Settler mob overwhelms Israeli forces in West Bank attack, prompting rare political backlash

On a Tuesday morning in early autumn, more than a hundred armed settlers descended on the village of Jalud in the occupied West Bank. Their target was a Palestinian family—the Tubasis—who had just won a court order to reclaim their homes after being forced out months earlier. What unfolded was a collision between Israeli state authority and the settlers it has long tolerated: the mob overwhelmed the small military escort, forced the family onto a roof, set their houses ablaze, and injured three Israeli security officers in the process. The incident was small in the arithmetic of occupation but large in its political reverberations, cracking open a conversation inside Israel about who actually holds power in the territories.

The Tubasi family's ordeal began in the summer when settler militants laid siege to their homes over weeks, making life impossible. They fought back through the courts—a rare avenue available to Palestinians with resources and legal representation—and won. A high court ruled that the Israeli state must evict the settlers and restore the family's access to their property. On Monday night, the military called with a plan: fifteen military police would escort them home immediately. The timing was poor. Israel was in the midst of Sukkot, a major holiday when settler outposts swell with reinforcements. The military did not coordinate with the national police or domestic intelligence service. Within minutes of arrival, the small escort was surrounded.

Wael Tubasi described what the settlers left behind: doors removed, tiles pried from walls, stairs dismantled, bathrooms destroyed, windows shattered. "They left nothing, everything was broken," he told Reuters. The family was evacuated in armored vehicles while the crowd set both houses on fire, blocked roads, and hurled stones at Israeli security forces. Three officers were injured. The state's inability to enforce its own court order, in broad daylight, against its own citizens, exposed a fracture in Israeli governance that had been widening for years.

The reaction from Israeli political figures was unusually sharp. President Isaac Herzog called the assault a "moral stain." Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief and Netanyahu's main challenger in elections scheduled for the following month, warned of a "campaign of terror and violence" that demanded action. Even this criticism, however, revealed the limits of Israeli concern. As Mairav Zonszein, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, observed, the opposition's alarm was not rooted in Palestinian suffering but in the fact that settlers were making Israel look bad and that the military appeared to be losing control. Palestinian rights, she noted, were not the concern.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which operates in the territory, issued a broader statement: settler violence, settlement expansion, and movement restrictions had rendered everyday life for Palestinians "untenable." The organization called for an end to the attacks and respect for international humanitarian law. The scale of displacement was staggering. Since October 2023, more than sixty Palestinian communities had been erased from the map entirely, according to the Israeli rights group B'Tselem. Another eighteen had been partially emptied. Nearly five thousand people—almost half of them children—had been forced from their homes.

International pressure was mounting. The Netherlands had just implemented a ban on imports of settlement goods. The United Kingdom announced plans for broader controls on trade and financing. A similar bill was set to be introduced in the U.S. Congress. On Tuesday, a Senate bill demanding a human rights report on Israel's occupation came close to passing, defeated only after winning support from all but one Democrat. An Israeli analyst, Roy Sharon, warned on social media that the barrier had been broken and that continued "anarchy in the West Bank" risked costing Israel military aid and international legitimacy.

Netanyahu condemned the "violent riots" and called for prosecution of the attackers, but he did not abandon the settlers themselves. "The handful of rioters are not representative of the law-abiding settler public," he said, using the Israeli term Judea and Samaria for the occupied territory. An Israeli military spokesperson acknowledged that two suspects had been detained and called the violence directed at soldiers "unacceptable," but the question hanging over the country was whether the state had the capacity to stop it. Avi Ashkenazi, writing in the Maariv newspaper, was blunt: "This was a terrorist attack and a failure by the Israeli defence establishment in its entirety. The real sovereign in Judea and Samaria are the extreme rightwing terrorist activists." The Tubasi family, meanwhile, had their court victory and nothing else.