On the weekend of October 28-29, Bilal Mohammad Saleh, a Palestinian farmer and vendor, was murdered by Jewish settlers in the Palestinian West Bank, which is occupied by Israel. His crime? Going out with family to pick olives from the grove his family had owned for generations. 

On October 13, in a small West Bank town, a Palestinian construction worker, Zakariya al-Arda, was clubbed, shot and wounded by a Jewish settler as he was walking with friends. “We did nothing to the settlers,” his brother said. “They’re constantly harassing us, vandalizing our property and threatening our safety. What do they want from us?”¹

On November 3, the Israeli military killed nine Palestinians during raids in the West Bank. One victim was 14 years old.²

All these incidents are part of an all-out pogrom against Palestinians that racist, genocidal Israeli settlers have launched in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack. These settlers, with direct backing by the Israeli state, in particular its military, have seized upon Israel’s war on Gaza and the thirst for bloodshed and revenge widespread in Israeli society to accelerate their efforts to grab Palestinian land and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the land many families have lived on for over 1,000 years. 

Since October 7, Israel’s military has escalated its raids against Palestinian towns and neighborhoods in the West Bank, arresting some 1,300 people. Palestinian homes and businesses have been vandalized or destroyed, and Palestinians have been attacked and murdered. Recent Israeli settler and military attacks in the West Bank have killed at least 152 Palestinians—33 of them children!—injured 2,000, and forced some 1,000 others to flee their homes. According to the UN, there are now an average of seven incidents of settler violence a day, up from an average of one. 

Israel’s fascist national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, ordered his ministry to buy 10,000 rifles to arm Israeli civilians, in particular, West Bank settlers.³ Leaflets, no doubt from settlers, have been left under the windshield wipers of Palestinian cars warning, “A great catastrophe will descend upon your heads soon. We will destroy every enemy and expel you forcefully from our Holy Land that God has written for us. Wherever you are, carry your loads immediately and leave to where you came from. We are coming for you.”⁴

The Jenin refugee camp has repeatedly been attacked by the Israeli military and settlers. Palestinian farmers and herders in the Jordan Valley have been abused and prevented from accessing grazing areas. On October 12, in the village of Wadi al-Siq, three Palestinians were beaten, stripped and abused by Israeli settlers—reminiscent of America’s torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison following its 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.⁵

Journalist Yuval Abraham described his recent stay in the West Bank: 

It was extremely horrifying to be there over the past few nights. We’ve had incidents where settlers entered one village—it’s called Susiya. They grabbed a boy and his father, and they told them, “You have 24 hours to leave the village, or we are going to murder everybody in the village.” We had an incident where one settler went down to the village and actually shot a Palestinian who was standing next to the mosque. There are incidents of torture, of abuse, of humiliation. And it’s happening every night. Like, I stayed up last night with a family. They’re not sleeping. And everybody is just—like, we see the settlers entering the village.⁶

Crimes and Outrages on Top of 56 years of Crimes and Outrages of the Israeli Occupation

This recent surge of violent ethnic cleansing is all the more outrageous because it comes on top of 56 years of violent Israeli occupation of the West Bank—a large swath of Palestinian land where 2.7 million Palestinians live. 

Israel seized this land from Jordan after launching a pre-emptive war in 1967 against a number of Arab states, primarily Egypt, Jordan and Syria (the so-called Six Day War). Since then Israel has refused to end its military occupation—now the longest in modern history—and instead supported widespread settlement by Israelis. Today there are some 700,000 Israeli settlers in 279 settlements across the West Bank.⁷ Even the United Nations has repeatedly condemned Israeli settlements as a "flagrant violation of international law" prohibiting settlements in occupied territories. 

Israel has over the years steadily expanded the extent and control of Israeli settlers and settlements by erecting barrier walls, military checkpoints, and roads only accessible by Israelis, along with other measures that carve up Palestinian land and isolate Palestinian cities, towns, and villages. Under Israeli occupation, Palestinians are stateless, their movements are limited, and they are tried in Israeli military courts. None of these restrictions apply to settlers, who are allowed—or rather, encouraged—to carry guns, which Palestinians are not. Palestinians are subject to all manner of abuse, threats and increasingly arrests, beatings, even death. Settler attacks—backed by Israel’s military—were increasing in the West Bank even before Hamas’s October 7 attack.

One human rights expert states, “In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules.”⁸

Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has been a stark illustration that it is an illegitimate, settler-colonial state. The new wave of Israeli settler and official military violence further underscores the reality that since its founding 75 years ago, the Zionist state of Israel has been based on the theft of Palestinian land and the genocidal ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine. And all this is now dangerously accelerating.