On the morning of July 24, more than 20 Israeli settlers from the illegal Havat Gilad settlement attacked Palestinians’ homes on the eastern edge of Tal, southwest of Nablus in the occupied West Bank.
Residents initially drove them back, but the settlers returned shortly afterwards, with Israeli soldiers. Videos appear to show a Palestinian man seizing a settler’s rifle and shooting him dead before soldiers shoot the man dead, with further video revealing Israelis continuing to open fire.
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Four Palestinians from the Ramadan family were killed in the ensuing violence. A settler and an Israeli soldier also died.
In the days since, the retaliation from Israeli forces and settlers alike has been overwhelming, with the occupied West Bank gripped by armed attacks, raids, demolitions, road closures and arson.
The sequence is familiar: settlers enter a Palestinian village, violence follows, and Israeli military operations rapidly expand. But with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition in its final months in power before elections, this week’s violence escalated well beyond the already grim baseline.
‘Regularise the farms’
Hours after the killings in Tal, Netanyahu ordered a “wide-scale military operation”, including demolishing the alleged Palestinian attacker’s home, revoking work permits in villages he called “terror hotspots”, reinforcing army units and accelerating the “regularisation” of settler farms and outposts – which are illegal even under Israeli law.
Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich said the response would be an “iron fist”, while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said every West Bank village should share the fate of Beit Hanoon in Gaza (flattened after any attack against Israelis). By the weekend, Israeli public radio reported that 26 army battalions were deployed across the occupied West Bank.
Israeli forces returned to raid Tal nightly over the next several days, arresting roughly 30 to 50 residents and searching some 70 homes. The campaign was also carried out across Jenin, Tubas, Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, Tulkarem and occupied East Jerusalem.
In Nablus, about 5km (3 miles) from Tal, Israeli forces stormed the hospital, the Wafa news agency reported, handcuffing doctors and nurses before detaining a wounded patient shot during the Tal attack.
Four new Israeli settlement outposts appeared overnight next to Tal and the nearby villages of Awarta, Qusra and Jabal Ubayd, according to Israeli public radio and activist Murad Samara.
This adds to the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission’s count of 42 new illegal outposts built across the occupied West Bank in the first half of 2026, most of them agricultural, concentrated in the Hebron, Ramallah and Nablus governorates.
Weekend of arson, roadblocks, and mosques set ablaze
The killings in Tal were the spark for settler violence that, in the days since, has engulfed numerous villages across the West Bank. Israel’s Army Radio counted 30 separate settler attacks across the territory over the weekend. Haaretz reported that influential settler figures ignored appeals from army officers to calm the situation.
In Sarra, southwest of Nablus, settlers burned six Palestinian homes and five vehicles and beat three villagers, Mayor Numan Abdullah said. When settlers tried to storm the village again on Saturday, Israeli forces followed to protect them and fired tear gas, leading to Palestinians and journalists suffering from tear gas inhalation.
In Farata, east of Qalqilya, settlers set fire to a woodworking shop, two homes and farmland, wounding five Palestinians with gunfire, stones and shrapnel, and emptied the water tank of a civil defence truck responding to the blaze, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.
Before dawn on Sunday, settlers set fire to two mosques in so-called “price tag” attacks (retaliatory attacks by Israeli settlers and nationalists against Palestinians). One was the al-Rahma Mosque under construction in Qusra, where Hebrew graffiti reading “revenge for Benayahu” – the Israeli settler killed in Tal – was sprayed on the walls, Qusra Mayor Abdul Azim Wadi said. The second was a mosque in Kour village near Tulkarem, which was defaced with racist slogans, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf.
A Palestinian infant not yet two months old survived an arson attack on her family’s home in Urif, only because her grandfather pulled her from her crib as more than 150 settlers set the house alight, relatives told Gaza Now.
Early on July 27, a six-month-pregnant woman lost her child in Awarta after being prevented from passing a closed gate by soldiers, who searched the woman while she was suffering extreme bleeding.
Israeli forces also sealed roads across the northern West Bank, closing entrances to Sinjil, erecting a checkpoint at Nabi Saleh, and repeatedly shutting gates around Jerusalem, while settlers established rolling roadblocks near Nablus and Ramallah, according to Wafa and local activists.
In Nablus, Ameed Ahmad, the director of the city’s Emergency and Ambulance Center, told Wafa that tightened checkpoint restrictions were delaying ambulance transfers to hospitals, including for kidney dialysis patients. The result has been a West Bank effectively besieged, with Palestinian cities and villages increasingly cut off from each other.
Land seizure orders accompanied the violence. Israeli authorities issued new orders this week to uproot olive trees and seize land in Jaba, Ajjah and al-Yamoun in the Jenin governorate, as well as additional land in Tubas, Wafa reported.
Deaths tied to settler attacks in 2026 – 18 as of July 20, per the UN humanitarian agency, OCHA – had already exceeded all of 2025 before the four Tal killings were added to the count, alongside the killing on July 23 of two Palestinians in Beit Furik, east of Nablus, who were attempting to extinguish fires set by settlers on Palestinian farmland.
Gaza’s post-‘ceasefire’ toll passes 1,200
In Gaza, the Ministry of Health’s tally of Palestinians killed since the October 2025 “ceasefire” reached 1,203 on July 27.
The week’s dead were killed at locations that have been regularly attacked since the “ceasefire” took effect:
- A drone strike killed two Palestinians outside Yemen Al-Saeed Hospital in Jabalia, medical sources told Wafa.
- Separate strikes destroyed homes in Zeitoun and the Yarmouk area of Gaza City, and hit a residential block in the Maghazi camp, Wafa and Gaza Now reported.
- Brigadier-General Abdul-Nasser al-Maqadma, described by Gaza’s Interior Ministry as the territory’s “governor of northern Gaza” and head of its police force, was killed in a drone strike in Sheikh Radwan. Israel claimed that he was a member of Hamas’s military wing.
- A drone killed Khaled al-Breem in Khan Younis as he went to buy sweets to celebrate his high school exam results with visiting relatives, according to Quds News Network and Wafa.
- Two people were killed in a separate strike on the Abu al-Rish family home in Khan Younis on the same day.
- On July 26, a drone fired three missiles into a four-wheel drive near Deir el-Balah, killing two Hamas security officials.
Israel’s “Yellow Line”, which demarcates the area Israel directly controls in Gaza, also continued advancing beyond the lines agreed upon in the October 2025 “ceasefire”.
The Israeli army pushed new concrete blocks into the Abu al-Ajeen area east of Deir el-Balah before dawn on July 25, forcing more families to flee, local sources told Wafa and Gaza Now.
Two days later, the “Yellow Line” was moved again on Salah al-Din Street towards the Sanfour intersection east of Gaza City, according to Gaza activist Hamza al-Masri.
Satellite imagery analysed by The Associated Press news agency showed Israel building an earthen barrier stretching roughly 23km (14 miles) across the Strip – more than half the enclave’s length – dividing Gaza in two. The US-led Board of Peace and Central Command, which oversee the “ceasefire”, have not commented, AP said.
The humanitarian picture in Gaza also continued to deteriorate. The World Food Programme, which supports the 70 percent of Gaza’s population that relies on food assistance, warned it would be forced into deeper cuts without urgent funding.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and UNICEF, meanwhile, said that 67 percent of the population, or 1.4 million people, still face crisis levels of not having enough to eat.
OCHA reported that there were nearly 4,000 miscarriages in the first half of 2026, more than triple the number in the second half of last year, with severe maternal complications at 82 per 1,000 deliveries, and 57 percent of pregnant women being anaemic.
The May closure of the Zikim crossing, the main entry point into northern Gaza, has cut weekly aid trucks entering the Strip by roughly a third.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has approved the entry into Gaza of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) following diplomatic calls to speed up its deployment.
The ISF will operate “in full coordination” with the Israeli military in areas that are not under Israeli control, an Israeli official said, according to The Times of Israel.
No timeline has been set for the entry of the ISF, however, which will be comprised of about 200 people from “friendly countries such as Uganda and Morocco”, according to the Reuters news agency.
