A new investigative report from Haaretz exposes a shocking escalation of settler and military-backed violence across the occupied West Bank — a campaign marked by organized lynch mobs, arson attacks, and the slaughtering of Palestinian livestock, described by local witnesses as “terror under the guise of security.”
The report, titled “Lynch Mobs, Arson, Slaughtered Animals: The West Bank Faces Unprecedented Israeli Violence,” catalogs a wave of brutality unleashed by armed settler militias over the past months, often operating with protection or open collaboration from Israeli soldiers. The evidence paints a grim picture of systemic state-sanctioned aggression and near-total impunity for the perpetrators.
A Campaign of Terror Across the Hills
According to eyewitnesses cited by Haaretz, coordinated settler groups have attacked dozens of Palestinian villages, burning homes, destroying crops, and setting herds ablaze. Livestock — a lifeline for many rural families — has been massacred in acts of intimidation designed to drive Palestinians from their land.
Residents recounted scenes of coordinated terror. “They came after midnight with rifles and masks,” one witness said. “They torched the fields, shot the sheep, and beat anyone who tried to stop them.”
The report highlights that these raids have intensified in scope and brutality since early summer. With Israeli military forces stationed mere kilometers away, settlement militias have acted freely — sometimes escorted by soldiers, according to the testimonies.
Human Rights Monitors Sound Alarm
Israeli rights groups, including Yesh Din and B’Tselem, confirmed that violent settler incursions have dramatically risen since the Gaza war’s escalation. In recent weeks, entire Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills and northern Jordan Valley were reportedly forced to flee following repeated armed assaults.
Yesh Din’s monitoring team described the situation as “a campaign of terror being carried out under state protection.” Footage and testimonies published through Haaretz indicate Israeli forces not only failed to intervene but, in several cases, actively shielded settlers from consequences.
“The army now behaves as a protective arm of the settlers,” one source told Haaretz. “Every complaint filed by a farmer or herder ends up buried — or worse, punished.”
Independent footage shared by journalist Jasper Nathaniel on X reinforces those accounts. His video, filmed near one of the recently attacked villages, shows soldiers standing by as masked settlers torch fields and chase fleeing residents — evidence, he wrote, of “open collaboration between military units and armed settlers.”
Settlers and soldiers joined forces to beat up an older Palestinian farmer in Nahaleen, near Bethlehem. So who exactly is going to stop the violence when they’re all on the same team? (This was sent to me—don’t know who to credit yet .) pic.twitter.com/I49eppuBjc
— jasper nathaniel (@infinite_jaz) October 25, 2025
Arson and Forced Flight
One of the article’s most harrowing accounts came from a shepherd in the Nablus district, whose grazing lands were set aflame while soldiers blocked firefighting efforts. “The flames reached our tents. We ran carrying our children,” he said. “The army just stood there and watched.”
The report cites multiple incidents of arson, including assaults in Turmus Ayya, Burin, and Wadi Qana. Entire olive groves — some of which had been cultivated for centuries — were burned to the ground. In the village of Qusra, settlers reportedly slaughtered goats and scrawled anti-Arab slurs on the remaining carcasses.
Haaretz journalists called the wave of violence “unprecedented in its scope and intensity,” noting that even veteran military officers privately acknowledge the chaos. One former commander said settler activity in the West Bank had become “a paramilitary enterprise operating with full political immunity.”
The Erosion of Red Lines
The report underscores that this violence is not random but part of a deeper process — the gradual erasure of Palestinian presence through fear and destruction. Legal experts referenced by Haaretz said the Israeli government’s permissive attitude toward these crimes has created an “anarchic hierarchy,” where extremist settlers dictate the enforcement of order.
“The settlers have essentially become an informal arm of state control,” one legal source said. “They terrorize the population into leaving while the government denies responsibility — it’s calculated displacement.”
The article also cites a mounting chorus of internal Israeli dissent, including human rights lawyers and former Shin Bet officials warning that the unchecked violence is eroding whatever moral legitimacy remains in Israel’s occupation regime.
International Outrage Builds
News of the Haaretz exposé quickly drew reactions from international observers and human rights organizations. Amnesty International condemned the impunity, calling for independent investigations into “systematic crimes amounting to ethnic persecution.”
European and U.S.-based advocacy groups demanded sanctions targeting extremist settler leaders, many of whom receive direct state funding for “security operations.”
Despite mounting evidence, the Netanyahu administration has remained silent on the revelations, while Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — himself a settler — recently defended “village defense groups” as “patriots under fire.”
A Spreading Fire
As the violence continues, local Palestinians are left trapped between despair and defiance. One father from a northern West Bank village told Haaretz: “We’ve survived bulldozers, arrests, and checkpoints, but this is worse — they come not as soldiers, but as neighbors who want us gone.”
The attacks have not only displaced Muslims but have also targeted Christian communities who remain in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Churches near Nablus and Bethlehem have reported desecration, vandalism, and harassment by extremist settlers. Clergy members told Haaretz and local media that their congregants are living under constant intimidation, their land seized or torched under government-sanctioned expansion programs.
Human rights monitors warn that this dual persecution of Christians and Muslims has been met with a wall of silence from Washington’s most outspoken Christian Zionists. Figures such as Mike Huckabee, long an evangelical political voice and vocal supporter of Israeli policy, have either ignored or excused the violence. Despite his self-styled defense of “biblical Israel,” Huckabee has been silent on the burning of Christian property, the assault of priests, and the forced exodus of Christian families from occupied villages that have stood for centuries.
The near-total absence of condemnation from many U.S. evangelical leaders underlines a growing hypocrisy within the Christian Zionist establishment—one that defends the state of Israel regardless of its documented violence against both Christian and Muslim civilians.
Human rights observers warn that without international pressure, the current spree of settler terror risks transforming the West Bank into a patchwork of depopulated ghost villages—a slow-motion annexation enforced not through formal policy, but through a campaign of permanent fear and sectarian cleansing.
