AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed
- Violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has been soaring, the UN and rights groups said.
- Attacks by Israeli forces and settlers have been pushing Palestinians out of their homes, the groups said.
- Violence has turned the West Bank into the "Wild West," a non-profit told The Washington Post.
Violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has been soaring amid the Israel-Hamas war — and the attacks by Israeli forces and settlers have been pushing Palestinians out of their homes in the occupied territory, according to human rights groups and the United Nations.
B'Tselem, a Jerusalem-based non-profit organization, told The Washington Post in a report published this week that settlers in the West Bank have ramped up violence and intimidation against Palestinians in recent weeks to force them out.
"The scale has expanded and not just the scale but also the severity of the attacks," B'Tselem spokesperson Dror Sadot told the news outlet. "Now it's like a Wild West."
Sadot added that a sense of "impunity" is prevalent among many settlers as Israel continues its deadly bombardment of Gaza in retaliation for the deadly October 7 terrorist attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on the Jewish state.
Tariq Mustafa, a local who recently fled his home in the West Bank village of Wadi al-Siq with his family, told The Washington Post, "The war in Gaza gave the settlers the green light."
"Before, they would yell at us to go to Ramallah. Now they are telling us to go all the way to Jordan," Mustafa, who went to the neighboring village of Taybeh, told the news outlet.
According to Mustafa, on a near daily basis since the October 7 surprise assault on Israel, armed settlers have paraded around the tiny Bedouin community of Wadi al-Siq, threatening Palestinians with violence if they did not leave.
"Get out of here; go to Jordan," Mustafa said the settlers yelled in Arabic during a recent incident before they wrecked tents and one stole Mustafa's car, according to the report. When he tried to report the incident to Israeli police, Mustafa said an officer hung up the phone.
According to a Tuesday assessment from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has surged from an "already high average" of three incidents per day so far in 2023 to a current average of seven per day since the October 7 attacks on Israel.
"In this period, OCHA has recorded 171 settler attacks against Palestinians, resulting in Palestinian casualties (26 incidents), damage to Palestinian properties (115 incidents), or both (30 incidents)," the UN office said.
Since October 7, more than 120 Palestinians, including more than 30 children, have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces or settlers, the UN office said in a Monday update.
Additionally, nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from their homes in the West Bank amid "intensified settler violence" and increased movement restrictions since the outbreak of the war, according to the UN office.
Last week, US President Joe Biden condemned the violence, saying he was "alarmed about extremist settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank," and described the issue as "pouring gasoline on fire."
"They're attacking Palestinians in places that they're entitled to be, and it has to stop," Biden said. "They have to be held accountable. And it has to stop now."