West Bank & Jerusalem
Soldiers and armed settlers raided al-Mughayyir and wounded three residents
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Israeli soldiers entered the village of al-Mughayyir north-east of Ramallah on Saturday alongside settlers, some of them carrying rifles, and three Palestinians were left wounded, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said.
One young man was hit by live fire and two others were beaten by settlers, according to the society's account, reported by the Israeli daily Haaretz. Rescue crews sent to reach them were held up at the entrance to the village by soldiers and settlers together.
Residents said the group tried twice to drive off their sheep. Fifteen lambs were taken and sheep were shot, in their account. Three young men from the village were arrested during the raid.
The Israeli army had not answered Haaretz's questions about the incident by the time the paper published. It has issued no account of why armed civilians accompanied a military force into a Palestinian village.
A village with a long file#
Al-Mughayyir has been among the most heavily targeted villages in the occupied West Bank since 2024, when a settler attack killed Jihad Abu Alia and burned houses and cars across the village in a single April day. Its grazing land runs east toward the Jordan Valley, and its shepherds have lost access to most of it.
Livestock is the specific target in the pattern the village describes. Sheep are the movable wealth of a herding community, and a flock driven off or shot is a household's income removed in an afternoon, with no route to restitution.
Saturday's raid came on the same day settlers burned land and attacked workers at Qusra, a short drive north across the same hills, where three families have been under siege for three weeks. The two incidents were reported by the same Israeli paper within hours of each other.
They also came four days after Israel's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, warned the prime minister in person that settler crime could take the West Bank out of the army's control — a warning the commentator Nadav Eyal disclosed in Yedioth Ahronoth on Friday. On Saturday the army's soldiers were in al-Mughayyir with the settlers.
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