In West Bank, Israeli Settlers Step Up Attacks Against Palestinians
A series of shootings that left six dead and two communities divided is part of a spasm of violence
QUSRA, West Bank—On the morning of Oct. 12, Hani Odeh was considering a problem: how to get the bodies of four Palestinians shot dead during an attack by Israeli settlers to the cemetery in Qusra, where he is mayor.
The four men had been killed the day before. Israeli police are still investigating the circumstances of the deaths, which came after Hamas’s massacre of over 1,400 people a few days earlier, and the Israeli military had instructed the mayor to change the route of the cortege from the hospital to avoid inflaming the situation further. Odeh, smoking cigarettes in his office, the customary portrait of Yasser Arafat hanging above his desk, said he complied.
People in the area were already on edge. Odeh had asked the military for a safe route for the funeral after local Palestinians had been receiving messages on their phones showing masked people carrying chain saws and axes, with text written in Hebrew and Arabic saying, “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra, we are waiting for you and will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.”
A few hours later, settlers blocked the road to Qusra and opened fire on the funeral procession, killing two more Palestinians, Ibrahim Al-Wadi, a manager in the Palestinian national economy ministry, and his son, Ahmed. A video of the incident, verified by open-source documentation firm Storyful, then shows unidentified people opening fire on the procession from a civilian car.
Odeh said he scrambled out of his car and pleaded with an Israeli general, the same one he said had approved the new route, to use tear gas to disperse the assailants. “He told us to go back,” he said. “It was chaos.”
A surge in violence has hit the West Bank since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks. Much of it has been directed at Palestinians. Settler attacks have increased to an average of seven attacks a day compared with three a day before Oct. 7, according to the United Nations. Israeli troops and armed settlers have killed at least 123 Palestinians, its humanitarian-affairs agency said. One Israeli soldier was also killed during the same period. A further 1,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in the West Bank amid settler attacks according to the U.N.
President Biden flagged his concern over hard-line settlers last week. “They’re attacking Palestinians in places they’re entitled to be. It has to stop now,” he said. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a responsibility to rein them in.
If the violence is left unchecked, it could open a third front in the war, with Israel facing a full-blown Palestinian uprising in the West Bank in addition to its war in Gaza and skirmishes with the Iran-backed Hezbollah group on its northern border with Lebanon.
Before the Hamas attack and resulting Israeli military offensive in Gaza, the West Bank was already on the brink of a crisis. Armed Palestinian militant groups were on the rise, threatening the position of the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank’s semiautonomous government. From Jan. 1 to Oct. 6 this year, 237 Palestinians and 25 Israelis were killed, according to the U.N.
The Hamas massacre has inflamed the situation further.
Nati Rom, a 42-year-old lawyer living in Esh Kodesh, an Israeli settlement overlooking Qusra, said that violence against their Palestinian neighbors was now justified. It was, he said, normal to want to avenge the Hamas massacre, an Uzi submachine gun slung over his white shirt.
“Revenge is not bad. Revenge is natural. It’s OK that when somebody kills your brothers, your parents, it’s OK that you are angry and want to take revenge,” said Rom, who works with a pro-settler legal organization.
Nearby, at the entrance to the Israeli settlement of Shiloh, Gilad Gur, a 27-year-old paramedic, was building a guardpost out of sandbags to beef up security for the settlement. Children swarmed around his feet while he worked with a shovel and hauled sandbags in the setting sun.
Gur said he wanted the Israeli military to be more aggressive in its offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
“Anyone who ate or gave out baklava after that attack, all of them are sons of death,” he said, referring to celebrations by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the Hamas attacks. “All this nonsense about humanitarian issues will be destroyed from above.”
Since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, an archipelago of Israeli settlements—cities, towns and small outposts—has been built on what had been Palestinian land, slowly putting out of reach the idea of creating a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, the resolution favored by the U.S. and most of the world’s governments.
Netanyahu’s government has encouraged the expansion, approving thousands of new settler housing units this year and looking the other way if they turn to violence as they confiscate Palestinians’ land, water and other resources, human-rights groups say.
“They see this as their moment to accomplish their political agenda,” said Allegra Pacheco, an American lawyer who heads the West Bank Protection Consortium, a Western-funded humanitarian aid group.
Tal Heinrich, a spokeswoman for the Israeli government, told a daily media briefing that she couldn’t address specific reports of violence in the West Bank. “Obviously, we want the order in Judea and Samaria to be maintained,” she said, using the biblical term for area.
Yochai Damri, chairman of the Har Hevron Regional Council, said settlers are carrying weapons for defensive purposes only. “Nerves are tense, especially since our citizens, our soldiers, our children, our husbands are on the battlefield,” he said. “Everything is so much more tense.”
Established in 2000 on land taken from two Palestinian villages, Esh Kodesh has long been associated with the most extreme end of the settler movement and the Israeli far right. Palestinians living in the neighboring towns say settlers from the outpost subject them to near daily harassment, including armed threats, raids, beatings and arson. In 2012 the Israeli Supreme Court upheld a conviction against a settler from Esh Kodesh over the kidnapping and beating of a 15-year-old Palestinian.
In Qusra, home to some 5,000 people, local leaders and residents said they fear their town is under threat. They said they are subject to frequent attacks from settlers from Esh Kodesh. Olive groves have been torched, while there was an arson attack on a local mosque. Some residents were killed, while other areas have been left without electricity after settlers cut power in what the mayor, Odeh, said was part of a campaign for them to leave.
LEBANON
SYRIA
Mediterranean Sea
GOLAN
HEIGHTS
Haifa
Nazareth
West
Bank
Qusra
Tel Aviv
Esh Kodesh
Amman
Jerusalem
Gaza
JOrdan
israel
Dead
Sea
Sderot
Gaza
Strip
Be’er Sheva
EGYPT
20 miles
20 km
Source: staff reports
Then, on Oct. 11, the friction again spilled over into violence.
Awad Mahmoud Odeh, a 30-year-old Palestinian metalworker, said he was getting ready to have his midday meal when he saw Israeli settlers trying to crash through the gates of his house.
Gunfire raked his home. Odeh, who is distantly related to the mayor, was hit in the jaw, shoulder and leg. His 6-year-old daughter Rahaf was also shot. They survived, but the gunfire killed three Palestinian men who had come to help the family find cover deeper into Qusra, according to several Palestinian witnesses.
“What Hamas did to them really hurt them, and they are trying to release this harm on us here, the weaker people. They know we are unarmed and have no one to protect us,” said Odeh, whose neck was still bandaged from the gunshot wound he sustained from the attack. “My children don’t want to go back to the house.”
Rom, the lawyer living in Esh Kodesh, said that the settlers were responding to gunfire at the settlement, and blamed Israeli forces for shooting the Palestinians. The Israeli military said it tried to break up a melee between masked attackers who entered Qusra and Palestinian residents, and acknowledged shooting only one person. The military didn’t say who was responsible for the killing of the other three Palestinians, adding that the incident is under police investigation.
The following morning, Hani Odeh said he knew it would be difficult to get the bodies of the four men from a nearby hospital to the cemetery in Qusra. An Israeli general had called, telling the mayor to change the route of the procession. He complied, riding among the cars accompanying the coffins from the hospital to ensure all went smoothly.
Rom said settlers had urged the army to stop the funeral procession, and argued that it was a display of sympathy for terrorists that had to be stopped.
“The army said they would not allow this march of hatred and incitement,” he said.
The Israeli military confirmed that a confrontation broke out between settlers and Palestinians “involving the hurling of stones” during the procession. Israeli forces tried to disperse the crowd by firing warning shots into the air, the military said. The killing of the two Palestinians is under investigation by Israeli police.
The military referred questions about the planning for the funeral to Israel’s office for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, which referred the question back to the military.
Odeh, the mayor, wondered whether more shootings would follow. A poster with the portraits of the six dead men of the town sat on his conference table among his maps of the West Bank and other papers.
“Since Oct. 7 their message has been clear: If I see you, I’m gonna kill you,” he said.
—Shoshanna Solomon contributed to this article.
Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com