Everyone's Ignoring the West Bank: Settlers, Raids, and a Collapsing Authority

Since October 7th, 2023, Palestinians in the West Bank have faced pressure from every direction at once. Settlers push in from the rural hills. The military presses in on the cities. Their own leadership offers little in the way of protection. That is the lived reality of a coordinated set of forces that, over two years, has killed close to a thousand Palestinians, reportedly detained more than 13,500, and completely emptied fourteen villages from the map.

The numbers tell only part of the story. In the weeks after the Hamas attack, the Israeli government distributed roughly 7,000 firearms to settlers through regional defense units. At least eight Palestinians were shot dead by settlers in the months that followed — deaths that would have been far less likely back when the weapons were stones and clubs. Of the nearly 2,000 complaints Palestinians filed about settler violence between 2005 and 2024, 94 percent were closed without an indictment.

The message was unmistakable: there would be no consequences.

Key Takeaways

Settler-related incidents in the West Bank have averaged roughly four per day since October 7th, 2023 — double the rate recorded in 2022 — and at least 14 Palestinian communities have been completely depopulated.
Within weeks of the Hamas attack, Israel’s government distributed about 7,000 firearms to settlers through regional defense units, sharply raising the lethality of confrontations.
Israel’s military mounted its largest West Bank operations in twenty years, detaining more than 17,000 Palestinians by May and holding over 3,300 — including 112 children — without charge or trial by the end of 2024.
Accountability is near-zero: Israeli rights group Yesh Din found 94 percent of settler-violence complaints since 2005 were closed without indictment, and 97 percent of documented violence produced no consequences at all.
The Palestinian Authority has become a government in name only — financially collapsing, deeply unpopular, and led by an 89-year-old president with no clear successor.
The Biden administration’s settler sanctions were largely reversed under President Trump, removing what little external restraint existed.
With roughly 40 percent of the West Bank now effectively off-limits to Palestinians, the two-state solution has become a geographic impossibility — and the question for the PA is no longer whether it can govern, but whether it will survive.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military launched its largest West Bank operations in two decades. Near-daily raids on Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nablus reached an intensity unseen since the Second Intifada. The death ratio — nearly a thousand Palestinians to 41 Israelis inside the territory — tells its own story about the nature of those operations. And throughout it all, far-right ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government were handed unprecedented power over West Bank policy, accelerating settlement expansion while turning a blind eye to the violence.

This is what unfolded while the world’s attention was fixed on Gaza: a quieter, slower transformation of the West Bank, one emptied village at a time, that has pushed a two-state future from improbable toward geographically impossible.

A Rampage in the Hills

Four attacks per day, every day, for two years straight — that is the documented average rate of settler-related incidents in the West Bank since October 7th. For perspective, 2022 averaged two incidents per day. That earlier figure was hardly peaceful, but it sits a world apart from the trend that has taken hold since. The surge has upended conditions across the occupied territories.

Communities that weathered decades of conflict now stand largely abandoned, and behind the statistics lie entire villages erased from the map, their residents scattered and their homes destroyed.

Khirbet Zanuta shows how this happens. Once home to nearly 150 people, the village simply ceased to exist. Armed settlers arrived in October 2023, smashing solar panels and threatening residents with death if they stayed. By the end of the month, the families had fled — and fencing was raised around the former town to keep them from coming back. What had taken generations to build was undone in a matter of weeks.

The attacks grew bolder over time. In November 2024, masked settlers descended on al-Bireh, just outside Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority. Armed with petrol bombs, they torched 20 cars at three in the morning and shot at residents who tried to stop them. The brazenness of an assault on the doorstep of the Palestinian capital underscored how little anyone expected to be held to account.

Elsewhere, the pressure took quieter but equally effective forms. In the herding communities of Ein al-Rashash and Wadi al-Seeq, east of Ramallah, settlers systematically cut off road access. Reaching markets, medical care, or even neighboring villages became impossible. Pasture lands where Palestinian families had grazed their flocks for centuries turned effectively off-limits as armed settlers stationed themselves at access points.

When families tried to push through anyway, warnings escalated quickly into violence.

The Guns Change Everything

What set this wave apart from earlier settler violence was the weaponry. Within weeks of the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, the government distributed approximately 7,000 firearms to settlers in the West Bank through regional defense units. The decision transformed the character of every confrontation that followed.

It did not take much persuasion. Settlers who had watched footage from the kibbutzim near Gaza understood viscerally what could happen when security failed — and those kibbutzim sat inside internationally recognized Israeli borders. Many took the weapons and regarded them as essential protection against another massacre. It is worth being fair on this point: small-scale raids on West Bank settlements are a genuine security concern, and the fear was not invented.

The guns, however, did not stay defensive for long. In Qusra, a village near Nablus, armed settlers stormed an apartment building on October 11th, 2023, shooting and killing four young Palestinians. When neighbors rushed to help, the settlers opened fire again. The next day, as mourners gathered for the funeral procession, settlers set up an ambush along the route, blocking the road with burning tires and then opening fire on the convoy.

A 62-year-old chemist and his 26-year-old son were shot dead in their car. What might once have ended in injuries now ended in killings.

This was only the beginning. Israeli security analysts documented that settler violence kept rising throughout 2024, even as Palestinian militant attacks declined — a divergence that pointed to something other than a security response. What followed looked, in its consistency and its results, like a deliberate campaign to drive Palestinians from their land.

A Repeating Pattern of Displacement

The attacks followed a relatively consistent script across the territory. Armed settlers would establish outposts on hilltops overlooking Palestinian villages, then begin raids at night. First came property destruction — torched cars, smashed windows. Then came the threats, with leaflets circulating through communities that left nothing to the imagination, openly warning residents to leave.

When families refused, the violence escalated. Week after week the pressure intensified until staying became impossible. In al-Qanub, a Bedouin community east of Hebron, armed raids drove out entire families.

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Clashes between settlers and Palestinians are nothing new. But unlike previous waves that flared after specific incidents and then subsided, this pressure never relented. Families who tried to defend their property faced not only the settlers but Israeli soldiers, who would arrest Palestinians for “disturbing the peace” while the attackers walked free. The United Nations documented this pattern in nearly half of the 1,420 recorded incidents in 2024: troops present but not intervening to protect Palestinians, and sometimes actively participating in forcing families to relocate.

By 2024, at least 14 Palestinian communities had been completely depopulated through this sustained pressure, with at least 7 of them emptied in the first six months after October 7th alone. More than 3,000 Palestinians had been displaced, and some endured the ordeal more than once. Two families expelled from the Hebron area in September 2025 had already been driven from another community back in 2023.

They rebuilt once, lost everything, rebuilt again, and lost it all a second time. Every emptied village meant more land available for settlement expansion — the connection between cause and consequence was rarely subtle.

Words Without Weight

The violence drew condemnation even from inside Israel, though rarely with enough force to change anything. President Isaac Herzog called the settler assaults “illegal and immoral,” but his role is largely ceremonial and the words carried little weight. Security analysts warned that arming civilians was creating a “tinderbox.” Their concerns, tellingly, focused on strategic rather than humanitarian grounds: they understood that burned homes and displaced families breed grievances that fuel future violence.

That cycle was already visible. Each attack bred retaliation — shootings at checkpoints, stabbings in markets, young men with no militant background carrying out solo operations after watching their communities destroyed. The violence fed on itself, accelerating with each round.

By the summer of 2025, the toll had reached levels that stunned even longtime observers. June and July each saw around 100 Palestinians injured by settlers, the highest monthly figures since tracking began in 2005. The incidents were not random flare-ups. In Taybeh, settlers set fires at a fifth-century church and cemetery in July without any known provocation.

Days later, in the South Hebron Hills, a settler shot dead Owdeh Hathaleen, an English teacher, as he tried to protect his community. That same week, Palestinian-American Saif Musallet was beaten to death in a settler confrontation near Sinjil.

The October 2025 olive harvest turned especially vicious. For Palestinian families, those few weeks represent a large share of their annual income, a tradition stretching back centuries — and the settlers knew it. In a single week of October, monitors recorded as many as 36 attacks specifically targeting the harvest: farmers beaten, trees destroyed, entire groves declared off-limits by armed civilians.

The pattern was unmistakable. They wanted the land, just without the people. Whether that was the explicit goal or simply the predictable result of handing military weapons to ideologically motivated civilians in contested territory, villages that had survived the Second Intifada and decades of occupation were vanishing in months — facts on the ground changing faster than anyone could document them.

The Military Crackdown

While settlers emptied villages in the hills, the Israeli military launched its largest West Bank operations in two decades. Additional battalions deployed across Palestinian cities, and countless new checkpoints turned twenty-minute journeys into multi-hour ordeals. The stated goal was to prevent a second front from opening.

But the scale and nature of the operations suggested something more deliberate: raids that tore up infrastructure with little connection to any security threat, and detentions that swept up thousands. Throughout, the same blind eye remained turned toward the settlers running riot across the countryside.

Jenin refugee camp, which had already endured major assaults earlier in 2023, became a testing ground for tactics that later spread. Bulldozers tore through camp streets night after night, ostensibly clearing improvised explosives but destroying water mains and sewage systems serving thousands in the process. When the military descended on Tulkarem’s Nur Shams camp, thousands of residents either fled or huddled in their homes for days as troops moved systematically through every building.

The Oslo Accords — the 1990s agreements that divided the West Bank into zones of Israeli and Palestinian control — had designated Area A as fully under Palestinian Authority control. After October 7th, that distinction effectively disappeared. Israeli forces entered Ramallah, the administrative capital, whenever they deemed it necessary. Raids in the supposedly autonomous Palestinian cities became routine, and local forces were largely powerless to respond.

Alongside the raids came a mass arrest campaign. More than 17,000 Palestinians were pulled into custody by May 2025. Detainees faced a military court system whose procedural protections had long been criticized by human rights groups, and the wartime pace strained even those limited safeguards further.

Detention Without End

The expansion of administrative detention — the mechanism that allows Israel to hold people indefinitely without charge and with no promise of a trial — reached levels not seen in twenty years. By the end of 2024, more than 3,300 Palestinians were being held without charge or trial, including 112 children. The system ran on secret evidence that could not be challenged, leaving families with no way to know whether their sons were actually involved in militant activity or simply caught up in mass sweeps.

None of this is to say Israel’s security concerns are baseless. While the West Bank is not the militant stronghold Gaza became, that is in no small part because of the ongoing military operations there, undertaken with the explicit aim of preventing a Gaza-style takeover by Palestinian militias. Hamas networks do exist in the West Bank, and weapons do flow in from neighboring areas. Iran, for its part, has been caught on multiple occasions trying to establish or grow cells in the territory. The threats are real.

The harder question is whether the tactics were proportionate to them. The scope of the operations — and the total impunity granted to settler violence — raised alarms even among Israel’s own security professionals. When bulldozers tore up an entire market during a raid on a refugee camp, wiping out the livelihoods of dozens of families with no connection to militants, the line between counterterrorism and collective punishment grew ever blurrier. Crushing organized resistance in the cities was one thing; the unchecked rural violence happening in parallel was another, and the way authorities handled it exposed the underlying strategy.

A System Working as Designed

The accountability record makes that strategy plain. Of the thousands of complaints Palestinians filed about settler attacks since 2005, the Israeli rights group Yesh Din found that 94 percent were closed without any indictment. Another 3 percent produced indictments that went nowhere, and only 3 percent ended in convictions. In all, 97 percent of documented violence produced no consequences whatsoever.

The rare convictions tended to involve cases too egregious to ignore — like the 2015 firebombing of a home that killed an infant, for which the perpetrators received life sentences that Israeli outlets themselves described as an exception. For the handful of other convictions, rights groups documented a pattern of lenient sentencing that only reinforced the de facto precedent: settler violence was not taken seriously.

On the ground, the consequence was a brutal asymmetry. Settlers would attack a village, Palestinians would call for help, and if anyone arrived it was usually soldiers — who would then arrest the Palestinians for disturbing the peace. Human Rights Watch documented case after case of troops accompanying settler rampages, standing by as homes burned, and sometimes actively helping force families out.

In one incident near Hebron, soldiers held a Palestinian family at gunpoint while settlers destroyed their home, then arrested the father when he tried to film it. There was, in practical terms, no authority Palestinians could turn to for protection.

A handful of Israeli politicians turned this impunity into policy. Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Ministry of National Security, which oversees the police, led the charge. The settlement security squads he championed operated with virtually no oversight, answering to no one. A Palestinian who threw stones at attackers could expect military court and years in prison; a settler who shot an unarmed man might face a few hours of questioning and then go home.

The disparity revealed a system functioning exactly as built, prioritizing settler expansion over any pretense of equal justice.

Warnings From Inside

The alarms were not confined to human rights organizations. Former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon warned that these tactics were “planting the seeds of the next explosion.” More than 200 former military and intelligence officials — career professionals who had run operations rather than attended peace rallies — signed a letter warning that the government’s approach could inflict lasting damage on Israel’s own security. Their concern was strategic: excessive force and mass detentions would generate future threats rather than eliminate them.

The warnings went largely unheeded because the far-right ministers holding crucial coalition seats had different priorities than the security establishment. Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich pushed for territorial control over de-escalation, and Netanyahu needed their support to stay in power. Every emptied village in Area C became available for potential settlement.

Every arrested activist meant one less voice of opposition. Infrastructure damage, movement restrictions, and mass arrests all combined to make Palestinian life steadily harder — whether by design or as a byproduct of security measures, the effect was the same.

Palestinians began calling it “the squeeze”: settlers pushing from the rural areas, the military pressing in the cities, nowhere safe and nowhere to turn. A farmer could not reach his olive groves without facing armed settlers. A student could not get to university without passing checkpoints where any soldier might decide to detain him. A mother could not know whether her son would come home from work or disappear into administrative detention.

The psychological toll was as calculated as the physical violence, with uncertainty and fear deployed as tools of control.

External restraint, never strong, weakened further. The Biden administration, in its final months, took the unprecedented step of sanctioning a handful of extremist settlers — the first time the United States had ever targeted Israeli settlers in this way. It marked a real policy shift, but the sanctions covered only a few individuals and did little to slow the broader wave.

The Trump administration has since lifted many of them and shown far less interest in restraining settler activity, a signal heard loud and clear across the region. With no meaningful outside pressure and a government actively encouraging expansion, the situation kept deteriorating. The West Bank, in the words of one Israeli human rights activist, has been turned into “an open-air prison with settlements as guard towers” — the map now resembling Swiss cheese, with Palestinian areas reduced to isolated islands in a sea of settlements and military zones.

The Leadership Vacuum

While Israel’s government carried out this agenda, where was Palestinian leadership? Hamas governed only Gaza, never the West Bank; its presence in the territory remains minimal and without legitimate status. The Palestinian Authority is supposed to be the government there. So where was it, and what was it doing?

By 2023, the PA had become a government in name only. Mahmoud Abbas, by then in the nineteenth year of what was meant to be a four-year term, presided over an authority that 89 percent of Palestinians want him gone from. His government has not held elections, in part because it recognizes its own deep unpopularity — and because a vote would, in all likelihood, hand power to Hamas or a similar militant faction. At 89, Abbas is seven years older than Joe Biden.

The international community largely treats the PA as powerless. It maintains a semblance of autonomy but lacks any serious ability to deliver what Palestinians need, let alone meaningful reform. It cannot provide basic services, cannot protect its people from violence, and has proven incapable of stopping settlement expansion. As a result, it commands almost no public support.

Some of this is not entirely Abbas’s fault, though he deserves a substantial share of the blame. The PA was never designed to be a permanent government of the West Bank; it was meant to be a transitional body on a path to statehood that never materialized. In that stagnation, the authority as it exists today was born — keeping the territory from full anarchy, but only just, and beneath that minimal functionality lay a system rotted by corruption. The Nizar Banat case in 2021 removed any remaining doubt: PA security forces beat an anti-corruption activist to death after he exposed government graft, confirming what Palestinians already believed — that the PA exists primarily to perpetuate itself.

Collaboration, Division, and Collapse

That self-preservation depends on collaboration with Israel; the PA could not survive without support from Jerusalem and the international community. Abbas himself has called security coordination with Israel “sacred.” The stance traps the Authority in an impossible position: collaborating with what it decries as the occupier while claiming to be the Palestinians’ best chance of overcoming that same occupation. The contradiction has hollowed out whatever legitimacy the authority once held.

The weakness would be more bearable if Palestinians could at least unite politically. But that hope, too, has faded. The Beijing Declaration of July 2024 brought the rival factions together on paper, yet, like earlier reconciliation attempts, it has shown little sign of producing unified governance. The underlying problem persists: Abbas and his Fatah party face dismal approval ratings with no realistic path back to popularity, and neither faction has much incentive to hold elections that might upend the current arrangement.

By 2025, the PA could no longer maintain even basic functions. After Israel stopped transferring tax revenues in May, the authority slid toward financial collapse, since those transfers had previously made up nearly two-thirds of its budget. The impact was brutal: PA salaries were cut by an average of 60 percent in May and 50 percent in June. Teachers and health workers who had already endured months of delayed pay now took home fractions of what they were owed.

Schools ran three days a week when they opened at all, and the health system buckled. Hospitals could not obtain oncology drugs, leaving cancer patients untreated as the health ministry issued ever more desperate warnings. Through it all, PA officials kept driving luxury cars through Ramallah, making the gap between the governing class and everyone else more visible than ever.

International donors did try to fill the void — the EU alone pledged over a billion euros, while Norway and Saudi Arabia assembled coalitions to keep the PA afloat. But the rot was on full display: an authority powerless to protect its residents from settler raids, yet whose leaders lived in comparative comfort. A succession crisis looms over everything. Abbas is 89, with no chosen successor and no mechanism for what happens when he leaves office.

Even Israeli officials who have no use for him worry about what comes next, because he has at least maintained some semblance of order. By the fall, the question was no longer whether the PA could govern — that much was clear — but whether it would survive at all.

What Comes Next

Roughly 40 percent of the West Bank is now effectively off-limits to Palestinians, and the remaining 60 percent faces ever-greater threats from settlement expansion. Yet international leaders still refer to the PA as the representative of the Palestinian people, because on paper that is what it is. The harder question is how anyone builds a state under these conditions.

The alternatives to a two-state solution have always been murky. A single state with equal rights for everyone is overwhelmingly rejected by Israeli Jews, since granting full citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would bring Arabs close to a majority. Most regard that as fatal to the project of a Jewish state, and after October 7th the objection is not fading.

The alternative version of a one-state outcome — full Israeli annexation without equal rights — amounts to apartheid, and even many conservative Israelis have little appetite for it, given the logistical burden of taking direct responsibility for the Palestinian population. Other ideas, such as a three-state arrangement separating the West Bank and Gaza into distinct Palestinian entities, sidestep a fundamental problem: the West Bank can barely govern itself now, and those governance failures would not vanish even if every settler left tomorrow.

That is the stagnation we arrive at. The diplomatic process is frozen, yet events on the ground keep moving at breakneck speed. Multiple villages have been emptied over the past two years, military operations have killed nearly a thousand people and detained countless more, and much of it has flown under the radar amid the war in Gaza. This is the squeeze Palestinians describe — settlers from the hills, the military from the cities, their own government offering no protection — unfolding while the West Bank is dramatically transformed and largely unremarked upon.

The dynamic is not improving. If anything, the squeeze is tightening as Israeli ministers speak more openly about building settlements that would cut the territory in two and effectively end any chance of a Palestinian state. That raises an uncomfortable paradox.

The PA’s collapse — through Abbas’s death, the unraveling fiscal crisis, or the long erosion of its legitimacy — would mean the end of the first internationally recognized Palestinian government. And yet, given the total political deadlock, continuing the status quo amounts to a managed decline of any chance at genuine independence. Which leaves an open and uneasy question: whether whatever succeeds the current order might somehow be better positioned to bring about a meaningful peace.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. HomeFronts is his deep dive into geopolitics, modern conflict, military history, and the civilian and societal dimensions of global events.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many settler-related incidents have occurred in the West Bank since October 7th? The documented average has been roughly four per day, every day, for about two years — double the rate of two per day recorded in 2022. The violence peaked in mid-2025, with June and July each seeing around 100 Palestinians injured by settlers, the highest monthly figures since tracking began in 2005.

Why did the violence become more lethal after October 7th? The key change was weaponry. Within weeks of the Hamas attack, Israel’s government distributed approximately 7,000 firearms to settlers through regional defense units. Confrontations that might once have involved stones and clubs increasingly involved guns, and at least eight Palestinians were shot dead by settlers in the months following the attack.

What happened to villages like Khirbet Zanuta? Khirbet Zanuta, once home to nearly 150 people, was emptied after armed settlers arrived in October 2023, smashed solar panels, and threatened residents with death. By the end of the month the families had fled, and fencing was raised around the former town to prevent their return. At least 14 Palestinian communities were completely depopulated through this kind of sustained pressure by 2024.

How extensive were the military’s detentions? More than 17,000 Palestinians were taken into custody by May 2025. By the end of 2024, over 3,300 were being held without charge or trial under administrative detention — the highest level in twenty years — including 112 children. The system relied on secret evidence that could not be challenged.

Why are settlers so rarely held accountable? According to the Israeli rights group Yesh Din, 94 percent of settler-violence complaints filed since 2005 were closed without indictment, and only 3 percent ended in convictions. In total, 97 percent of documented violence produced no consequences. Soldiers frequently accompanied settler rampages, sometimes arresting the Palestinian victims rather than the attackers.

What has happened to the Palestinian Authority financially? After Israel stopped transferring tax revenues in May 2025 — funds that had made up nearly two-thirds of its budget — the PA slid toward financial collapse. Salaries were cut by an average of 60 percent in May and 50 percent in June, schools ran reduced hours, and hospitals could not obtain basic drugs such as oncology medications.

Why is a two-state solution described as increasingly impossible? With roughly 40 percent of the West Bank effectively off-limits to Palestinians and settlements continuing to expand, the territory’s map has come to resemble Swiss cheese, with Palestinian areas reduced to isolated enclaves surrounded by settlements and military zones. Israeli ministers have also spoken openly about settlements that would cut the West Bank in two, further foreclosing the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.