Over the span of two days, one of the last remaining Palestinian communities between Ramallah and Jericho was uprooted from its land.

On the evening of July 2, dozens of Israeli settlers descended on the West Bank shepherding village of Al-Muarrajat. They broke into homes, stole around 60 sheep, and erected a small outpost inside the village. By the next morning, settlers were seen sitting alongside Israeli soldiers at the newly built outpost, now moved just meters from the village school.

Fearing further theft, residents began evacuating their livestock. By Friday, families were packing their belongings and leaving en masse. Thirty families — 177 people in total — were forced out, all but erasing the community.

“Residents were forced to leave at gunpoint,” said 28-year-old Aaliyah Malihat, a local activist, as her family gathered their possessions. “People have nowhere to go. They’re scattering to nearby villages.”

Before 1948, Al-Muarrajat’s residents lived in the Naqab/Negev desert. Since then, they’ve been displaced multiple times, first by Israeli military orders, later by settler expansion. For many, this was the third or fourth time they’ve been uprooted.

But even after fleeing Al-Muarrajat, their ordeal continued.

“We went to Aqbat Jaber refugee camp in Jericho,” Malihat recounted to +972. “But on Monday, settlers came again and tried to take some of our sheep. Israeli soldiers arrived with them. They surrounded us, took our IDs and phones, and led the settlers through our homes. Then they said we had three hours to leave or we’d lose our lives.

“It’s painful,” she continued, speaking from the bare hill on the outskirts of Jericho to which she and dozens of her family members had fled. Her old home in Al-Muarrajat, now destroyed, could clearly be seen just a few kilometers away.

Alia’s uncle, Jabar Malihat, described how the situation had deteriorated since the war in Gaza began in 2023. “Settler attacks became relentless,” he said. “You might ask why we didn’t leave earlier, knowing destruction was coming. The truth is, we had no alternative. If the Israeli government had offered us a safe place, we would have gone peacefully. But they didn’t negotiate. They just sent the settlers.”

In response to +972’s inquiry about Friday’s expulsion, the IDF Spokesperson claimed that there were “no reports of violent incidents” in Al-Muarrajat. But the Palestinians who were expelled painted a completely different picture. “Unfortunately, the police and the army were involved. They supported the settlers, instead of protecting the children and the residents,” Jamal Malihat, a resident of the village, testified.

According to the UN, settler violence in Al-Muarrajat has surged from just three recorded incidents in 2021 and 2022, to 20 in 2023, and 74 in 2024. Over these years, settlers have built outposts around Al-Muarrajat and used them to launch repeated raids. Last year, settlers armed with clubs stormed the village school while students and teachers were inside.

One resident, 75, had fled after that attack. On Friday, he returned to stand with his neighbors during the latest expulsion. Overcome by the scene, he suffered a heart attack; he now remains hospitalized in Ramallah.

‘They treat us all as their enemy’

The assault on Al-Muarrajat comes just days after a string of deadly settler attacks in the town of Kufr Malik, northeast of Ramallah. On June 23, Israeli forces shot and killed a 13-year-old boy; two days later, settlers rampaged through the town, setting property on fire and killing three more young Palestinians who were among a group of villagers trying to defend their homes.

“They [settlers] don’t treat people like human beings,” said one man at the funeral for those killed in Kufr Malik on June 26, who asked not to be identified. “They treat us all as their enemy — a child, an old man or woman, even a baby. They believe that baby will cause harm when they grow up, so they want to kill them now.”

Mere hours after the funeral, settlers launched another attack, this time targeting the nearby town of Turmus Ayya. Unlike previous incidents, reporters from +972 Magazine and other outlets were on the ground, offering a close-up view of how these settler assaults unfold in real time.

Around 3 p.m., the town’s central mosque blared an alarm and loudspeaker calls, urging residents to come out and defend the area under attack. Likely assuming many of the villagers would still be at the funeral, dozens of settlers had swept into the northern part of the village, where a Palestinian-American 14-year-old boy was killed by Israeli soldiers in April.

The settlers tried to break into homes and set fire to surrounding agricultural fields — what Palestinian witnesses have described as a highly coordinated operation. But within minutes, some 200 men, youth, and elders from the village rushed to confront them with stones.

At the front line of settlers were about ten masked youth hurling stones. Just behind them, one man held a walkie-talkie; another, unmasked and armed, fired his gun as villagers advanced. The attackers moved in tight groups, carrying clubs, firearms, and plastic bottles, likely filled with flammable liquids. Their tactics mimicked those of military and police units: feigned retreats to lure villagers into vulnerable positions before counterattacking.

Several minutes later, Israeli soldiers arrived. The settlers slowly withdrew, passing right by the troops. None were stopped. Meanwhile, the military poured into the village, not to halt the settler assault, but to contain the Palestinians trying to defend their homes.

Violence with a clear purpose

As settler violence in the West Bank grows increasingly vicious and widespread, Israeli authorities only appear to respond decisively when the victims are soldiers.

On June 27, days after the deadly attacks in Kufr Malik, Israeli forces arrived to evacuate a nearby settler outpost. In retaliation, dozens of settlers pelted the soldiers with stones, including the battalion commander. Amid the clashes, troops opened fire and injured a 14-year-old settler boy; Israelis later rioted outside a military base against the shooting, burning down a nearby facility.

This rare instance of violence against the army sparked swift and widespread condemnation, even from establishment settler leaders. “The entire settlement enterprise condemns the violence of a small handful,” said Israel Gantz, chairman of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council. “They must be apprehended and brought to justice.” 

His remarks reflect a familiar narrative in Israeli political discourse: the attempt to draw a line between so-called “extremist” settlers and the broader settler movement. But that distinction is deeply misleading.

In reality, these “hilltop youth” enjoy broad support from within the settler population, as well as from state institutions even the army itself. They are frequently accompanied by adults, local settlement guards, and soldiers. Their attacks are carried out with full confidence that if Palestinians attempt to resist, the army will step in and protect them. As far as Israeli authorities go, their violence serves a clear purpose: to forcibly displace Palestinian communities, while allowing the state to maintain plausible deniability.

Even the battalion commander attacked by settlers, identified in Israeli media as G., made clear where his loyalties lie. “I’ve been serving in this area for 20 years. Binyamin [the biblical name for the central West Bank] is dearer to me than anything else,” he told the Israeli outlet Ynet. “We return to reserve duty time and again with a sense of mission, and now we have to deal with incidents like these … 90 percent of our time is spent preventing the ‘hilltop youth’ from setting fire to open areas. Our mission is to protect the settlements … This endangers the residents.”

Settler leaders frequently claim that the attackers, many of them minors, are “not from the area.” But this is merely a legal technicality. Many live in unrecognized outposts or settler farms across the West Bank, while being officially registered elsewhere. They operate with the logistical, political, and military backing of the Israeli state.

That alignment was made abundantly clear in the authorities’ response following the attack on soldiers. After the initial outcry, a few settlers were arrested, but were quietly released just days later. The state prosecution claimed the evidence “did not meet the threshold” for assault charges. Instead of prosecution, the suspects were placed under house arrest and temporarily barred from the West Bank.

In parallel, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced a NIS 50 million program to fund social activities and educational frameworks for extremist youth settlers meant to “steer them away from illegal activities.”

Occasionally, as happened last week, there’s “friction” (the military’s euphemism for settler violence). But the overall mission remains unchanged: to protect and expand the settlement enterprise. Any temporary disciplinary action against the settlers — an arrest here, a restraining order there — will soon be forgotten. “Order” will return: settlers will continue attacking Palestinians and left-wing activists, unimpeded.

As Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put it, “the IDF and the settlers are one and the same.”

‘A vicious cycle of terror’

Elisha Yered, a self-described member of the Hilltop Youth and former spokesperson for MK Limor Son Har-Melech, recently bragged in an article for the right-wing Israeli outlet Arutz Sheva about a “major success.” The expulsion of Palestinians from Maghayer Al-Dir at the end of May, he said, marked the culmination of a larger project: the complete cleansing of Palestinians from the area between the Allon Road and the Jordan Valley — “an area larger than the entire Gaza Strip,” he boasted.

Even before the war began in October 2023, this vast stretch of land, roughly 150,000 dunams from east of Ramallah to the outskirts of Jericho, had already been largely emptied of Palestinians. Communities like Ras a-Tin, Ein Samia, and al-Qabun were forcibly depopulated through coordinated settler violence and state-sanctioned land grabs.

Since the war, the pace of violence and displacement has only accelerated. Settlers now appear to be targeting the very villages that sheltered those previously displaced. 

On July 7, the Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission reported that settlers carried out 2,153 attacks across the occupied West Bank in the first six months of 2025 alone, killing at least four Palestinians. The report catalogued a wide array of violence: from physical assaults and shootings to arson, the seizure of private land, and coordinated ambushes on roads. Some homes were burned while residents were still inside.

Kufr Malik, Al-Mughayyir, Beita, and Sinjil were among the hardest-hit areas. Ramallah Governorate registered the highest number of settler attacks (491), followed by Hebron (409) and Nablus (396).

Dror Etkes, a researcher with the Israeli NGO Kerem Navot, told +972 Magazine that seven new settler outposts have been erected along the Allon Road since October 2023. “Establishing outposts has a single goal: fueling fear and terror to pave the way for more land grabs and expulsions,” he explained. “It’s a vicious cycle of terror, looting, violence, and displacement.”

Juma’a Adwai, a farmer from Kufr Malik, has firsthand experience of this cycle. His family owns land east of the Allon Road, but he can no longer access it. “The problems didn’t start today, they’ve been happening for years,” he told +972. “We used to farm 55,000 dunams in the Ein Samia area. Now we’re barred from over 50,000 of them. The land is completely off-limits.”

According to Adwai, the latest wave of attacks marked a disturbing escalation. “Until recently, they never entered the village itself. Now, they want to kill. They come to our homes. If people hadn’t come out to defend us, they would have burned the whole village. The army is supposed to protect us, but [the soldiers] come to help the settlers.”

+972 approached the IDF Spokesperson to ask if the army is taking any steps to curb settler attacks against Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers; their reply will be added here if received.

A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.