Israeli Press
Israel's army closes Taybeh to settlers as they block Mughayyir's farmers
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Israeli army declared the village of Taybeh, north-east of Ramallah, closed to Israelis who do not live in the area, an order the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Monday and the army justified as a step "to protect the citizens of the area and maintain order."
Taybeh is the last village in the occupied West Bank with a Palestinian Christian majority, and the closure follows months of settler attacks on its land, its cemetery and the fifth-century ruins of the Church of St George.
The order is narrow. It keeps Israeli visitors out of one village; it does not remove an outpost, disarm anyone or restore access to the fields that attacks have made unreachable.
A few kilometres north, in Mughayyir, Haaretz reported that settlers mobilised to stop Palestinians from reaching their farmland on the first occasion the residents have had to work it since the war began.
That combination is the West Bank's summer in miniature: an army order acknowledging that settlers make a village unsafe, issued the same week settlers keep another village's farmers off their own soil.
Haaretz's reporting on the two villages carried the bylines of Rawan Suleiman and Matan Golan.
Taybeh's priests have appealed repeatedly to diplomats in Jerusalem, and a delegation of heads of churches visited the village in July 2025 after fires were set beside the church compound.
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