Occupied West Bank

As Israel gears up to hold elections in October, a dramatic surge in settlement activity has heightened concerns that the settler movement is stepping up efforts to cement its grip on the occupied West Bank, in stark defiance of international law.

Last week, the United Nations warned that attacks by Israeli settlers – often carried out alongside Israeli forces – and the creation of illegal settlements and outposts had hit “an all-time high”.

The uptick comes as members of Israel’s hard right seek to ratchet up the political temperature ahead of the crucial polls. It also follows a parliamentary term during which Israel moved to entrench control over the West Bank deeper within the machinery of the state, shifting authority from military administration to civilian institutions, accelerating settlement planning and expanding infrastructure.

However, the Religious Zionist Party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – the man widely credited as pushing the settler project to the forefront of Israeli political debate – is suggested by numerous opinion polls to be far from certain to even meet the electoral threshold for the post-election Knesset.

This has prompted what analysts describe as a desperate scramble to promote the settlement mission while consolidating the support of the settler minority that Smotrich grew up within.

Speaking at a meeting of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party in late July, Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz boasted that, under the governing coalition and Smotrich’s supervision, Israel had approved the establishment of 104 illegal settlements and some 160 settlement farms in the West Bank since coming to power in 2022, according to Israeli media.

In August of last year, Smotrich announced the creation of the E1 settlement project, linking occupied East Jerusalem with the existing settlement of Maale Adumim, located several kilometres to the east – a proposal which, Smotrich bragged, “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”.

The race to settle

Smotrich, who made increased administrative control over the West Bank a condition for supporting Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition in 2022, has undertaken a series of measures to expand the influence of settlers within policymaking.

In 2023, he established his influential Settlements Administration agency within the Ministry of Defence – which oversees the West Bank’s occupation. And last month, he legally embedded the agency within the ministry, making it harder to reverse any of the decisions taken under its watch.

Israeli political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said it is “hard to imagine” that Netanyahu “won’t come up with some kind of imaginative ploy to keep him and the far right on the ticket”, referring to Smotrich.

“He has very strong support within the settlements and the ideological far-right,” Flaschenberg added, “but that might not be enough in and of itself to get him securely past the threshold. He’s being squeezed between the populism of [far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir and what many people in the lower middle class see as the security of Netanyahu.”

Keeping the hard right

Allied to Smotrich is a prime minister who observers describe as facing not simply an electoral battle, but an existential battle for both his freedom – as a consequence of his long-running corruption trial – and legacy, should the independent inquiry into his failings ahead of the Hamas-led attack of 2023 go ahead.

Given the stakes, some analysts have suggested the incumbent was far from ready to gamble on losing the support of Israel’s hard right and settler movement by condemning the increasing levels of violence in the West Bank.

“We saw him come out on US TV and concede that there may have been a few incidents in the West Bank, but nothing serious,” Chatham House’s Yossi Mekelberg said of Netanyahu’s response to the widespread violence that has swept the West Bank in recent weeks.

“He needs the hard right and settlers’ support, if not for him individually, then at least for his bloc.”

While Netanyahu may feel he has room to manoeuvre over the hugely controversial issue of ultra-Orthodox conscription, no such margin existed within the hard right and settlers. Ultra-Orthodox parties, a key component in the 2022 coalition government, have made the exemption of their constituents from the draft – which almost all Israeli adults are eligible for – a pillar of their political campaigning in recent years.

“Netanyahu knows that the ultra-Orthodox will likely stay with him,” added Mekelberg. “The settlers are more binary. You’re either for them or against,” he said.

Cresting the wave

Irrespective of electoral tactics, the consequences for people living in the occupied West Bank have been catastrophic. In July alone, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, there were 2,256 attacks against Palestinians and their property: 1,458 by the Israeli army and 798 by settlers.

After Yair Golan, leader of the opposition Democrats party, offered a rare criticism of the settler “extremism” which triggered the latest round of violence, Katz accused him of spreading a “blood libel”.

According to leaks of the same meeting in Hebrew-language media, other ministers present called for a harsher response to any resistance from Palestinians, and for the military to be given even greater freedom to shoot at them.

“As the election gets closer, we’re seeing an even greater increase in the violence that’s been escalating ever since October 2023,” said Yair Dvir, of the Israeli rights group B’Tselem.

“It’s important to add this isn’t just the scale of the violence, but also its brutality and the participation of the Israeli state – both the soldiers and the political support they’re receiving.”

Seven Palestinians, including two children, have been detained by Israeli forces in overnight and predawn raids across the West Bank, according to Palestinian local sources.

Israeli settlers separately assaulted a Palestinian man and his wife on their own farmland on Saturday.

The couple was attacked in the al-Zarqa area of Beitillu, northwest of Ramallah, when a group of settlers stormed the farm where they were working, leaving both with injuries and bruising that required hospital treatment.

The latest settler attacks and raids by Israeli forces are a single day’s snapshot of activity now unfolding “in every direction” across the occupied West Bank, said Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah.

Odeh said Israeli military jeeps were roaming constantly through Ramallah on Saturday, as soldiers used tear gas inside a supermarket in the city. This level of everyday disruption, she said, has become difficult to separate from the settlement expansion driving it.

Settlers have erected another illegal outpost this week, Odeh added, the 12th such construction in the past seven days alone.

The military raids that produced Saturday’s detentions spanned three governorates at once. In Tubas, forces searched a family home in the town of Tammun and detained a 16-year-old; in Nablus, four Palestinians were picked up in predawn raids on the villages of Urif, Einabus and Burqa; and in Bethlehem, a second 16-year-old was detained in Wadi Fukin, with another man held at the Container Checkpoint.

In the nearby town of Asira ash Shamaliya, troops went further still, storming dozens of homes overnight and converting one house into a makeshift field interrogation centre, security sources told Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Further south, in Khashem al-Daraj near Hebron, Israeli forces chased down and detained 11 workers, beating them in the process, according to local activist Osama Makhamreh.

Israeli settlers, meanwhile, were active on parallel fronts.

In Surif, near Hebron, residents from the Bat Ayin outpost set fire to one car, damaged another, and sprayed racist graffiti on a house, the town’s mayor, Hazem Ghneimat, said.

Later on Saturday, three young Palestinian men were assaulted with pepper spray on the road between al-Mughayyir and Abu Falah, northeast of Ramallah, after settlers rammed their vehicle with an all-terrain vehicle – an attack that village council head Amin Abu Aliya said has become almost a daily occurrence along that stretch of road.

In Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, Israeli authorities forced three residents to demolish their own homes rather than face the fines and costs of a state-led demolition, which, Palestinians say, is a practice used routinely to sidestep Israel’s near-total refusal to grant them building permits.

Saturday’s events fit a pattern that rights monitors have been documenting for months. Palestinian sources recorded more than 11,000 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers across the West Bank in the first half of this year alone, with Hebron, Ramallah and Nablus the worst affected.

The figures echo recent United Nations warnings – including from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has said settler violence and forced displacement are accelerating alongside plans to expand and legalise outposts, all of which the UN maintains have no legal validity under international law.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham added his own criticism on Saturday, calling the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Palestine “unacceptable” and saying his government was weighing further measures on Israeli settlements, including possible restrictions on arms exports.

Why is Israel arming illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank? As settler attacks reach record levels, the government has distributed more than 100,000 assault rifles to Israelis. Al Jazeera’s Leila Warah reports on what that means for Palestinians on the ground.

Al Jazeera visited the occupied West Bank village of Sinjil, where Israeli earth mounds, metal barriers and road closures have blocked all main entrances. Residents say the restrictions have left the village effectively cut off, making even routine journeys difficult and potentially deadly.

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Israel is intensifying its crackdown on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank after an attack by Israeli settlers resulted in the deaths of six people. Author and activist Phyllis Bennis says we’re seeing an ‘increase in direct war crimes’ with no accountability.

Protest group says at least 200 demonstrated in Israeli capital a day after major escalation of West Bank violence.

Israeli police have arrested nine people at a Tel Aviv demonstration decrying settler violence in the occupied West Bank, according to media reports and protest organisers.

Hundreds of people gathered on Kaplan Street on Saturday to demonstrate against the settler violence and Israeli military rule in the occupied Palestinian territory, according to Israeli media. The protest was organised by the left-wing Hadash party and its allies.

The Mothers Against Violence protest group said more than 200 people took part in the demonstration, and accused police of using force against demonstrators, including the nine they confirmed were arrested.

Israeli police said demonstrations had gone ahead without authorisation and had begun to “disrupt public order and block the roadway”, according to local media.

The protest came a day after Israeli forces shot dead four Palestinians in the town of Tal, near Nablus, during a settler incursion on their land. Two Israelis were also killed in the confrontation.

On Friday, about 30 settlers entered Tal, next to the illegal Israeli settlement of Havat Gilad, and tried to break into two houses on Friday, said Essam Saifi, a local Fatah official. Residents confronted them, and the settlers opened fire.

A video shows a Palestinian man seizing a rifle from a settler and shooting him before soldiers shot him dead. Three others were killed and four wounded.

Ubai al-Aboudi, a rights activist in Ramallah, told Al Jazeera that one week prior, settlers set fire to a home in Tal with the family still inside. “It was a miracle that the residents of Tal were able to get that family out of the house before they were burned alive,” he said.

In retaliation for Friday’s shooting incident, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a wide-scale military operation across the West Bank, and Israeli forces arrested nearly 50 Palestinians in Tal while raiding about 70 homes.

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said at least 80 Palestinians were held across the West Bank the day after the incident, calling it “collective punishment”.

Funerals for the four killed were held before dawn under restrictions on attendance.

Political analyst Ori Goldberg said video of the attack on Tal had made denial impossible for the Israeli public.

“They saw the Jewish terrorist come into the villages and they saw the response … I’m not expecting the public to rise in protest in response, but I do expect this might revivify the last dregs of liberal Zionism in protest,” he told Al Jazeera.

“This may be a threshold moment in what Israelis have previously termed as ‘settler violence’ in an attempt to distance it from themselves,” Goldberg added.

At least 1,182 Palestinians have been killed, 13,000 wounded and nearly 24,000 arrested in the occupied West Bank since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023, according to official Palestinian figures.

Overnight funerals were held for four Palestinians killed near Nablus. Palestinian officials blame Israeli settlers and soldiers for attacking areas in the occupied West Bank, while Israel said the violence began after an attack on Israeli civilians.

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Videos show Israeli settlers attacking the Palestinian village of al Tuwani in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, setting homes, vehicles and a mosque on fire. According to Palestinian media, Israeli forces provided protection for the settlers during the assault.

With the ruins of the Gaza Strip lying around him, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz last week renewed his push to set up illegal settlements in the battered territory’s north.

“I intend to establish three Nahal outposts, which is also a military entity, in those places that were in northern Gaza,” Katz told Channel 14, referring to bases that combine farming with an armed presence in a bid to consolidate control over a territory.

The minister said, in his view, establishing these settlements would enhance security – but execution would have to be “in the right way, at the right timing, while coordinating”.

It was not the first time the member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has made such remarks. In December, Katz said the Israeli military would “never leave all of Gaza” but “in due course” would establish Nahal posts despite a United States-brokered plan stipulating a full Israeli military withdrawal and barring the re-establishment of Israeli settlements.

His comments also echoed a recent statement by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich that “the groundwork to establish three settlements in the North Gaza area” had been completed. Smotrich, who also holds the portfolio of “settlement administration” in the Ministry of Defence, has repeatedly called for the full occupation of the Gaza Strip.

Such a push has been central to the goals of Israel’s settler movement, which in January 2024 organised a conference attended by government ministers to advocate for the re-establishment of settlements in the Strip.

“This is their ideology. They want the Gazans out of Gaza and they want to settle there like they settle in the West Bank,” former Israeli diplomat Alon Liel told Al Jazeera.

All settlements on Palestinian land are illegal under international law, but settlement expansion and annexation have been a core objective of Netanyahu’s hard-right government. In recent years, it has carried out unprecedented settlement expansion, resulting in the forced displacement of dozens of Palestinian communities and the de facto annexation of land in the occupied West Bank.

Issam Younis, a prominent Palestinian human rights defender and director of the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, said he was not surprised by Katz’s latest comments. “It was very clear from day one in the genocide that the main goal was to make life impossible in Gaza by destroying everything,” he told Al Jazeera. “It’s a race for time – take over land, starve Gaza and deny it any chance at life, then expel the population and build settlements.”

Younis said Israel’s conduct during its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza and the “ceasefire” agreed in October under the US plan clearly showed that expelling the population is the main objective of the Israeli government.

“Dehumanising statements by senior Israeli officials reaffirmed this: calling Palestinians in Gaza ‘human animals’, saying that there are no civilians in Gaza, then saying clearly that the objective was to expel the population and create settlements in the Gaza Strip,” Younis added.

Israel made no secret of that objective. In early 2025, the government announced it was setting up an agency to oversee the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza as part of a plan proposed by Katz.

The announcement drew widespread international condemnation. Experts warned that such a move would amount to a war crime. Last month, the Israeli government decided to rebrand the agency and replace talk of “voluntary migration” with the “free movement plan” while using “language deemed more acceptable internationally”, according to Israeli media.

The policy enjoys widespread support in Israel. A 2025 poll commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania found that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

Meanwhile, nine months into a “ceasefire”, during which Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,127 Palestinians, conditions in Gaza remain unbearable.

The United Nations says at least 265 children have been killed during the period while hunger persists and the debilitated healthcare system continues to suffer acute medicine shortages.

“Only 20 percent of what Gaza needs has been allowed to enter – things related to water and health and to life in general,” Younis said, referring to Israeli restrictions on aid entering the Strip. “Gaza is being starved and parched for water.” For him, the aim is clear: expulsion, “even if they call it voluntary migration”.

Liel said Israel is doing the minimum on the humanitarian track to avoid upsetting US President Donald Trump, who has set up what he has named the Board of Peace to oversee the administration and reconstruction of the Strip.

“I don’t think that Israel wants Gaza to be reconstructed like Trump is dreaming,” he said.

Palestinians have been increasingly frustrated with the Board of Peace’s failure to pressure Israel or implement the recovery and construction plans outlined in Trump’s “ceasefire” plan, including the entry of critically needed assistance.

“The Board of Peace is complicit until it moves to rebuild Gaza immediately,” Younis said. “Otherwise, it would not be allowing Israel to create the conditions that make life impossible for Palestinians in Gaza, which will result in expulsion.”

Israeli forces have also expanded the “Yellow Line”, demarcating Israeli-controlled areas within Gaza, to encompass 70 percent of the Strip. “We are not retreating from the ‘Yellow Line’, unequivocally, as long as Hamas does not truly disarm, and even after that, we remain inside Gaza,” Katz told Channel 14 during his tour of northern Gaza, saying the destruction of the territory was “the result of a deliberate policy”.

The settlement push comes as Israel is gearing up for elections, which will be held on October 27.

According to Liel, Katz and other ministers are openly talking about building settlements in Gaza because their calculation is that it would boost their electoral chances amid a shift to the right by the electorate.

Many observers expected the weeks leading up to the polls to be accompanied by a serious escalation in Gaza, the West Bank and other Israeli “war fronts” without changing the political situation in Israel.

“The wish of this Israeli government was that as many [Palestinians from Gaza] will leave. Hopefully voluntarily. If not, Israel will help, and this is the reason you don’t want to rebuild Gaza,” Liel said.

The move lands as EU foreign ministers remain deadlocked over a bloc-wide ban on illegal settlement trade

Belgium’s federal government has approved a ban on importing goods produced in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

It is the latest among a small but fast-growing group of European countries acting alone on a question still unresolved at EU level.

The decision came at the government’s final cabinet meeting before the summer break, the Belgian News Agency (Belga) reported on Saturday.

The move fulfils a commitment made last year over the scale of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and its death toll.

Earlier this week, Belgian foreign minister Maxime Prevot pressed EU counterparts at a closed-doors meeting in Brussels for a bloc-wide ban, accusing the European Commission of offering ministers “a bone to chew on” rather than a genuine plan to act.

Belgium’s ban arrives as both a domestic pledge fulfilled and a signal to the EU leadership.

The case for tighter controls was strengthened this year by a Global Echo Litigation Center investigation, which examined more than 30,000 export documents covering thousands of Israeli agricultural shipments to Europe.

Roughly one in six contained goods grown in settlements in the occupied West Bank or Golan Heights, rising to nearly one in five among shipments bound for EU countries.

Investigators found exporters routinely obscured the true origin of the produce, labelling it Israeli, blending it with genuine Israeli stock, or shipping it under addresses unconnected to where it was grown.

Similar moves by others in Europe

The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, buying close to 30 percent of its exports and accounting for nearly a third of its total trade in goods, worth 43 billion euros ($49bn) last year.

Belgium joins a list of states no longer waiting for EU-wide action.

Spain enshrined a ban in law last September, the Netherlands agreed to one in May and Slovenia adopted a similar measure earlier this year, though it has dramatically shifted its approach to Israel following the election of a more pro-Israel government.

Differences between the EU’s 27 member states have made it difficult for the bloc to act decisively on the issue.

Ireland’s parliament passed its own prohibition on July 15 , days before Belgium’s move.

The wave of national bans follows efforts earlier this month by the EU to coordinate action among its member states.

The European Commission reportedly circulated a paper to EU capitals setting out three options: an import ban, a licensing scheme, or high tariffs on settlement goods. However no decision was reached.

Five former European officials, including ex-Italian prime minister Enrico Letta and former German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, published a joint call for the EU to adopt a bloc-wide ban.

They argued that national bans like Belgium’s carry limited weight alone, since goods cleared through customs in one member state can move freely across the rest of the bloc.

A ban, they wrote, would not amount to a sanction against Israel but would simply bring EU trade policy into line with restrictions it has applied before, including on conflict minerals and goods made with forced labour.

Several EU countries, including Spain, Italy and Germany, have also acted to restrict arms exports to Israel over the war in Gaza.

Pressure is growing on the EU to sanction Israel for its expansion of illegal settlements and violence against Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank.

The European Union has renewed its call on Israel to halt the expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank, warning that continued construction and other unilateral measures threaten the viability of a future Palestinian state.

An EU spokesperson on Friday urged Israel to stop the legalisation of settlement outposts, land appropriation, demolitions, forced evictions of Palestinians, and other actions that “undermine the viability of the two-state solution”.

The statement came days after Israel’s security cabinet approved the allocation of 1.3 billion shekels ($427.8m) to establish 34 new settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The funding package marks one of Israel’s largest recent investments in settlement expansion and has drawn criticism from Palestinian officials and international partners.

The United Nations, the International Court of Justice and most countries consider Israeli settlements in territory occupied by Israel since 1967 to be illegal under international law. Israel rejects that interpretation.

The EU has long maintained that it does not recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the territories it occupied in 1967. However, the 27-member bloc remains divided over whether to take stronger measures against Israel’s settlement policy.

EU foreign ministers this week failed to reach a consensus on proposals that could restrict trade with settlements in the occupied West Bank, despite growing calls from several member states for tougher action.

The renewed diplomatic pressure comes amid continuing violence in the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians, including children, have been injured in separate incidents involving Israeli settlers and Israeli forces.

On Friday, two Palestinian children were taken to hospital after suffering head and facial injuries when Israeli settlers allegedly hurled stones at their family’s vehicle in the Wadi al-Sha’er area, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

In another incident, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy was shot by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. He remains in hospital.

“Everybody agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable,” the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said ahead of talks among EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday.

“What is happening in the West Bank is actually making it more and more impossible that the two-state solution ever can come into effect,” she added.

European Union foreign ministers met in Brussels on Monday to discuss whether there is enough support for new measures to curb trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

“Everybody agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable,”  EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said at the start of a meeting.

“What is happening in the West Bank is actually making it more and more impossible that the two-state solution ever can come into effect.”

Here is more about the ongoing EU discussions on Israeli settlements.

What options are the EU foreign ministers discussing?

The discussions are based on a confidential paper by the European Commission that floats three different options – an import licensing system, prohibitive tariffs, or a ban – an unnamed senior EU diplomat and a European official said, Reuters reported.

The EU has long struggled to take major decisions on Middle East policy because of deep and long-standing divisions among its 27 member countries, particularly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Diplomats said the debate at a meeting in Brussels on Monday was not expected to yield any concrete decisions, but would help to sound out if there is enough support to move forward.

Are Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank expanding?

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the territory, excluding east Jerusalem, among some three million Palestinians.

This month, Israel’s Security Cabinet has approved a plan to establish 13 new settlements in the central occupied West Bank.

The number of new settlements has soared recently, according to new data from the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR). After averaging approximately eight outposts annually between 2012 and 2022, the number jumped to 32 in 2023, then 62 in 2024, reaching 86 during 2025.

Nasser Khdour, Middle East assistant research manager at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), said that 2026 is the deadliest year for settler violence since ACLED began tracking incidents in Palestine a decade ago.

“Incidents have included attacks on Palestinians, property destruction, damage to farming equipment and facilities, tree uprooting, and grazing on Palestinian agricultural land. Other incidents have involved looting, including the theft of equipment, sheep, and crops,” Khdour was quoted as saying on the ACLED website in May.

What pressure has the EU faced to take measures about this?

Under pressure for the EU as a whole to take measures, the bloc’s executive last week laid out options to curb trade with settlements, including a ban.

“There have been a lot of asks and requests from the member states regarding the ban of the trade with illegal settlements,” Kallas said.

“Let’s see if these options that have been provided now will have a stronger push from member states.”

Belgium’s Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot said the options laid out appeared to be more “a bone to gnaw on than a genuine desire to move forward”.

“We are calling for concrete proposals,” he said.

There is disagreement in Brussels as to whether that move would need backing from all 27 member states or just a weighted majority.

Diplomats say that key players Germany and Italy are still undecided on the move.

What has the EU’s position been so far?

Several EU countries – including Spain, the Netherlands, and the Republic of Ireland – have already imposed their own trade restrictions on Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, considered illegal under international law.

In May, the EU imposed sanctions on four entities and three individuals over what it described as serious and systematic human rights abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank.

In a July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice said Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and settlements in the West Bank are illegal and that states should take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that help maintain the situation.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar last year described a push by some European governments to implement the advisory opinion as “shameful”.

The incident is the latest in a pattern of Israeli measures in the occupied territory since the Gaza genocide began.

Israel has barred the grand mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound for one week.

The Jerusalem Governorate said in a post on Facebook that Sheikh Muhammad Hussein was detained by Israeli forces after delivering his Friday sermon at Al-Aqsa Mosque. Later, the governorate confirmed that Hussein had been released, but was temporarily banned by Israeli authorities from entering Islam’s third-holiest site in occupied East Jerusalem for one week, with the possibility of the ban being renewed.

According to the Quds News Network, Hussein was arrested for the contents of his sermon, during which he prayed for mercy for Palestinians killed by Israel and relief for those held in Israeli prisons.

In a message to Al Jazeera, the Jerusalem Governorate said “the arrest was carried out in order to serve him [Hussein] with an order banning him from entering Al-Aqsa Mosque for one week, with the possibility of renewal. This is not the first time such a measure has been taken against him.”

Israel has not commented on Hussein’s brief arrest or banning.

The incident is the latest in a pattern of escalating Israeli measures in occupied Palestinian territory since the start of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023.

More than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since then, including at least 243 children, amid what rights groups say is an intensifying campaign of military raids, settler violence and expanding Israeli control.

On Friday, six Palestinians, including children, were reportedly injured during an attack by settlers in Huwara, Nablus.

Local sources said settlers set upon a Palestinian family, including an elderly man, using pepper spray and physically beating them.

The attack took place on land belonging to the family. Israeli forces were reportedly present and protected the settlers during the attack.

Israeli forces then allegedly assaulted residents and arrested three members of the family, including 80-year-old Ibrahim Ismail al-Jabour.

The incident comes amid growing international concern over violence in the occupied West Bank. Last month, Amnesty International released a report accusing the Israeli government of carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the territory. The report concluded that the campaign was state-led and not the result of rogue settlers or far-right ministers.

Videos show Israeli settlers, protected by Israeli soldiers, trying to seize a house under construction on the outskirts of the town of Qabalan, just south of Nablus, in the occupied West Bank.

Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – In the narrow alleyways of the Dheisheh refugee camp, three children debate which of their encounters with the Israeli military is worth telling, and who gets to tell it.

Yanal, 14, wins the opening round on language skills alone. He speaks three languages: Arabic, English and Spanish, and insists on telling his story in English.

“Life in the camp is complex,” he says, because, as he explains, there is nowhere to run away to when the army comes.

Yanal keeps returning to one memory: a football match, soldiers entering the field, and there being no way out.

Mustafa Abu Aliyah, 13, counters with a raid that he ran into as he was on his way to his grandfather’s house. The Israeli army fired live rounds and tear gas, he says. “We were in the middle of the fire.”

He can’t remember his first encounter with soldiers, “but I definitely saw them when I was little, because they are always coming here”.

His sister Diyar, 12, was mid-piano lesson the last time the army came through.

“Whenever the army comes, there will be tear gas,” she says. “People will be beaten. There’s usually someone injured or killed.”

She compares it to life elsewhere. “I see children in other countries, in other worlds, living in safety, but we can’t even leave our front door without suffering.”

The raids happen so often that the children often can’t remember the dates of specific incidents. But what they do remember is the fear they experienced and the aggression displayed by the Israeli soldiers.

In the first nine months of 2025 alone, Israeli forces carried out nearly 7,500 raids across the occupied West Bank, or about 27 a day, and a 37 percent increase compared with the same period in 2024.

‘Essence of childhood destroyed’

The children in the Dheisheh refugee camp reflect a wider pattern of childhood experiences under Israeli occupation, set out in a report the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released on Tuesday.

It examines Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children in Gaza and the occupied West Bank since October 2023.

Titled, “The essence of childhood has been destroyed”, it found that Israeli forces have killed at least 20,179 Palestinian children and wounded more than 44,000 across the occupied territory, most of them in Gaza – where it said that the deliberate targeting of children constituted part of the genocide in the Palestinian territory.

The report also documents a pattern of killings, mass arrests, torture, sexual violence and attacks on schools and hospitals.

In the West Bank, it records a sharp rise in settler violence against children and killings by Israeli forces, among them a two-year-old girl shot dead in January 2025. Children, the report notes, are held in Israeli detention, with no lawyer and no word sent to their parents, a separation it says can amount to enforced disappearance. Schools, too, are targets: 85 across the West Bank are under demolition or stop-work orders, and others have been closed or attacked by soldiers and settlers.

Beyond the casualty count

The UN commission argues that Israel has created conditions in which Palestinians live in a constant state of “diffused, ambient terror, that does not require constant bombing to remain effective”.

“We are talking about repeated shocks, about continuous events that never end,” says Lemis Farraj, a psychologist and the project coordinator at Shorouq in Dheisheh, emphasising that a child’s physical and mental health cannot be separated from each other.

The report calls this continuous traumatic stress, distinct from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), because there is no single event to recover from. The danger does not just come from experiencing one raid, but from the fear that comes with waiting for the expected raids that will likely come in the future.

Diyar explains that when the army enters her neighbourhood, she has to stay home and wait, no matter what her plans were. “Our life stops,” she says.

Her brother, Mustafa, says that the repetition has worn the fear flat.

“When I see the army, I [am] used to it and I stop being afraid.”

Farraj sees the same in the young children she treats: a startle at an ordinary sound, certainty that a raid has begun, and regression – skills already learned suddenly lost again.

Five-year-old Khour Hammad, who lives a few alleys away from the older children, has experienced the same raids.

She explains that both of her parents are in prison. Israeli forces arrested her father in July 2023 and her mother last March, according to the family.

Khour remembers the night the army came for her mother. Half-asleep, she heard a man’s voice and thought her father had finally come home. She climbed out of bed expecting him. Instead, she found soldiers inside the house.

The soldiers tried to question Khour. She says that she “felt like I was going to throw up”.

Handed an old family photo, she brightens at once, pointing out her mother, Islam Amarna, and her father, Osama Hammad, and rattling off memories in bursts.

Generational trauma

While Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank face different lived experiences, the UN finds the same cause behind the harm: a military occupation described as a “long-term mechanism of domination, subjugation and oppression”.

Farraj adds that children are affected not only by their own experiences of trauma, but also by what is passed down from parents and grandparents.

“The first generation of the Nakba lived in shock and passed it on to their children,” she says, referring to the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians following the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.

The report similarly notes that Palestinian refugees, now in their fifth generation, have internalised a sense of “dispossession from the Nakba” alongside present-day experiences of occupation.

In the West Bank, roughly one in four Palestinians are refugees; in Gaza, it is about 70 percent.

Israeli violence and forcible displacement have been carried through generations of Palestinians, compounding as the cycle repeats. Farraj says trauma recovery depends on stability: family support, schooling, safe spaces and a predictable routine, all of which remain precarious under Israel’s occupation.

For Khour, that stability begins with her parents.

“I want the whole world to listen and see my picture,” Khour says, “and get my mom and dad out of prison.”

Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, according to a new UN inquiry. The report says more than 20,000 children were killed between October 2023 and October 2025. Israel rejected the findings.

Israeli settlers have vandalised and burned a mosque in the occupied West Bank village of Jaljulia, north of Ramallah. Racist slogans were scrawled on the walls by the settlers.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says Israel has transferred authority over Hebron to the army. It includes control of the key holy site, Cave of the Patriarchs. Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh explains.