Real Lives
West Bank fire crews fight settler arson without water or clearance
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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A fire on a Palestinian hillside in the occupied West Bank is not primarily a fire problem. It is a routing problem, a water problem and a permission problem, and the men who solve all three for a living work for the Palestinian Civil Defence.
Their season is about to begin. The olive harvest opens in October, and the burn record that runs alongside it has grown every year of the war.
The record, counted#
The Commission Against the Wall and Settlements, the Palestinian body that monitors settlement activity, documented 900 fires set on Palestinian homes, land, vehicles and facilities between the start of 2023 and 10 July 2026.
Settlers were responsible for 799 of them, or 88.8 per cent, and the Israeli military for 101, or 11.2 per cent, the commission found. The annual figures rise without interruption: 217 in 2023, 264 in 2024, 307 in 2025, and 112 in the first six months and ten days of this year.
The commission's own explanation for the curve is an environment of impunity — no prosecutions, so no deterrent.
The craft#
The first calculation a station makes is not about the fire. It is about which zone the fire is in.
A blaze on village land classified Area C, under full Israeli control, cannot be approached until the Palestinian district coordination office reaches its Israeli counterpart and clearance comes back. The fire does not wait for the phone call.
The second calculation is water. West Bank villages are not hydranted the way a city is; a crew works from what its tender carries, and refills at a source that is often in Area A, behind whatever is on the road that day. A tender that empties in an Area C olive grove is a vehicle that must leave the fire to become useful again.
So the crews work in arithmetic: how many minutes of water, how many minutes back to the fill point, and which line of trees can be given up to hold the fire off a house. Fields are sacrificed on purpose. That is a decision, made quickly, by someone who has to look at the owner afterwards.
Taybeh, 10 June#
What happens when both calculations fail was documented this summer at Taybeh, the last entirely Christian village in the West Bank.
Settlers set a wide area of Mount al-Masees alight, opposite the petrol station, according to the parish priest, Father Bashar Fawadleh. Civil defence crews were kept from the site at first while security coordination was arranged, the Palestinian Civil Defence spokesman Nael al-Azza said, and the fire spread toward neighbouring land and property.
The priest said settlers fired weapons and surrounded the men trying to bring a water tanker up to the blaze. Several were assaulted, two vehicles were damaged and a phone was taken. The crews reached the fire in the end and put it out, with settlers still trying to obstruct them.
What the season looks like from the station#
At Ein Siniya, north of Ramallah, a blaze near an aluminium works ran into roughly fifty dunams of mature olive trees — the kind of loss measured not in a season's income but in the decades a mature tree takes to come back.
OCHA's count for this year averages six settler attacks a day across the West Bank, and in one recent week more than fifty caused casualties or property damage, among them arson against a mosque, homes, farmland and vehicles.
Against that the civil defence puts crews, tenders and the patience to make the same three calculations again. They are not a humanitarian statistic and they are not victims. They are a fire service, doing a technical job under conditions designed to make it fail, and mostly getting there.
