West Bank school fortified with barbed wire as settler violence surges

In the West Bank village of al-Mughayyir, a school has been encircled in barbed wire — not as a symbol, but as a last resort. Six residents have died this year from settler-related violence, three of them children who attended that very school, including a fourteen-year-old shot at its gates in April. The fortification speaks to a deeper failure: of enforcement, of political will, and of the protections that exist in law but not in life. A community now asks what it means when the place built to secure a child's future must itself be secured against harm.