)
The Israeli military initially denied involvement in the boys’ slayings. Spokespeople told reporters that Israeli forces had not used live ammunition in the area on the day the killings took place. Some suggested that a Palestinian sniper might have shot the kids. When video footage later emerged, the military claimed it was likely “forged.” I drove over to the Nuwara family’s home one day that week and met his parents. They were grieving, but they wanted to correct the record. They had found the bullet that killed their son. After passing through his body, it had been stopped by a textbook in his backpack. We measured the bullet and took photos, and I sent them to a ballistics expert. Unsurprisingly, he confirmed that the bullet appeared to have been made by Israeli Military Industries and was of a kind in active use by Israeli forces.
Israel continued to deny its involvement in the boy’s death, but amid mounting evidence, in November 2014, an Israeli border policeman was finally charged with manslaughter. A subsequent plea deal stipulated that he would serve nine months in prison. By then, I had left my job at the school and was reporting in Gaza. Israel had waged a 51-day war on the Strip over that summer and it lay in ruins. The UN had already tallied more than 2,200 Palestinian deaths, 551 of them children. East of Gaza City, I walked with a Palestinian colleague along a residential street in the Shujayeah neighborhood. Both sides of the street were lined with destroyed homes. All that remained standing of one house was a single wall, propped up on rubble. On it, someone had spray-painted: “All This Family Killed by USA Weapons.”
“Help Has Arrived”
This is the second time Israel has gone to war with Iran since Trump, who pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear agreement during his first term, returned to office last year. In June 2025, Israeli warplanes rained down bombs across that country for 12 days. Iran responded with missiles and suicide drones. That bout of fighting killed more than 430 civilians in Iran and at least 28 people in Israel before it ended. The US also joined in, launching a series of strikes on the country, and the president boasted that the attacks had “completely and totally obliterated” the Iranian nuclear program.
Last October, Trump included that war on his list when he took credit for ending “eight wars in eight months.” After Trump and Netanyahu again went to war with Iran this February, the American president offered new justifications. In addition to vowing to help persecuted Iranians, he said that the regime was building missiles that “could soon reach the American homeland,” a claim US intelligence reportedly denied. He also cited a supposedly “imminent” Iranian attack and mentioned the same nuclear program he had previously said was destroyed.
In the United States, few people believe the war is justified. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that more than half of the respondents believed Iran posed at worst a minor threat or no threat at all. Even among pro-MAGA media figures, including several prominent ones like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, have railed against the president. “It’s hard to say this, but the United States didn’t make the decision here,” Carlson said. “Benjamin Netanyahu did.”
The real reason Trump has shed his former claims to anti-interventionism, though, is history. Since 1776, according to the Military Intervention Project of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University, the United States has intervened militarily in foreign countries nearly 400 times. Since September 11, 2001, US-led counterterrorism operations have reached at least 78 countries. As of 2021, the US had spent more than $8 trillion on its Global War on Terror, a series of conflicts that the Cost of War project at Brown University estimates to have killed at least 900,000 people. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s budget has reached $1 trillion and defense contractors continue to pump tens of millions of dollars into lawmakers’ pockets each election cycle. With a record like that, what help can an American president really offer Iranians living under a repressive regime?
For my part, each new report of an American or Israeli airstrike hitting a home, a hospital, or a school in Iran brings back another memory from my years living in the West Bank. After a bullet cut Nadim Nuwara’s life short in the late spring of 2014, I was sitting in his family’s living room when his little brother came in. He was 10, small and gentle voiced, and wore a backward hat. He held up a large photo of his brother. “I thought this summer was going to be very fun with my brother,” he told me. “I thought Nadim and I were going to be able to play together a lot. But he’s gone now and this is going to be a very bad summer.”
During the first 24 hours of this latest war alone, US Central Command’s Brad Cooper announced in a video on X that the scope of the assault on Iran was “nearly double the scale” of the first day of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. On the first day of the war, Benjamin Netanyahu released another video in which he directly addressed Iranians. “Your suffering and sacrifice will not be in vain,” he insisted. “The help you have prayed for, that help has arrived.” And then the slaughter continued.
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Israeli Forces Kill Parents and 2 Children in West Bank, Beat Surviving Children
"Targeting an entire family in this savage manner reveals the true nature of the Israeli occupation and its policies based on killing and extermination, destruction and displacement," the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
Mar 15, 2026
The Israeli Defense Forces killed a Palestinian couple and two of their children in the West Bank on Sunday, on one of the deadliest days for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in weeks.
The soldiers opened fire on a car in the village of Tammun in which 37-year-old Ali Khaled Bani Odeh, his 35-year-old wife Waad, and their four sons Mohammad, Othman, Mustafa, and Khaled were traveling. Odeh, Waad, 5-year-old Mohammad, and 7-year-old Othman were shot in the head and died, leaving behind two injured children.
"We came under direct fire, we didn't know the source. Everyone in the car was martyred, except my brother Mustafa and me," one of the surviving children, 12-year-old Khaled, told Reuters from the hospital.
He said that after the shooting was over, the Israeli soldiers pulled him out of the car and began to beat him, telling him, "We killed dogs."
"These crimes occur within a systematic policy pursued by the occupation authorities using lethal force against Palestinian civilians."
The soldiers also beat his other surviving brother, according to Al Jazeera.
The Israeli military said that it had been operating in Tammun to make arrests on "terrorist" charges and that soldiers had fired on a vehicle when it accelerated toward them, according to Reuters. It said it was reviewing the incident.
Al Jazeera journalist Nida Ibrahim said that the family had been totally shocked by the shooting.
“The extended family says the father and the mother did not know that Israeli forces were there as they were in a Palestinian car,” she said.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the killing on social media as a "terrifying arbitrary execution crime that targeted an entire Palestinian family inside their vehicle."
The Israeli soldiers also prevented Red Crescent workers from reaching the family, the ministry said, leading to the families' "deliberate and cold-blooded execution."
The ministry continued: "The Ministry affirms that targeting an entire family in this savage manner reveals the true nature of the Israeli occupation and its policies based on killing and extermination, destruction and displacement, amid a systematic impunity, and it further affirms that these crimes, concurrent with the escalation of settler crimes and their organized terrorism in the occupied West Bank, are not isolated incidents, but part of a comprehensive and systematic aggression aimed at exterminating the Palestinian people and displacing them, in clear exploitation of the escalation occurring in the region."
In a statement issued on social media, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) also blamed the deaths on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which has been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice.
"This escalation in these crimes comes as a direct result of the expansion of shooting instructions in the Israeli army, the rising violence of settlers amid the prevalence of an impunity policy, and the entrenchment of ethnic cleansing amid unprecedented international silence," PCHR said.
It continued: "While the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights condemns the unjustified murder crimes committed by occupation forces and settlers, it affirms that these crimes occur within a systematic policy pursued by the occupation authorities using lethal force against Palestinian civilians, in flagrant violation of the principles of necessity and distinction that form fundamental pillars of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. Moreover, they come as part of a pattern aimed at terrorizing citizens, intimidating them, and entrenching ethnic cleansing policies, and replicating acts of genocide, albeit in a less overt manner."
Also on Sunday, Israeli settlers killed a Palestinian man in Nablus Governorate, making him the sixth man killed by settlers since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran. Movement restrictions imposed due the war have emboldened setters to attack, knowing that ambulances will be delayed in reaching their victims, human rights advocates and healthcare workers told Reuters.
In total, Israeli settlers and soldiers have killed 25 Palestinians in the West Bank since the beginning of the year, PCHR said.
In Gaza, where Israeli strikes at first declined following the beginning of the Iran war, the death toll is rising again. On Sunday, Israeli strikes killed nine police officers in Zawayda and a pregnant woman, her husband, and son in Nuseirat.
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