Israeli soldiers conduct a military operation at the Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank, in March. Extremists are carrying out one of the most violent campaigns against Palestinian villages since the UN began keeping records. Photo / Afif Amireh, The New York Times
It was well past midnight when the masked arsonists sneaked into the hilltop Palestinian village of Burqa in the West Bank.
Arriving from the direction of a nearby Israeli settlement, they crept inside a junkyard on the edge of the village.
They sprayed liquid on several cars, security footage showed, and set the vehicles alight.
One sprayed graffiti on a barn wall, tagging the name of a nearby settlement, as well as the Hebrew word for “revenge”.
It was the third attack that July night in this central pocket of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the seventh attack on this particular junkyard since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip in October 2023, according to its owner.
“Before the war, they harassed us, but not like this,” said Muhammad Sabr Asalaya, 56, the junkyard owner.
“Now they’re trying to expel as many people as they can and annex as much land as they can.”
Such attacks were on the rise before Hamas led a deadly raid on Israel in 2023, setting off the war in Gaza, and they have since become the new normal across much of the West Bank.
With the world’s attention on Gaza, extremist settlers in the West Bank are carrying out one of the most violent and effective campaigns of intimidation and land-grabbing since Israel occupied the territory during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.
Settlers have carried out more than 750 attacks on Palestinians and their property during the first half of this year, an average of nearly 130 assaults a month, according to records compiled by the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
That is the highest monthly average since the UN started compiling such records in 2006.
The Israeli military has recorded a similar surge in settler violence, though it has documented only 440 attacks in the same period, according to unpublished internal records reviewed by the New York Times.
The military, which is the sovereign power in the occupied territory, says it tries to prevent the attacks, but a New York Times investigation last year found that Israeli authorities have for decades failed to impose meaningful restraints on criminal settlers.
While Israel usually prosecutes Palestinians under military law, settlers are typically charged under civil law, if they are prosecuted at all.
For this article, reporters for the New York Times visited five villages recently attacked by settlers, reviewed security footage of several episodes and cellphone footage of others, and spoke with residents of the afflicted villages as well as Israeli military officers and settler leaders.
Our reporting found that masked settlers typically sneak into Palestinian villages at night, setting fire to vehicles and buildings.
In some cases, they enter during the daylight hours, leading to confrontations with residents.
Sometimes the clashes have involved the Israel military, leading to the killings of several Palestinians, including a Palestinian American.
In one daytime attack, settlers threw a firebomb into a child’s bedroom, the child’s family said.
The vast majority of the 700,000 Jewish Israelis who have settled since 1967 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not involved in such violence.
The settlements are considered illegal by most of the international community.
Mainstream settler leaders say they have a right to the land but oppose attacking Palestinians.
Hardline settler leaders acknowledge that their aim is to intimidate Palestinians into leaving strategic tracts of territory that many Palestinians hope may one day form the spine of a state.
“It’s not the nicest thing to evacuate a population,” Ariel Danino, a prominent settler activist, said in an interview with the New York Times in 2023.
“But we’re talking about a war over the land, and this is what is done during times of war.”
In a recent call, Danino said he stood by the comments but declined a second interview.
For several years, the settlers had focused their intimidation on tiny, semi-nomadic herding communities along a remote chain of hilltops northeast of Ramallah, the main Palestinian city in the West Bank.
That campaign has largely succeeded, forcing at least 38 communities to leave their hamlets and encampments since 2023, according to records compiled by B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group.
That has eroded the Palestinian presence there and ceded the surrounding slopes to settlers, who have seized the chance to build more small settlement outposts, or encampments.
After members of one Palestinian community fled en masse in May, a settler leader, Elisha Yered, wrote on social media that their departure was “thanks to the campaign waged against it by the Jewish settlement outposts in the area”.
“With God’s help, one day we will expel you to your natural place in Iraq and Saudi Arabia,” Yered added.
Since the start of 2023, settlers have built more than 130 outposts, mostly in rural areas of the West Bank, that are technically unauthorised but often tolerated by the Israeli Government.
That is more than they had built in the previous two decades combined, according to research by Peace Now, an Israeli group that backs the creation of a Palestinian state.
Now settlers have expanded their scope.
They are increasingly targeting a cluster of wealthier, larger and better connected Palestinian villages closer to Ramallah — villages like Burqa and its neighbour, Beitin.
Before the junkyard attack in Burqa, masked settlers had, in fact, begun to rampage in Beitin.
Just after 1am, Abdallah Abbas, a retired teacher in that village, woke to find his sedan on fire and a Star of David sprayed on the wall of his garden.
Roughly an hour later, security footage showed, two masked arsonists stole into the yard of Leila Jaraba’s house, a few hundred metres away on the edge of the village.
One sprayed the hood of Jaraba’s car with something flammable, and his accomplice set the car on fire.
“We knew our turn would come,” said Jaraba, 28, who was cowering inside with her husband and two sons, aged 2 and 4 months. “They want to take this land; they want to kick us out.”
About an hour later, masked settlers entered Burqa and attacked Sabr Asalaya’s junkyard.
Villagers said in interviews that they suspected the same group of settlers might have moved from place to place, wreaking havoc. This sequence of attacks was just a snapshot of a broader pattern of violence in the area.
In the first half of 2025, there were an average of 17 attacks a month in this about 100sqkm area, according to the UN.
That was nearly twice the monthly rate in 2024 and roughly five times as many as in 2022.
The attacks have occurred against the backdrop of intensifying efforts by the Israeli Government, which is partly led by longtime settler activists, to entrench its grip on the West Bank.
Since entering office in late 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have authorised more than 30 settlements, some of which were previously built without government permission and have been granted retroactive authorisation.
It is the largest wave of government-led settlement activity since before the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.
Simultaneously, the Israeli military has captured and demolished key urban neighbourhoods in the northern West Bank that are technically administered by the Palestinian Authority, a semi-autonomous institution that oversees civil governance in Palestinian cities.
The military has also installed hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints across the territory.
The Israeli military defends its actions as a means of containing Palestinian militant groups that launch terrorist attacks on Israelis.
But it has further complicated the lives of most Palestinians in the West Bank, stifled the economy, left tens of thousands of people homeless and made it even harder for most Palestinians to journey to nearby cities.
In villages like Burqa, settlers’ attacks make life especially untenable.
Repeated arson attacks have damaged scores of used cars that Sabr Asalaya, the junkyard owner, said he had bought from dealers in Israel.
He planned to retool their engines and spare parts and sell them for a profit. The attacks have lost him stock worth tens of thousands of dollars, making his business — and his ability to survive in this village — much less viable, he said.
Life is “not slowly turning untenable; it is already untenable”, Sabr Asalaya said. “We are encircled. We can’t even herd our cattle. We’re locked in.”
The problem has been made worse by the Israeli military’s failure to prevent either the attacks or the settlers’ construction of unauthorised encampments across the territory.
A New York Times investigation last year found that Israeli authorities had for decades shown substantial leniency to Jews involved in terrorist attacks against Arabs, a dynamic that has only worsened since October 2023.
In one emblematic case, a settler was filmed shooting a Palestinian in the presence of an Israeli soldier, yet the shooter was questioned for only 20 minutes and never arrested.
A senior Israeli military commander in the central West Bank, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said his soldiers tried to protect settlers and Palestinians in accordance with Israeli law.
He noted that settlers had sometimes clashed with Israeli soldiers this summer.
We spoke to the commander eight hours before the attacks on Sabr Asalaya’s property and Jaraba’s car.
Soldiers arrived long after the fires had been extinguished, villagers said.
While Israeli police said they had opened investigations into each episode, no one was prosecuted.
“In some cases, suspects were arrested,” the police said in a statement, “though later released due to a lack of evidence”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Patrick Kingsley, Fatima AbdulKarim and Natan Odenheimer
Photographs by: Afif Amireh, Patrick Kingsley, Avishag Shaar-Yashuv,
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES