“‘Conquering the land on foot.’”
The Zionist settlers' attack in Tell on 24 July signals the ‘Gazification’ of the West Bank. The Floutist investigates the incident, the aftermath, and the media coverage.
CARA MARIANNA
AUG 12, 2026
This was Farouq Ramadan’s home. 11 August. (Screenshot, APT News)
12 AUGUST—In a Palestinian village called Tell, five kilometers southwest of Nablus, a group of trouble-seeking settlers, with the usual protection of the Israel Occupation Forces, attacked local residents trying to protect their families, homes, and property. When the clash was over, in a matter of minutes, four Palestinians and two Israelis were dead. The fallout of this incident has not ceased.
While there is no evidence that any Palestinian was responsible for the two Israeli fatalities, what transpired during those moments has since proven a trip wire in the Jewish state’s escalating aggressions against West Bank Palestinians. The Zionist regime and the Zionist press—with the conspicuous exception of Haaretz, whose reporting it is important to analyze—continue to describe the incident as a terrorist attack. Netanyahu and Israel Katz, his defense minister, immediately launched a major new military operation across the West Bank. Armed settlers, often in coordination with the I.O.F., are now on a spree of village-to-village attacks that resemble nothing so much as a pogrom.
Since the events in Tell, is there any longer denying that we witness—such as we can, given Western media have sustained a more or less complete news blackout—the ‘Gazification’ of the West Bank? I do not think so. This is the truth I draw from all that has followed the incident. Fewer bombing runs and drones, at least for now, more bulldozers, semi-automatic weapons, the torching of villages and crops: This is the West Bank formula.
What actually happened in Tell on Friday, 24 July, such that the Zionist army and the settlers they protect are escalating what we can no longer deny is a second genocide against the Palestinian population? Why aren’t we reading about this escalating violence in The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream press? Why, with the significant exceptions of Haaretz and, among independent media, +972 Magazine, has no news organization conducted a close-in investigation of that day’s events? What cynical use are those in power in Tel Aviv making of the incident? Why do the rampages of increasingly savage settlers, daily occurrences in the West Bank now, go unreported in U.S. corporate media? As Israel continues its atrocities in Gaza and the threat of renewed attacks on Iran linger, what’s happening on the ground in the West Bank?
These are our questions.
Corollary question: Why, once again, is the Israeli press reporting events in Tell and elsewhere in the West Bank more thoroughly, objectively, and honestly—within limits, of course—than ever we find in American media, broadcast or print?
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Let’s begin with what transpired on 24 July. Even now new details continue to emerge in the more credible Israeli media. These make it clear that there was no “terrorist attack”—not against Jewish settlers—in Tell that day and that official accounts of the events to this effect—from the I.O.F., from the Netanyahu regime, in the Zionist press—are lies.
It was already evident by the 24th that settlers were targeting Tell: They had burned a house on the village’s outskirts a week earlier and, last spring, set fire to a village mosque. On the morning of the 24th a group of roughly 30 armed Jewish settlers—including numerous teenagers—were on a “hiking tour” of Palestinian land, engaged in what settlers call “conquering the land on foot.” They entered Tell, attacked several homes, and then moved on. Subsequent details are sketchy, but a group of village men—unarmed, gathered to defend their community—confronted them along the eastern outskirts of Tell.
Occupation forces arrived and stood back, allowing two settlers to threaten the villagers with assault rifles and push them back into Tell. The I.O.F. made no attempt to disperse the settlers or stop their continued provocations. As the villagers started to leave, a settler serving as a security coordinator at a nearby outpost struck a villager named Farouk Ramadan in the head with his weapon.
Ramadan—filmed a few moments earlier talking to two soldiers and attempting to deescalate the situation—didn’t respond. Instead, he turned to leave with the other men. For a few seconds the confrontation seemed over.
It wasn’t. Gunfire erupted—probably from settlers, possibly from the I.O.F.: This is not clear. In a matter of minutes four Palestinians, including Farouk Ramadan, and two Israelis lay dead; others were wounded. The I.O.F. immediately described the incident as a terrorist attack—an account reproduced in the Zionist press. For its part, I may as well add here, The New York Times reported the events, complete with the usual he-said, she-said, as “a confrontation in the West Bank.”
The initial Haaretz report, while not much clearer, had some detail other media omitted. “All those injured in the incident were shot by Israeli weapons,” its first piece, datelined 24 July, stated, “and the military is examining whether some were hit by fire exchanged between both sides.” There could not have been any such exchange of fire: The Palestinians were unarmed. At one point Ramadan did seize his attacker’s weapon and it appears in videos that he, Ramadan, fired at him in self-defense. These were the only shots fired by a Palestinian.
Haaretz published an updated investigation of these events—for which it analyzed eight separate videos—on 4 August. It reported more than 30 rounds were fired during the encounter. And it was the first of these, fired by Israeli Jews, that caused the retreating villagers, including Ramadan, to stop and turn to face the gunfire.
What took place at this point is inevitably confusing.
The security coordinator ran back toward the retreating villagers. He swung his assault rifle at a Palestinian whose hands had been raised and who then grabbed the weapon’s shoulder strap.
The ensuing scuffle lasted only seconds, during which unidentified Israelis fired numerous shots. Several Palestinians have by this time been hit, including the man who first attempted to seize the rifle. When he falls, Ramadan seizes the weapon, points it at the security coordinator and shoots—so it appears in available video. The coordinator was videoed moments later running away with a minor injury to his hand. The brief moment Ramadan had control over the security coordinator’s rifle was the only time any Palestinian present was armed.
At the other end of this thicket of detail, this:
There is no credible evidence that Ramadan, the only Palestinian ever in possession of a weapon, killed either of the two Israelis who died the 24th. Notably, in all its reporting Haaretz makes no claim that he did; neither does +972, the independent Israeli magazine, which also analyzed a number of videos. I.O.F. officials subsequently admitted that at least one Israeli was likely killed by friendly fire.
Reflecting the significance Israelis attach to these events, Haaretz, to its credit, reported them in intricate detail. Here I have summarized them. To mark this down as a “violent confrontation,” as one reads in the Western press, or a Palestinian “terrorist attack,” as almost all Israeli media report it— these are not remotely fair descriptions of the 24 July events.
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The four Palestinians killed on 24 July were all from the same family. Four more villagers were wounded, three critically. Within hours of the incident the I.O.F. raided the Nablus hospital where the wounded villagers were transported. These men were arrested and taken away.
Apart from the fact that two Israelis were killed at Tell, this level of violence against West Bank Palestinians isn’t unusual. But what happened in the aftermath was: A frenzy of settler and military violence swept across the occupied territory. Palestinians had done the unthinkable and unforgivable: They fought back. And two Jews were killed—it didn’t matter by whom.
Tell was raided, houses searched and ransacked. Upward of 80 people were interrogated, 40 to 50 arrested or detained. Two homes, one of which belonged to Farouq Ramadan, and where his elderly parents lived on the first floor, were forcibly emptied. The city of Nablus and all nearby villages were besieged. Over the two days following the events in Tell armed settlers using backhoes uprooted hundreds of Palestinian olive trees and set up an illegal outpost on the site of the shooting. A second outpost was erected south of Tell, 200 meters from village homes.
On Tuesday Haaretz, which continues to follow the Tell story, reported that Farouk Ramadan’s home was demolished earlier in the day despite “uncertainty over the sequence of events and who fired the fatal shots.”
The I.O.F., the paper also reported, has accused Ramadan of killing Yuval Ezra, a major, but has provided no evidence to support its claim, and there appears not to be any. None of the publicly available video shows Ramadan firing the shot that killed Ezra. To the contrary, it never shows him firing in Ezra’s direction. When Ramadan was shot and killed, +972 reported on 28 July, he was unarmed.
More news of worsening conditions across the West Bank arrives daily now. From a Drop Site News report published today under a Taybeh dateline:
On Sunday, the Israeli military declared the Palestinian village of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank a closed military zone, claiming the order was aimed to prevent escalating attacks by marauding Israeli settlers. It ostensibly bars Israelis and foreigners from entering the area.
But residents of the village and the surrounding area told Drop Site News that the military order is designed to further isolate Taybeh from the outside world, barring solidarity activists from the area while allowing settler attacks to continue. One of the few Christian-majority Palestinian villages in the West Bank, Taybeh has come under growing attacks by Israeli settlers who have expanded colonial outposts encircling it over the past several weeks.
Journalists, aid workers, activists, international observers of all kinds are increasingly restricted in the West Bank, how much longer until they are completely barred from entry?
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On Sunday, 26 July, a Nablus contact sent the following text. I share it as a testament of the collective punishment Palestinians have endured routinely since Zionists began stealing their land a hundred and more years ago:
Nablus is under siege today:
No fuel for vehicles;
All checkpoints closed;
Settlers everywhere;
No food supplies in the markets;
Homes and mosques set ablaze;
Hospitals stormed;
And we do not know what the future holds.
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Nearly three weeks after the shooting, military checkpoints and roadblocks remain closed or severely restricted. Ambulances movement is severely impeded. Critically ill and injured people are unable to get medical help, pregnant women have given birth in cars trying to get to a hospital. The flow of agricultural goods is restricted. Farmers can’t get their produce to markets, fresh fruits and vegetables have become scarce and expensive. And this is happening throughout the West Bank. On Tuesday Drop Site News reported 504 Israeli attacks against Palestinians in one week.
If you think what I describe sounds Gaza-like you are thinking correctly.
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While Israeli officials and media immediately termed the 24 July events a terrorist attack carried out by Palestinians, the people of Tell had been quietly observing their Friday, a holy day traditionally set aside for family and prayer at the local mosque—the one day of the week most Palestinians don’t work.
Terrorism is indeed the word, turned back on those so quick to use it.
It takes a particularly twisted case of chutzpah—at which the Jewish state and media excel—to accuse villagers of Tell of responsibility for a terrorist attack that was planned and carried out by settlers. This is indicative of a collective psychosis that causes a majority of Israeli Jews to fear Palestinians and believe any resistance to Jewish domination constitutes an existential threat.
Along these lines, immediately after the 24 July events Ynet, the online publication of Israel’s most widely read daily, published the following as released by the Havat Gilad outpost:
“How the mighty have fallen,” the community said in a message to residents. “With great pain and sorrow, we announce the murder of Benayahu Mellet [a settler killed on 24 July] in a terror attack by vile terrorists while rescuing a group of hikers in the area.”
This was nothing less than a call to arms for settlers throughout the West Bank, as indeed it was intended to be. In the hours and days following the attack on Tell, settlers launched multiple pogroms across the occupied territory. Mosques, homes, businesses, and cars were vandalized and set on fire. Palestinians were shot or beaten. Olive trees and agricultural lands were destroyed. More illegal outposts erected. More settlement approved.
Netanyahu and Israel Katz used the incident to launch a sweeping “counter-terrorism offensive” to root out “Palestinian militants” and “terrorist hubs.” The Israeli PM announced plans to increase the number of settlements and outposts and to legalize those that have already been established. Israel’s national necurity minister, Itamar Ben–Gvir, called for Gaza-like revenge against the residents of Tell and surrounding villages. Here he is quoted in a Haaretz report published the day of the shooting:
“I will demand that the IDF raze the homes of terrorists and their supporters from the air and with bulldozers, and make them pay the price they deserve,” he said.
The far-right minister added: “For every Jew murdered, the enemy should lose land and homes. This is the language of the Middle East. Just as we spoke it in Gaza, it is time to speak it in the West Bank.”
The home belonging to Farouq Ramadan was demolished yesterday, 11 August, leaving his wife and five children homeless. More homes are scheduled for demolition. But note the language: Ben–Gvir is routinely characterized as “far-right” by Haaretz and the Zionist-aligned New York Times. The implication, intentional and erroneous, is that this minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet is an anomaly in Israeli politics and society. He is anything but, and in this connection I return to the question of media dereliction later in this piece.
In the same Haaretz report Bezalel Smotrich, who has civilian and administrative control over the entire West Bank, “called for the villages to look like ‘refugee camps in Nablus and Tulkarm,’ and for them to be ‘cleared of terror infrastructure.’”
In obvious agreement, and operating under his own authority, Katz ordered the military to prepare to occupy and expel the populations of additional refugee camps following the “Jenin model.” In January 2025 the camps of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams were raided and forcibly emptied of inhabitants. The I.O.F. demolished homes and business, tore up roads, bulldozed large swaths of the camps, and turned these into military zones; 40,000 people were expelled and cannot return.
The ethnic cleansing of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams—another in a long history of shocking Israeli crimes against humanity—began days after a ceasefire in Gaza was announced on 15 January 2025. Israel seized the opportunity and pivoted to the West Bank as a world exhausted from images of the horrors in Gaza ceased paying attention. All of it was reported at the time, but briefly and was overshadowed by other events, among them the looming war against Iran that would erupt in June. This is what the Zionist regime does when it sees an opportunity to advance its genocidal goals and whenever the world looks elsewhere, as it generally does in the case of Palestine.
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The village of Beitillu, located in the governorate of Ramallah south of Tell—and which I reported on previously in The Floutist, Winter Wheat, and West Bank Alerts—was among those that were attacked after the shooting in Tell. I reached out to a friend and contact who lives there and whose family has farmed the land of Beitillu for many generations. What she had to say is extraordinary for its account of colonial violence and Palestinian sumud—steadfastness. I quote her at length:
25 July text:
In my village and in many other villages across the West Bank, they are destroying anything that gives people hope. Farmers are being prevented from reaching their land. Crops are destroyed, sheep are stolen or killed, irrigation networks are damaged, and even basic infrastructure is targeted. The aim is to make life impossible and sever people’s connection to their land. This is happening across the West Bank, not only where I live.
Tell follows the same occupation policies we’ve been living with for years. Nothing they do surprises us anymore.
It may not look exactly like Gaza, but what is happening is the systematic takeover of the West Bank. Through settlement expansion, settler violence, military raids, arrests, killings, and the forced displacement of communities, more and more land is being taken while people are pushed out of their homes and villages. Entire communities are living under constant pressure, and many families are being forced to leave. The West Bank is being swallowed piece by piece in a very open and deliberate way.
What my friend describes is a process of genocide: the deliberate, strategic imposition of conditions intended to bring about the physical destruction of a people. The Zionist goal is not merely displacement and expulsion but the wholesale obliteration of Palestinian culture, history, memory—Palestinian identity itself—and, of course, presence.
Things are much worse in Beitillu and its neighboring villages since my last report of 6 July from that area. Many more people have been assaulted and settlers now attack directly into the villages, targeting houses and businesses.
3 August text:
Every day there is more damage. They have destroyed so much. Many houses have been raided, vandalized, and looted. Every day they attack people who try to reach their land.
Still, farmers keep trying to reach their land, irrigate it, and harvest whatever crops they can. Our seasonal vegetables were completely destroyed, along with the greenhouses, irrigation systems, and many of the trees. We have vineyards, lemon groves, and olive trees, and they have all been severely affected. What they are trying to do is cut farmers off from their land. Now they are even letting their sheep graze in our vineyards and opening the area to wild boars [by cutting fences] causing even more destruction.
Every time they [the farmers] are being attacked.
But they still go to their land. They know there is a high chance they will be attacked, so they try to finish as much work as they can and leave before the attacks begin. They have learned to minimize their losses as much as possible, but every time they go, they risk being attacked.
The transfer project is real. Everyone here knows that the goal is to expand the settlements, take more land, and push Palestinians out of the areas surrounding them. This isn’t a secret.
Of course, some people leave, and that has always happened. But that’s very different from saying the [Zionist] project will succeed.
The people who are losing their land right now—the farmers, the shepherds, the villagers, are the people least likely to leave. They have already sacrificed so much. Some have lost their children, their parents, their brothers and sisters. They are still here. They still wake up every morning and go back to their land, even knowing they might be attacked.
Leaving is not an option. As long as we are alive, we stay. That is simply how many of us see it.
The difference between Gaza and the West Bank is mainly the method. In Gaza, the destruction has been massive and direct. In the West Bank, the strategy is settlement expansion, land confiscation, demolitions, settler attacks, arrests, road closures, and making life harder every single day until people leave. That is the reality we are living.
One of the things I find most dangerous about colonialism is that it evolves. It learns. The Zionist movement understood very early that military force alone was not enough. It also had to build a relationship between the settler and the land.
That is why ideas like Hebrew Labor and later the kibbutz movement became so important. They encouraged Jewish immigrants to cultivate the land themselves and build agricultural communities, creating a sense of belonging and attachment to land that had been taken from Palestinians.
For us, this is a struggle for existence. The land is not simply property or territory. It is who we are. It is our identity, our history, and our collective memory.
Thousands upon thousands of Palestinians have lost their lives defending this land. So when people ask why we don’t leave, or why we keep going back despite the danger, it’s because leaving is not just about moving somewhere else. For us it mean abandoning everything that generations before us lived and died to protect. The land is us. It is who we are.
I mean, this is what we believe as Palestinians. This explains why people keep risking their lives and putting themselves in danger, leaving the land would mean denying and abandoning all those sacrifices, the blood that has been shed, the martyrs, the prisoners, and everything that generations have endured to protect it.
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And how is this reported in the Israeli and U.S. press? As you would expect, right wing media in both countries describe all Palestinian resistance and attempts at self-defense as—but what else?—terrorism. It conveniently follows that Jewish Israeli violence at any scale is entirely warranted, laudable even.
Liberal U.S. and Israeli media, Zionist through and through, require more scrutiny because they are where you find the lies of omission, the reportorial contortions required to sustain Western support for the criminal Zionist regime. The New York Times ran one article—one!—published the same day as the shooting and written by Adam Rasgon, one of its Jerusalem correspondents, who previously worked for two Zionist think tanks before joining The Times. This should give you an idea of his loyalty and likelihood of any objectivity.
The Times reported the 24 July incident without actually reporting anything. The official I.O.F. account was noted, the mayor of Tell was quoted. With each side represented and accounted for, The Times upholds a cynical and altogether fake objectivity without publishing anything of authenticity or substance.
Haaretz, which reports events throughout occupied Palestine with more accuracy and detail than you will ever find at The New York Times or, indeed, in any of the corporate U.S. press, and continued to investigate the Tell shooting with a laudable doggedness, nevertheless failed to mention the single salient and irrefutable fact—one The Timeslikewise leaves unsaid: It was illegal under international law for any of the Jews present that day in Tell—soldiers, settlers, reservists, cheering boys—to have been there in the first place. Under the same law—and let this not be missed—Palestinians have a right to armed resistance when confronting an occupying power. Whether or not Farouq Ramadan actually killed either Israeli who died that day, he had a legal right to do so, whereas the Israelis who died—both armed—had no right to self-defense on Palestinian land.
Haaretz, for all its left-leaning pretensions is, like The New York Times, a liberal Zionist newspaper, loyal to the Zionist project, to the fiction of Israeli democracy, and loyal, above all, to the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state. This makes both of these prominent dailies entirely complicit in Israel’s too-numerous-to-count crimes against humanity.
There is no predicting how this will end. As my contact in Beitillu reminded me, the one certainty now before us is the Palestinians won’t leave their lands. What, then, will the Zionist regime prove willing to do? Will it employ the Gaza method in full—drones, snipers, massive aerial bombardment?
That horrifying outcome seems increasingly possible as refugee camps are forcibly emptied and rural Palestinians forced from their villages. With nowhere else to go, those who do not leave altogether are being driven into the few urban enclaves: Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, al–Khalil (Hebron).
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