Jewish settlers clash with Israeli security forces to prevent Palestinian family from returning to West Bank

After the settlers entered the property, Tubassi said, Israeli security forces urged his family to go to the roof, where the settlers followed them. Several soldiers and officers formed a physical barrier between the family and the settlers, Tubassi said.

Tubassi said security officials asked them to get back into an armored car and drive them to safety.

The failure of security forces to return the Tubassi to their homes comes as settler violence in the occupied West Bank has become a growing international embarrassment for Israeli leaders, who have struggled to explain how Israel’s formidable army repeatedly found itself outnumbered by hundreds of lightly armed young men.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attacks in a statement Tuesday and called for the rioters to be brought to justice. The “handful of rioters are not representative of the law-abiding settler public in Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the biblical and historical term for the West Bank.

The statement echoed his comments to the United Nations General Assembly last week, in which he rejected the “vigilantism” of Jewish settlers in the West Bank but sought to downplay the violence, suggesting that the problem concerned only “a handful of juvenile delinquents, numbering around 150, who throw stones, cut down olive trees, and sometimes light fires.”

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), some 6,500 Palestinians have been displaced due to settler attacks in the West Bank since 2023. Between January 1 and July 24, Israeli forces or settlers killed 76 Palestinians, according to the latest available data from OCHA. Three Israelis were killed during the same period, according to the data.

The agency recorded nearly 200 settler attacks that caused Palestinian casualties or property damage in August alone.

Israel regularly accuses the UN of taking sides against it. But many governments around the world consider the West Bank to be illegally occupied by Israel.

Monday night’s police and military action in Jalud was an attempt to carry out an order from Israel’s High Court of Justice, which asked “competent authorities” earlier this month to ensure that the Tubassi return home within two weeks.

The court also demanded that security forces explain to the Tubassi and another Palestinian family “why they are not working to return the family to their homes and why they are not removing barriers and obstacles that block access to the homes.”

It was unclear Tuesday if and when the police and army would attempt to carry out the court order again, and the Israeli military said it had no details on how the matter would be handled in the short term.

“The Israelis haven’t told me anything” about their future plans, Tubassi said in a phone call from his father’s nearby house, where the family resides. “I don’t know if they’ll let me in.”

It remains to be seen whether they will be able to return after last night’s fire, as the house was badly damaged.

“What happened was a nightmare for us,” Tubassi said. “And now we are living more nightmares, because our loss has become so great. The State of Israel did not stop these thugs from taking our homes and our lands and killing us.”