Transparency & Accountability
Human Rights Watch says settler violence emptied 107 Palestinian communities
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Overnight into Sunday, residents of Osarin south of Nablus said settlers set fire to vehicles and a building, and residents of Burqa to the north said settlers burned a building, property and livestock feed. On Saturday settlers wounded a fifteen-year-old near Tammun, and in Masafer Yatta a settler beat an elderly disabled man, Saeed al-Amour, with a metal bar during a raid on Khirbet al-Rakiz that a bystander filmed.
Each of those nights has a place in a count published three days earlier. Human Rights Watch concluded on 20 August that Israeli-backed settler violence has driven Palestinians out of 107 communities in the occupied West Bank since January 2023 — a displacement of some 5,900 people, whole or partial, village by village.
Seven villages, read closely#
The organisation investigated attacks from January 2023 through August 2026 and did field work in April and May of this year in seven communities: al-Mughayyir, Mikhmas and Taybeh in the Ramallah governorate, Jalud and Qaryut in the Nablus governorate, and Khirbet Humsa and Muarrajat East in the Jordan Valley.
The pattern it describes is not a series of assaults but a method: attacks that recur until the ground becomes unliveable, with no state protection between them.
"The Israeli government and the settlers share the same goal of maximum land and minimum Palestinians, with the authorities not only failing to stop settler violence, but actively enabling it."
Sarah Sanbar, acting Israel and Palestine researcher, Human Rights Watch
What the organisation calls it#
Human Rights Watch states that the displacement amounts to forcible transfer, prohibited by Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and that it constitutes war crimes and crimes against humanity. Those are the organisation's legal characterisations, argued from its own field record.
Um Muhammad Muammar, a seventy-two-year-old from Qaryut whose sons were killed, told its researchers: "I have known war in this region for all my life, but never like this."
The Israeli military did not answer the organisation's questions about the specific incidents it documented, with one exception. On the killings in Qaryut on 2 March 2026, the army confirmed that the shooter was a serving reservist and that a criminal investigation had been opened.
The numbers around the report#
The count of 107 communities is drawn from the United Nations humanitarian office, which has recorded settler violence running at its highest pace since it began keeping the figure. In the first four months of 2026 the office logged roughly 190 attacks a month.
In its weekly bulletin for 27 July to 2 August, the office counted 35 settler attacks causing casualties, property damage or both, with 37 Palestinians injured by Israeli forces or settlers and no fatalities in that particular week. As of 24 July it had recorded at least fifteen Palestinians, two of them children, killed by settlers this year, against a previous annual record of sixteen set in 2023.
Human Rights Watch adds two files beyond the villages it visited: the roughly 32,000 refugees expelled from the northern West Bank camps in January 2025, and more than eighteen Bedouin communities standing in the path of the E1 settlement scheme, whose tender Israel opened this month.
Israeli officials have consistently rejected the characterisation of the West Bank as occupied territory under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the legal ground on which the finding rests. Israeli commanders, in an account the news site Ynet published on Sunday, describe the same violence in their own vocabulary — nationalist crime they say they cannot bring under control before the October election.
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