Settler attacks in Taybeh and Umm al-Kheir on July 28
Taybeh
On July 28, Israeli settler militias, supported by the Israeli army, attacked Palestinian homes of the town of Taybeh, east of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. Settlers set fire to vehicles owned by Palestinians and wrote racist slogans and threats on the walls of houses.
Once the settlers left, the Israeli soldiers raided Taybeh.
In June, settler militias established a new outpost on the ruins of homes of a Palestinian family who had been forcibly displaced nearly a year ago following settler attacks on Palestinians in Taybeh.
In 2024 alone, Israel built 4 new outposts around Taybeh:
- Ofra South-East, Amona Farm (Mizpe Roim), Or Ahuvia (Maoz Ester B) – on the Western side of Taybeh;
- Kochav Hashahar West – on the Eastern side of Taybeh.
These outposts will turn into full-scale settlements and close the stranglehold around Taybeh, initiated by the Ofra and Rimonim settlements.
Israeli settler militias have long targeted Taybeh. On July 17, settlers set fire to the historic Church of Saint George and its nearby graveyard. This was the third such attack against the holy site in a week.
With Israeli military support, settlers have steadily and forcibly taken and stolen large areas of Taybeh’s pastoral lands for road construction, paving the way for further settlement expansion.
Settler groups, including the so-called “Youths of the Hills,” have established outposts on these pastoral lands, such as “agricultural barracks”, and prevent Palestinian shepherds from grazing their animals.
Settlers use the land freely while Palestinians face regular harassment, including arson, theft, home demolitions, arrests, and punitive fines.
Umm al-Kheir
The settler Yinon Levi killed the 31-year-old Palestinian, activist, teacher, father of three, Awdah Hathaleen in Umm al-Kheir, south of Hebron. Five members of Awdah’s family were detained.
The Israeli forces refused to release Hathaleen’s body for burial, sealed off the village, soldiers raided the condolence tent, declared the area a closed military zone, arrested two activists, and used stun grenades against journalists and mourners.
This murder followed a settler attack that damaged vital infrastructure in Umm al-Kheir, and the settler operating the bulldozer injured Awdah’s cousin with the digger’s claw.
Umm al-Kheir, located in northern Masafer Yatta and only meters from the Carmel settlement, has faced intensifying demolitions. In July 2024, Israeli forces demolished ten homes, displacing the Palestinians who lived there. These demolitions serve settlement expansion and annexation of Masafer Yatta.
Since July 31, more than 60 women in the Palestinian village of Umm al-Kheir, initiated a hunger strike to demand the return of the body of Awdah and the release of all residents who had been arrested.
The tragedy of Umm al-Kheir is deepened by its history. Its residents are refugees, expelled during the Nakba from Beersheba. Alongside other Bedouin communities in Masafer Yatta, they continue to suffer displacement and erasure as settlements encroach further into Palestinian land.
De Jure Annexation
The Israeli Knesset passed a resolution on July 23 supporting Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. The Knesset’s motion is part of Israel’s drive to formalize what it has already been doing since 1967, and at an accelerated pace since October 7 – establishing total Israeli control also over the occupied Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel’s settler colonial ideology, Zionism, has never admitted anything else but the colonization of all of Palestine, while erasing – through murder and and ethnic cleansing – the Palestinian Indigenous population.
The vote follows a conference hosted on July 21 by five Likud MKs titled “Sovereignty Now – Realizing the Window of Opportunity to Apply Sovereignty to Judea and Samaria.”
In February this year, the Knesset approved a bill to replace the term “West Bank” with “Judea and Samaria”, which Palestinians have continuously warned is one step towards full annexation.
Israel’s genocide against the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza is also aimed at annexation.
The most recent conference to discuss this policy was hosted on July 22 by Smotrich, titled “The Gaza Riviera – From Vision to Reality”. Speakers at the conference underlined that the US had given Israel the “green light” to transform the besieged Gaza Strip into a “resort town” once they had completed the genocide and ethnic cleansing of more than two million Palestinians.