Israeli settlers block Palestinian family's court-ordered return, torch homes

Mahmoud al-Tubasi, sixty years old, received a call just after midnight. Israeli officials were offering him a chance to reclaim the homes his family had been forced to abandon months earlier—but only if he came immediately, with the army and border police. A court had ordered it. The High Court of Israel had ruled that the al-Tubasi family must be allowed to return to their properties in Jalud, a village south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank. So on a Monday night in late September, al-Tubasi, his wife Aida, and their son Wael set out with their military escort to take back what was theirs.

What they found when they arrived was devastation. By torchlight, they inspected one of their homes. Settlers had smashed holes through doors, torn out electrical wiring, ripped up floor tiles, shattered windows. The toilet had been destroyed and filled with human waste. Rubbish covered the floors. The house was not simply occupied—it had been methodically wrecked. But the family had little time to process the scale of the damage. As soon as they entered, settlers began hurling stones. The Israeli soldiers responded with tear gas, but there were too many attackers. More than a hundred had gathered, coordinated through WhatsApp messages alerting them that the Palestinian family they had driven out was trying to return. The settlers came to stop them.

The violence escalated quickly. Settlers slashed the tires of the military van carrying the family, forcing a transfer to an armored vehicle. As that vehicle pulled away, the settlers set fire to the family's car and then to both of their houses. Smoke billowed into the night. The Israeli military later confirmed that more than a hundred rioters had been present, blocking roads, setting tires ablaze, and throwing stones at security forces. Three police officers were injured. The mission to return the family to their home was abandoned. The al-Tubasi family was driven away from Jalud, their court-ordered return thwarted by violence that the military could not or would not suppress.

Mahmoud al-Tubasi described the experience to the BBC with the weight of someone who believed he might not survive it. "It was extremely terrifying, beyond words," he said. "My feeling now is that I am happy to have escaped death. I genuinely expected they were going to kill us." He acknowledged that Israeli soldiers had formed a protective barrier around his family, using pepper spray to force back the settlers who tried to reach them. But he also noted what did not happen: the security forces took no action against the settlers themselves. They extracted the family and left.

The al-Tubasis had been living under siege since summer. Extremist settlers had established an illegal outpost near Jalud and besieged three houses in the village, including two belonging to the family's married sons. The harassment and attacks had become unbearable, forcing the family to flee. A month before the failed return, masked settlers had attacked Aida al-Tubasi while she was being interviewed by American journalists, injuring both her and the reporters. The High Court, in its ruling ordering the family's safe return, had used forceful language, describing settler actions as "a completely unacceptable phenomenon that stands in contrast to the basic values and moral principles of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state." The court had set a deadline of September 20th for the family to be safely returned. That deadline passed. The return attempt on Monday night was what followed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attacks on security forces and called for law enforcement to prosecute the rioters "to the fullest extent of the law." Israeli police arrested three people suspected of involvement. Yet the broader pattern tells a different story. According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization, fewer than three percent of police investigations into settler violence over the past two decades have resulted in convictions. Ziv Stahl, the group's executive director, attributed this enforcement failure to something structural: "the violence is part of a systematic government policy aimed at pushing Palestinians out of the area and expanding Israeli control over land in the West Bank."

The numbers bear weight. Since 2023, more than 6,500 Palestinians have been displaced due to settler attacks and access restrictions in the occupied West Bank, according to the United Nations. In the same period, the UN's Humanitarian Office has documented 6,199 attacks by Israeli settlers causing casualties or damage. This year alone, at least 82 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank, with at least 23 of those deaths occurring in the context of settler attacks. Four Israelis have been killed—members of security forces and civilians. Settler violence has reached an all-time high in 2026.

The al-Tubasi family remains displaced. Their homes, destroyed by fire, sit empty in Jalud. The court order that was supposed to restore them to their property has become a document without force. What happened on that Monday night—the failure of the military to control the settlers, the absence of arrests at the scene, the family's extraction rather than their return—illustrates a gap between what Israeli courts rule and what Israeli authorities are willing or able to enforce when settlers resist.