Settler violence hits record level

Palestinian residents from the village of Al-Mazra’a al-Sharqiya, east of Ramallah, harvest olives on their lands, October 27, 2025.
Avishay Mohar ActiveStills

Jewish settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has reached record levels.

October was on track to be “the most violent month” since UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, began documenting settler violence in 2013.

UN monitoring group OCHA also recorded the highest number of settler attacks in a single month since they began documenting incidents in 2006, with more than 260 settler attacks on Palestinians and their property.

This was an average of eight incidents per day.

OCHA documented some 150 harvest-related settler attacks on Palestinians and their property in the occupied West Bank during the season so far. This compares to 110 during the same period last year, and 30 to 46 attacks between 2020 and 2023.

More than 140 Palestinians have been injured in these attacks.

Extremist Jewish settlers have inflicted more damage during this year’s olive harvest season than they have in any year since 2020. Over 4,200 olive trees and saplings have also been vandalized by settlers – more than double the recorded number during the same period last year.

“The geographic scope of attacks has also significantly increased,” OCHA reported last week.

More than 75 towns and villages have been targeted – around double the number of affected communities in 2023, and three times that of 2020.

Settler attacks during the harvest season have included violent assaults on farmers, theft of olives and harvesting equipment, cutting down or uprooting trees, obstructing access to land and burning of vehicles belonging to Palestinian residents.

“The annual olive harvest is the primary livelihood for tens of thousands of Palestinians, with olive trees deeply rooted in Palestinian heritage and identity,” Roland Friedrich stated as head of UNRWA affairs for the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

These attacks “threaten the very way of life for many Palestinians.”

OCHA recorded nearly 1,500 settler attacks against Palestinians since the beginning of the year, the vast majority of which involved settlers damaging the property of Palestinians.

More than 180 of those cases also involved Palestinian casualties.

Land access

Settlers also severely restricted Palestinians’ access to their land, even when farmers had explicit permission from the Israeli army to do so.

One example of settler intimidation was in the village of Burin – a village in the Nablus governorate in the northern occupied West Bank.

Palestinian farmers had “prior coordination” with Israeli authorities to access their land for harvest. But the so-called guard of the Yitzhar settlement, which hosts some of the most violent settlers in the West Bank, prevented Palestinians from doing so by firing shots into the air to force them to leave.

Some 300 dunams – 74 acres – of olive groves remained unharvested as a result.

This is the third consecutive year that certain villages have been completely blocked from accessing their olive groves inside Israeli settlements.

In some cases, farmers who did have permission to access their groves were given a limited time period in which to do so – such as in Ein Yabrud village near Ramallah, where they were given three days. When they were attacked by settlers, they did not return.

New settlement outposts in particular have undermined farmers’ ability to access their lands, even in Areas A and B – smaller areas of the occupied West Bank where the Palestinian Authority has nominal control.

What Israel refers to as “outposts” are often built without even Israel’s permission and are considered illegal under Israeli law.

In December 2024, two Israeli groups that monitor settler activity reported that shepherding outposts comprise 14 percent of the West Bank – over 194,000 acres of land.

“In less than three years, 70 percent of all land seized by settlers to date has been taken under the guise of grazing activities,” Peace Now and Kerem Navot reported.

Settlers begin their land takeovers by forcibly displacing Palestinian shepherds and farmers from their land and establishing shepherding outposts.

They then begin to harass, intimidate and attack Palestinian communities, leaving them no choice but to flee, the groups explain. After that, settlers seize the land and set up new outposts, which at first consist of a few caravans or structures, usually not connected to water, sewage or electricity infrastructure.

The current Israeli government has been working to streamline the process of recognizing these outposts as settlements.

All of Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Syria’s Golan Heights are illegal under international law and are considered a war crime.

Last week, the planning council of the Civil Administration was set to discuss plans for 1,973 new settler housing units that would be built in the occupied West Bank. Since last November, this “Higher Planning Council” has held weekly meetings with the purpose of advancing settlement housing projects.

“Since the beginning of 2025, including the plans slated for approval this week, the council has advanced a total of 28,183 housing units,” Peace Now reported last week.

This is an “all-time record.”

Earlier this month, Israel’s housing ministry published implementation plans for construction of a new neighborhood in a settlement southeast of Ramallah – the seat of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank.

The Geva Binyamin settlement would add 342 housing units, as well as 14 new single-family homes particularly for reserve soldiers in the Israeli military.

This allows tenders issued in August by the Israeli government for more than 4,000 units in the mega-settlement of Maaleh Adumim, near Jerusalem, as well as Ariel.

Since the beginning of the year, Israel has published tenders for nearly 5,700 settlement housing units – described by Peace Now as “an all-time record” and approximately a 50 percent increase from the last peak in 2018.

These plans could bring roughly 25,000 additional settlers to live in Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank.

Deportations

Israel has deported dozens of foreign activists who tried to offer support or protection to Palestinian farmers in the occupied West Bank during the harvest season.

Rudy Schulkind, a 30-year-old British activist, was one of those deported.

“All the farmers we spoke with were incredibly generous and friendly and grateful for the support from the international volunteers,” he told The Electronic Intifada.

But his time in the West Bank was cut short.

“I was only picking olives for one full day, and on the second day was when I was detained and deported,” he told The Electronic Intifada.

On that second day Schulkind said Israeli settlers with heavy machine guns “tried, both verbally and physically, to disrupt the work we’re doing, to stop us from harvesting the olives.”

Schulkind said when the Israeli military then arrived, it became clear that it “had no interest in deterring the settlers, and they were there to essentially support the settlers in preventing the Palestinian farmers from accessing their land rights.”

Upon arriving at a different location, volunteers were detained and notified by the Israeli military that the area they were in had been declared a so-called military zone.

Schulkind said he, along with a number of activists, were detained on a bus and taken to a police station where they were interrogated one by one under different charges, including terror charges.

Israeli forces held Schulkind for about three days before deporting him back to England on 19 October.

“We were never given a chance to speak to our family,” he told The Electronic Intifada.

Schulkind added that he was allowed a brief phone call with a lawyer before the interrogation, but he was never brought before a judge prior to being deported.