Settler attacked a school – killed a 14 year old boy
Jewish settler terrorism on the West Bank is escalating. Soon, there will be no Palestine to free. Originally published in Aftonbladet May 2, 2026.
An Israeli settler, dressed in dark green military fatigues, climbs a slope in the West Bank. The hills in this biblical landscape are easily recognisable: mild scrub, the scent of thyme, the soil so often described as ancient, sacred, contested. But here it becomes something different: a firing position. The settler, bearing an automatic rifle, takes an elevated position among the bushes. He aims and opens fire. The target is a school in the village of al Mughayyir. A 14-year-old and a 32-year-old are hit — and killed.
A 16-year-old Palestinian rides his electric bike to school outside Hebron. A car, reportedly belonging to the security detail of an Israeli government minister, strikes the boy. He dies.
A 25-year-old Palestinian is shot dead in the village of Deir Dibwan outside Ramallah. About thirty men are then marched out of the village in a long line. Instead of the settler who committed murder being detained it is the Palestinian men of the village who are mass-arrested.
Outside Nablus, Israeli forces uproot 400 olive trees. “I have tended these trees for forty years, as if they were my own children,” owner Fuad Daraghmeh tells France24. Only weeks earlier, Israel’s official X account posted a picture of an olive tree with the caption: “Rooted in this land for generations. An olive tree in bloom — quiet, resilient and unmistakably Israel.”
A group of settlers surround human-rights activist Issa Amro’s home in Hebron. They shout curses in Hebrew and Arabic, throw stones and try to break in. Perhaps Amro was targeted because in 2024 he traveled to Stockholm to accept the alternative Nobel Prize, the Right Livelihood Award, for his nonviolent resistance to Israel’s occupation.
These are only some of the abuses Palestinians in the West Bank have endured in the past couple weeks. In March, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that a man was sexually assaulted while his children were forced to watch. Settlers tied up the whole family, threatened to rape his female relatives and beat them.
The deadly settler violence is not an aberration alongside the occupation. It is a deliberate strategy.
“Every day and every night attacks occur in the West Bank,” says Yair Dvir, spokesperson for the Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem. “Everything from harassment, arson and deadly attacks on Palestinian livestock. What we are beginning to see more of are outright murders. The goal is clear: ethnic cleansing.”
According to a recent UN report, residents of 45 Palestinian communities have been completely displaced since October 7, 2023, as a result of settler violence and formal state evictions.
“The lethal violence is perhaps most shocking. But what does the most long-term damage is dispossession. Whole villages of hundreds are emptied of people,” says Palestinian freelance journalist Zena Tahhan, who lives in occupied East Jerusalem.
When 600 people were recently expelled from a Bedouin community in Ein Al-Auja after years of attacks and terror, settlers celebrated. The area, they said, had been “cleansed.”
Tahhan and Dvir agree that what enables this is the Israeli state’s direct collaboration with the settlers’ militias. The 750,000 Jewish Israelis who illegally settle the West Bank are directly represented in Israel’s government by far-right ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Since October 7, the Minister for National Security, Ben-Gvir, has openly armed thousands of settler militias, to such an extent that the Israeli human-rights organization Breaking the Silence, founded by former IDF soldiers, launched the campaign “Don’t give them guns.”
Finance Minister Smotrich presented the Israeli government’s vision for the West Bank last September: 82% of the territory should be annexed by Israel while Palestinians are moved to six urban centres: Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Jericho and Hebron.
A few weeks later Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated plainly: There will not be a Palestinian state.
Since October 7 Israel has confiscated nearly $5 billion from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which administers parts of the West Bank. The PA is three months behind on salary payments to public employees.
“The PA is on the brink of collapse. We are experiencing the worst economic crisis in decades,” says Zena Tahhan.
What emerges is not chaos. It is a method. A far-right government strangles the economy, arms settlers, tears down villages, seizes land and pushes Palestinians into confined urban pockets. There are several words for this: Ethnic cleansing. Fascism. Apartheid. The danger is not which word is strongest. The danger is that all three begin to feel insufficient.
What does the political opposition say? Recently, centrist and right-wing politicians Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett joined forces to challenge their rival, Netanyahu. Lapid has in the past criticised the settlements while Bennett fully supports the movement. They are also campaigning on the promise not to cooperate with Arab parties (which represent 20% of the population) because “they are not Zionists.”