After uprooting Palestinian hamlets, extremist settlers set sights on purge of entire West Bank |
Extremist settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, already at unprecedented levels over the last three years, has reached a new zenith since the outbreak of war between Israel and Iran at the end of February.
Civil rights groups and activists have reported extremely high rates of Jewish extremist attacks since war broke out, with multiple incidents of assault, vandalism, theft, and harassment occurring daily.
The number of extremely severe incidents, such as fatal shootings, has also increased, with seven Palestinian civilians shot dead by extremist settlers since the war began.
And last week bore witness to further escalation, as mobs of extremist Jewish youth from the settlements and illegal outposts of the West Bank descended on rural Palestinian villages, set homes and property ablaze, and violently assaulted Palestinian residents, in “revenge” for the death of a fellow settler activist who died in unclear circumstances on March 21.
The severe spike in attacks during the course of the last month has been accompanied by extreme rhetoric by radical activists on social media networks, including explicit and proud statements in favor of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank.
Alongside the rhetoric, extremist settler actions once limited to Area C of the West Bank where Israel has full civil and security control — and where the overwhelming majority of settlements and illegal outposts are located — have begun to widen into Areas A and B as well, where the Palestinian Authority is supposed to hold political autonomy.
This has included intensified violent settler raids into Palestinian towns and villages, as well as the establishment of Jewish settlement outposts in Areas A and B, as part of the grander plan to assert Israeli control over the entire territory from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
Civil rights groups such as B’Tselem and Yesh Din have alleged that the timing is not coincidental — that the radical settler activists are using the Iran war as cover for increased violence targeted at displacing Palestinians.
According to the Yesh Din organization, which tracks settler violence, there were 257 incidents of extremist settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank from the day the war with Iran began on February 28 until March 26, based on cross-referenced public statements and reports from different sources.
These incidents included the killing of six Palestinian civilians who were shot dead by settler radicals, a figure that has since risen to seven.
“Under the cover of war, settler violence is increasing with the goal of expelling Palestinians and taking control of their land,” Yesh Din alleged on March 5.
The B’Tselem human rights organization, which also tracks settler extremism, made a similar observation, noting the spread of intense violence to Areas A and B of the West Bank.
“The combination of the increasing and lethal use of live fire by Israeli militias and the expansion of attacks on large, established Palestinian communities indicates the intensification of Israel’s ethnic cleansing efforts under cover of the war with Iran,” B’Tselem charged on March 9.
In the first week of the current Iranian war, an administrator of a public WhatsApp channel dubbed “Hilltop News” spelled out the strategy of the extremists.
The channel, run by extremist settlers, is one of a number of similar outlets seen as representative of the settler movement’s most radical, and often violent, wing.
The post argued that it must be the settler radicals who first advance the goal of removing Palestinians from the West Bank, a concept they term “transfer.” Their efforts, if determined enough, will eventually be adopted by the state, similar to how the settlement movement itself started at the grassroots level before being backed by the government in the 1970s and 80s, it claimed.
“In the end, transfer will really happen due to the initiative of private individuals, and not because the government woke up,” declared the post.
It referenced the fact that many thriving settlements began life as illegal outposts before being retroactively authorized.
“Just as it happens with the settlements, first Jews move into the area, and only after a few months or years do the heads of regional councils, cabinet ministers, and members of Knesset arrive to ‘approve’ and cut the red ribbon,” the post continued.
Jewish extremists in the West Bank have been working toward the goal of expelling as many Palestinians as possible from Area C for several years, human rights groups have alleged. But those efforts shifted into high gear with the outbreak of war in Gaza following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion and atrocities.
According to B’Tselem, 57 Palestinian communities, home to over 3,900 people, have been displaced since that date due to settler violence and harassment in Areas C and B of the West Bank. Another 530-odd Palestinians have been forced out of their homes in 17 partially displaced West Bank communities.
The strenuous attempts to displace Palestinians from the region have been accompanied by similarly energetic efforts for Jewish Israelis to control as much West Bank land as possible, which also stepped up over the last three years. According to Peace Now, 86 illegal outposts were established in 2025, 62 in 2024, and 32 in 2023.
The average number of illegal outposts established every year until the current government took office was six.
The spike comes as settlers have also shifted from establishing small, densely clustered outposts to setting up agricultural bases that allow them to lay claim to vast tracts for growing or grazing, expanding the reach of their land grab. These activities often bring about fraught encounters with Palestinian herding communities.
In many cases, extremists have appeared to use outposts as forward positions to harass and attack local Palestinians in a bid to force them to abandon their homes.
Several dozen Palestinian Bedouin families fled Wadi as-Seeq in October 2023, in the face of persistent settler harassment and violence after radical activists established an illegal outpost right next to the hamlet.
The entire population of Khirbet Zanuta in the South Hebron Hills also fled their village due to persistent violence and harassment from extremists from the nearby Meitarim Farm outpost.
And the residents of Mu’arrajat in the Jordan Valley fled their homes in July 2025 after extremists set up an outpost encampment less than 100 meters from the Palestinian hamlet, stole from their homes, vandalized their property and engaged in other forms of harassment and intimidation.
Settler extremists have not explicitly said they are using the war as cover to step up attacks on Palestinians while the world is looking away, but comments from members of the community make clear that at the very least, the fighting against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon has not distracted them from the goal of expelling Palestinians.
“Sad Jews are reporting that even during Operation Roaring Lion [the IDF campaign against Iran] happy Jews continue Operation You Shall Inherit in Judea and Samaria!” sneered one bulletin posted on the Hilltop News channel, mocking human rights activists lamenting the displacement that week of a Bedouin community next to the Palestinian town of Duma.
“Operation You Shall Inherit” is the biblically inspired name given by the settler extremists to their campaign to expel Palestinians from the West Bank, also called Judea and Samaria, and crops up frequently in their rhetoric and social media posts.
In a post in another extremist WhatsApp group called “Fighting for Life,” extremist settler ideologue Rabbi Menachem Ben Shahar portrayed the war as a model for how to expel Palestinians from the West Bank.
“There is an unbelievable gap between the actions of the people of Israel against the distant enemy in Iran, and Beirut, and the nearby enemy,” said Ben Shahar, who has been investigated by the police for incitement.
“Issue notices, expel entire villages, bomb. An enemy is an enemy is an enemy. Bomb the enemy wherever they are,” urged Ben Shahar, a teacher in a yeshiva in Homesh, a far-flung settlement in the northern West Bank that had been evacuated by the government in 2005 and was only recently re-legalized.
“Now we must bridge the gap and defeat the close enemy as well. We must expel the villages and strongholds of the enemy in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], the Galilee, Ramallah, Qalqiliya, everywhere in the land,” he declared.
Another post in Hilltop News by an administrator cheered the uprooting of Palestinian Bedouin communities, which often bear the brunt of settler violence, and expressed hopes that such efforts would soon expand to larger Palestinian population centers.
The post quoted a “senior figure in Hilltop News” who “clarified that while there is yet another military campaign, he is optimistic, and that it will be possible to go to the stage of expulsion from the big towns in the coming months.”
In the past, settler extremists have raided Palestinian towns, setting fires and beating residents, in revenge for terror attacks — often with little or no link between their victims and those behind the terror activity — or as part of a program of retaliation for Israeli authorities moving against them.
Yet the post indicated that settlers are now looking to carry out such attacks with the goal of expelling Palestinians to points unknown.
Such processes may already be underway.
In the northern West Bank, settler extremists, apparently from the nearby illegal outpost of Kol Mevaser, attacked the Bedouin hamlet of Khalet a-Sidra with such brutality that the approximately 16 families living there decided to leave. The same decision has been made by dozens of other similar communities in the last three years.
Since then, what appears to be the same group has turned its attention to the long-established village of Mukhmas, just a few hundred meters from Khalet a-Sidra, including one incident in which a 19-year-old youth was shot and killed and over 350 sheep were allegedly stolen from the residents of the village.
When Israeli authorities tore down some of Kol Mevaser’s structures on March 18, several settler extremists descended from the wildcat hilltop outpost and set fires in Mukhmas.
“The clear goal of the Kol Mevaser outpost is to use violence to force Palestinians out of their homes,” said Rabbi Arik Ascherman, who heads the dovish Torat Tzedek organization and has monitored violence in the area. “They are now working on the village of Mukhmas as well.”
In Mukhmas, as elsewhere, Palestinians who are under attack say they will not leave their land, and it may not matter whether settlers are motivated by revenge or a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The end result of both is the same: death and fiery destruction.
“I’m not going to leave,” Youssef Hammas Abu Ali, a Mukhmas chicken farmer whose coops were assaulted, told The Times of Israel recently. “This is my village. I have my house [here], my land.”
The notion of putting up illegal settlement outposts in the areas governed by the Palestinian Authority was given full expression this week, with the almost unprecedented establishment of three illegal settlement outposts in Area A of the West Bank.
In the past, almost all settlement activity has been limited to Area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank that Israel has full military and civil control over, which is home to all the Israeli settlements and several hundred thousand Palestinians.
Area A, which Palestinians both govern and secure, comprises around 18% of the territory, almost all of which is made up of the urban core of Palestinian cities and towns.
Pictures posted by Palestinian media outlets this week of one of the new outposts in the northern West Bank close to the Palestinian town of Jaba and just north of the Palestinian village of Beit Imrin showed a stone building with an Israeli flag raised over it.
The Times of Israel confirmed that extremist settler activists had indeed taken up residence in the building.
اقتحام المستوطنين على طريق النكب قرب بلدة جبع جنوب جنين pic.twitter.com/uR5ZBuOBof — شبكة قدس الإخبارية (@qudsn) March 26, 2026
اقتحام المستوطنين على طريق النكب قرب بلدة جبع جنوب جنين pic.twitter.com/uR5ZBuOBof
— شبكة قدس الإخبارية (@qudsn) March 26, 2026
The establishment of the outpost appeared to be a response to the death of Yehuda Sherman, a resident of the illegal agricultural outpost of Shuva Yisrael, located very close to Beit Imrin.
Like other activists of his ilk, Sherman was “driven crazy” by the distinction between areas of the West Bank under Israeli versus Palestinian control, viewing the whole West Bank as a Jewish inheritance, his father Yehoshua Sherman was quoted saying in the Olam Katan weekly, which is associated with the far right.
“When they established the [Shuva Yisrael] farm I brought a surveying gauge for them to measure where Area C was. Yehuda asked me ‘Dad, what does it matter? Why are you limiting us? It’s the Land of Israel,’” the elder Sherman told the weekly.
At the funeral, Yehoshua Sherman called on the government to annul the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, which split the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C.
“The generation that grew up here doesn’t know what A, B and C is, it just knows that all of the Land of Israel is ours,” said Sherman in his eulogy.
Yehuda Sherman was killed when a Palestinian vehicle hit the ATV he and his brother were in while they conducted a “patrol” close to their illegal settlement outpost. The police and Shin Bet stated on Thursday that “suspicions are growing” that Sherman’s death was the result of a terror attack.
The death sparked two nights of attacks on Palestinian communities across the West Bank, with the violence reaching levels that managed to break through the Iran war’s monopoly on attention. Military officials were alarmed to the point that an Israel Defense Forces unit was redeployed from Lebanon to help quell the violence.
The attacks have largely ended, but settler extremists are still speaking openly of their desire to rid the West Bank of Palestinians.
On Thursday, Elisha Yered, a central figure in the network of extremist settler activists, wrote a lengthy essay calling for the abolition of the Oslo Accords, the expansion of Israeli settlements into Areas A and B, and the expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank, saying such actions would fulfill the “unwritten will” of Yehuda Sherman.
“We must not be content with the Oslo borders… but continue forward with all our might,” he wrote, asserting that the government’s support for illegal settlement outposts was proof of how such radicals can influence government policy.
“That which has been done in the farming outposts and in the hills must be replicated as soon as possible in Areas A and B, in places in Area C that the enemy has already invaded,” declared Yered, a suspect in several crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank. “[We must] not be afraid to proudly demand expulsion, occupation, and inheritance alongside the settlement of the land and the flourishing of the wilderness.”
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