When Israeli settlers attacked his West Bank village, Moatasem Odeh saw his son Amir, 28, fatally shot. Then he was stabbed repeatedly and beaten unconscious.
The attack in Qusra, on March 14, was one of many in a wave of brutal violence in the West Bank over the past two months.
Villagers might have once driven the attackers away by throwing stones, said Mr. Odeh, 46, but settlers now routinely carry guns. “We are helpless,” he said, “and they know it.”
With the world’s attention focused on the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and its proxies, extremist settlers acting with seeming impunity have intensified their attacks on Palestinians across the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Their campaign of violence and intimidation is emptying out entire villages and leaving countless Palestinians fearing what each nightfall might bring.
In the Jordan Valley, masked men sexually assaulted Suhaib Abualkebash, 29, and brutalized his extended family, children included.
In Deir Dibwan, east of Ramallah, Odeh Awawdeh, 25, was fatally shot when he tried to stop settlers from stealing his family’s sheep, according to his family and local authorities.
Thaer Hamayel, 28, was shot dead fending off Israeli settlers raiding his village, Khirbet Abu Falah.
“I’m afraid of being in my house, and I’m afraid of what will happen if I leave it,” said Maleeha Al-Omari, 40, standing outside her home just steps from where Mr. Hamayel was gunned down.
“No one protects us from the settlers,” she said. “We are on our own.”
Between the start of the war on Feb. 28 and April 27, 13 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed in attacks, hundreds injured and 622 driven from their homes, according to data compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In all of 2025, the office counted as many as 15 Palestinians killed by Israeli settlers.
Put simply, experts say, extremists have seen the war as an opportunity.
“It’s a chance to escalate pogroms on Palestinians while the world is distracted,” said Idan Yaron, an anthropologist who has spent years studying Israel’s radical nationalist groups, including long stretches with extremist settlers. “Their goal is to expel Palestinians from their lands and make them their own.”
The violence, often involving beatings, arson, theft and vandalism, has become routine. The attacks — an average of nearly seven a day — showed no sign of slowing after the U.S. and Iran agreed to a temporary cease-fire on April 8.
Extremist settlers even publicize their violent attacks. One online group boasted that, in the Hebrew month ending in April, the fight “against the Arab enemy in the Holy Land” had seen attacks in 40 Palestinian communities, including 79 people injured, 63 cars and 32 buildings torched, and hundreds of olive trees uprooted.
The responses of the Israeli authorities have generally ranged from unkept promises to address the problem, to blame shifting, to outright denial.
The Israeli police, who investigate crimes committed by Israelis in the West Bank, said that they had opened investigations into some of the more egregious incidents since Feb. 28. They said they arrested seven men in the sexual assault case in Khirbet Humsa and one man, an army reservist, in the killing in Qusra.
Yet the police also denied that settler violence had surged in that period, without providing any data to support that assertion.
The force has long failed to bring settlers to justice. Over the past two decades, 93.6 percent of police investigations ended without an indictment, according to the Israeli human-rights group Yesh Din.
The police force is overseen by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, who made his name as a lawyer defending settlers who had attacked Palestinians. Mr. Ben-Gvir, who did not respond to requests for comment, was once convicted of inciting racism and supporting a Jewish terrorist organization.
As the occupying power in the West Bank, the Israeli military is supposed to maintain order and protect civilians. Its leadership has repeatedly sounded the alarm about rising settler violence since the start of the war.
Yet the military has exerted little force in stopping settler violence. Soldiers, often the first authorities in the West Bank to arrive at the scene of an attack, seldom detain settlers until the police can arrive. And though they sometimes bulldoze illegal outposts, those are often rebuilt within hours.
Senior and midlevel commanders, speaking to The New York Times on condition of anonymity to discuss military issues, say that they struggle to make their troops act against the settlers; some soldiers, the commanders say, sympathize with the settlers. In many cases, soldiers have stood by as settlers attacked Palestinians, according to Palestinians and Israeli activists and officials. Some soldiers even take part in the violence.
Asked about such cases, the military said in a statement that instances in which troops failed to follow orders were “examined thoroughly and disciplinary measures are taken accordingly.”
Top army commanders have gingerly suggested that the problem is much broader and extends beyond the military. Settler violence, they say, is supported, or at least condoned, by Israeli politicians — and, increasingly, by the public that they represent.
“I’m calling on you — public leaders, rabbis, educators, parents, and youth — open your eyes,” Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, the army’s commander for the West Bank, wrote in an open letter published on March 19. “Don’t encourage it. Don’t be silent.”
Israel’s right-wing government, which has overseen a record expansion of West Bank settlements, has minimized the surge of violence, when it has discussed it at all.
It announced on March 24 the creation of a unit in the Defense Ministry to address at-risk youth, as officials often refer to the young men and teenagers perpetrating violence in the West Bank. It would do so by encouraging them to stay in school, play sports, serve in the army and get jobs.
The government has also allocated more money for providing security equipment to settlers, like drones and off-road vehicles. Those are purportedly to help settlements protect themselves but are often used by settlers to harass and attack Palestinians.
An 18-year-old settler was driving one such vehicle when he was killed, last month, in a collision with a car driven by a Palestinian. The driver said it was an accident, but extremist settlers did not wait for the police to investigate.
For nights after, scores of settlers marauded through villages across the West Bank, attacking Palestinians and torching their cars and homes. The police said a handful of people had been arrested but did not respond to questions about whether any had been charged. The collision is now being investigated as a possible terrorist attack by the Palestinian driver.
Critics of the government’s response to settler violence say it has amounted to gaslighting and tacit support.
Senior Israeli officials have suggested that claims of settler violence are simply made up, despite abundant evidence of widespread and organized attacks. Or they shrug off the attackers as few and their crimes as minor.
The actual number of settlers participating in violence is not known, but the most authoritative estimates are in the hundreds. Dr. Yaron, who studies Israeli extremists, said the core group regularly terrorizing Palestinians ranges from hundreds to about 1,000, with a similar number joining in sporadically. All told, that is a small fraction of the roughly 700,000 Israelis living in West Bank settlements.
Emboldened, some extremists now speak openly about their goals and methods.
In a recent podcast interview, Elisha Yered, 25, a leader of a group of young settlers who call themselves the “hilltop youth,” talked about wanting to drive Palestinians out of their lands.
“There’s an enemy here waiting for the day he can kill me,” Mr. Yered said of Palestinians, adding, “I’ll do everything I can to remove him, to harm him, or at the very least, to deter him for the time being.”
He rejected the term “settler violence,” saying, “It’s self-defense,” but added that “the best defense, as you know, is offense.” This meant always pushing the Palestinians — with land grabs or attacks — to the point at which they feel they must fight back, he said. “We provoke clashes, and we take pride in it.”
Few settlers are so outspoken. More typical was the response of a group of eight young settlers to Times reporters who tried to interview them at their hilltop outpost opposite Qusra — the village where Amir Odeh was killed and his father stabbed.
Within hours of the attack, the Israeli military said that it had evicted the settlers and dismantled their outpost. The next day, they were back.
Three of them tried to block the paths of Times reporters approaching the hilltop. Israeli soldiers watched the confrontation play out from a distance.
Asked about the violence the day before, none of the settlers said a word.
