With the World’s Eyes on Gaza, Attacks Are on the Rise in the West Bank, Which Faces its Own War 

Bashar al-Qaryoute, a Palestinian Red Crescent medic, displays bullet casings that he says he has collected from attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers on his ambulance in the village of Qaryout in the northern West Bank, Sunday, Nov. 12, 2023. (AP)
Bashar al-Qaryoute, a Palestinian Red Crescent medic, displays bullet casings that he says he has collected from attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers on his ambulance in the village of Qaryout in the northern West Bank, Sunday, Nov. 12, 2023. (AP)
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With the World’s Eyes on Gaza, Attacks Are on the Rise in the West Bank, Which Faces its Own War 

Bashar al-Qaryoute, a Palestinian Red Crescent medic, displays bullet casings that he says he has collected from attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers on his ambulance in the village of Qaryout in the northern West Bank, Sunday, Nov. 12, 2023. (AP)
Bashar al-Qaryoute, a Palestinian Red Crescent medic, displays bullet casings that he says he has collected from attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers on his ambulance in the village of Qaryout in the northern West Bank, Sunday, Nov. 12, 2023. (AP)

When Israeli warplanes swooped over the Gaza Strip following Hamas militants’ deadly attack on southern Israel, Palestinians say a different kind of war took hold in the occupied West Bank.

Overnight, the territory was closed off. Towns were raided, curfews imposed, teenagers arrested, detainees beaten, and villages stormed by Jewish vigilantes.

With the world’s attention on Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there, the violence of war has also erupted in the West Bank. Israeli settler attacks have surged at an unprecedented rate, according to the United Nations. The escalation has spread fear, deepened despair, and robbed Palestinians of their livelihoods, their homes and, in some cases, their lives.

“Our lives are hell,” said Sabri Boum, a 52-year-old farmer who fortified his windows with metal grills last week to protect his children from settlers he said threw stun grenades in Qaryout, a northern village. “It's like I'm in a prison.”

In six weeks, settlers have killed nine Palestinians, said Palestinian health authorities. They've destroyed 3,000-plus olive trees during the crucial harvest season, said Palestinian Authority official Ghassan Daghlas, wiping out what for some were inheritances passed through generations. And they've harassed herding communities, forcing over 900 people to abandon 15 hamlets they long called home, the UN said.

When asked about settler attacks, the Israeli army said only that it aims to defuse conflict and troops “are required to act” if Israel citizens violate the law. The army didn't respond to requests for comment on specific incidents.

US President Biden and other administration officials have repeatedly condemned settler violence, even as they defended the Israeli campaign in Gaza.

“It has to stop,” Biden said last month. “They have to be held accountable.”

That hasn't happened, according to Israeli rights group Yesh Din. Since Oct. 7, one settler has been arrested — over an olive farmer's death — and was released five days later, the group said. Two other settlers were placed in preventive detention without charge, it said.

Naomi Kahn, of advocacy group Regavim, which lobbies for settler interests, argued that settler attacks weren't nearly as widespread as rights groups report because it's a broad category including self-defense, anti-Palestinian graffiti and other nonviolent provocations.

“The entire Israeli system works not only to stamp out this violence but to prevent it,” she said.

Before the Hamas assault, 2023 already was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank in over two decades, with 250 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire, most during military operations.

Over these six weeks of war, Israeli security forces have killed another 206 Palestinians, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, the result of a rise in army raids backed by airstrikes and Palestinian militant attacks. In the deadliest West Bank raid since the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, of the 2000s, Israeli forces killed 14 Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp Nov. 9, most of them militants.

While for years settlers enjoyed the support of the Israeli government, they now have vocal proponents at the highest levels of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition. This month, Netanyahu appointed Zvi Sukkot, a settler temporarily banned from the West Bank in 2012 over alleged assaults targeting Palestinians and Israeli forces, to lead the subcommittee on West Bank issues in parliament.

Palestinians who've endured hardships of Israeli military rule, in its 57th year, say this war has left them more vulnerable than ever.

“We’ve become scared of tomorrow,” said Abdelazim Wadi, 50, whose brother and nephew were fatally shot by settlers, according to health authorities.

Conflict has long been part of daily life here, but Palestinians say the war has unleashed a new wave of provocations, disrupting even their grim routine.

THE SETTLERS IN FATIGUES Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza in the 1967 Mideast war. Settlers claim the West Bank as their biblical birthright. Most of the international community considers the settlements, home to 700,000 Israelis, illegal. Israel considers the West Bank disputed land, and says the settlements' fate should be decided in negotiations. International law says the military, as the occupying power, must protect Palestinian civilians.

Palestinians say that in nearly six decades of occupation, Israeli soldiers often failed to protect them from settler attacks or even joined in.

Since the war's start, the line between settlers and soldiers has blurred further.

Israel’s wartime mobilization of 300,000-plus reservists included the call-up of settlers for duty and put many in charge of policing their own communities. The military said in some cases, reservists who live in settlements replaced regular West Bank battalions deployed in the war.

Tom Kleiner, a reservist guarding Beit El, a religious settlement near the Palestinian city of Ramallah, said the Oct. 7 Hamas attack's brutality cemented his conviction that Palestinians are determined to “murder us.”

“We don’t kill Arabs without any reason,” he said. “We kill them because they’re trying to kill us.”

Rights groups say uniforms and assault rifles have inflated settlers' sense of impunity.

“Imagine that the military supposed to protect you is now made of settlers committing violence against you,” said Ori Givati, of Breaking the Silence, a whistleblower group of former Israeli soldiers.

Bashar al-Qaryoute, a medic from the Palestinian village of Qaryout, said residents from the nearby settlement Shilo, now wearing fatigues, have blocked all but one road out. He said they smashed Qaryout’s water pipeline, forcing residents to truck in water at triple the price.

“They were the ones always burning olive trees and creating problems,” al-Qaryoute said. “Now they're in charge.”

THE CURFEW “Close it!” a soldier barked at Imad Abu Shamsiyya when he met the young man's eyes through his open window. Then, he pointed his rifle.

Over 52 years, Abu Shamsiyya has witnessed crises strike the heart of Hebron, the only place in which Jewish settlers live amid local residents, not in separate communities.

He thought life in the maze of barbed wire and security cameras couldn't get worse. Then came the war.

“This terror, these pressures,” he said, “are unlike before.”

The Israeli military has barred 750 families in Hebron's Old City — where some 700 radical Jewish settlers live among 34,000 Palestinians under heavy military protection — from stepping outside except for one hour in the morning and one in the evening on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursday, said residents and Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

Schools have closed. Work has stopped. Sick people have moved in with relatives in the Palestinian-controlled part of town. Israeli settlers often roam at night, taunting Palestinians trapped indoors, according to footage published by B'Tselem.

Checkpoints instill dread. Soldiers who in the past just glanced at Abu Shamsiyya’s ID now search his phone and social media. They pat him down, he said, gawking and cursing.

“Hebron is a blatant microcosm of how Israel is exerting control over the Palestinians population,” said Dror Sadot, of B'Tselem.

The Israeli military didn't respond to a request for comment on the curfew.

THE SETTLER RAID The grinding of a bulldozer's gears. The crack of a gun. With a glance, parents let each other know the drill: Grab the children, lock the doors, keep away from windows.

Palestinians say settlers storm the northern village of Qusra almost daily, covering olive orchards in cement and dousing cars and homes in gasoline.

On Oct. 11, settlers tore through dusty streets, shooting at families in their homes. Within minutes, three Palestinian men were dead.

Israeli forces sent to disperse armed settlers and Palestinian stone-throwers fired into the crowd, killing a fourth villager, Palestinian officials said.

The next day, settlers heeded social-media calls to ambush a funeral procession the village coordinated with the army. They cut off roads and sprayed bullets at mourners who sprang from cars and sprinted through fields, attendees said.

Ibrahim Wadi, a 62-year-old chemist, and his 26-year-old son Ahmed, a lawyer, were killed. The funeral for four became one for six.

Settlers’ online posts rejoicing at the deaths, shared with The Associated Press, stung Ibrahim's brother, Abdelazim, almost as much as the loss.

“The mind breaks down, it stops comprehending,” he said.

THE GHOST TOWN Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Israel should “wipe out” Palestinian town Hawara after a gunman killed two Israeli brothers in February, sending hundreds of settlers on a deadly rampage.

Another far-right religious lawmaker, Zvika Fogel, said he wanted to see the commercial hub “closed, incinerated."

Today, Hawara resembles a ghost town.

The army shuttered shops “to maintain public order” after Palestinian militant attacks, it said. Abandoned dogs roam among vandalized storefronts. Posters with a Talmudic justification for killing Palestinians adorn road blocks: “Rise and kill first.”

From the war's start, much of the West Bank's main north-south highway has been closed to Palestinians, said anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now. Commutes that took 10 to 20 minutes now take hourslong detours on dangerous dirt roads.

The restrictions, said Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti, “have divided the West Bank into 224 ghettos separated by closed checkpoints.”

The 160,000 Palestinian laborers who passed those checkpoints to work in Israel and Israeli settlements before Oct. 7 lost their coveted permits overnight, said Israel's defense agency overseeing Palestinian civil matters. The agency allowed 8,000 essential workers to return to factories and hospitals earlier this month. There's no word on when the rest can.

“My grandfather relies on me, and now I have nothing,” said Ahmed, a 27-year-old from Hebron who lost his barista job in Haifa, Israel. He declined to give his last name for fear of reprisals.

“The pressure is building. We expect the West Bank to explode if nothing changes.”

THE OLIVE HARVEST Palestinians wait all year for the autumn moment that olives turn from green to black. The two-month harvest is a beloved ritual and income boost.

Violence has marred the season. Soldiers and settlers blocked villagers from reaching orchards and used bulldozers to remove gnarled roots of centuries-old trees, they say.

Hafeeda al-Khatib, an 80-year-old farmer in Qaryout, said soldiers shot in the air and dragged her from her land when they caught her picking olives last week. It's the first year she can remember not having enough to make oil.

In a letter to Netanyahu this month, Smotrich called for a ban on Palestinians harvesting olives near Israeli settlements to reduce friction.

Palestinians say settlers' efforts have done the opposite.

“They've declared war on me,” said Mahmoud Hassan, a 63-year-old farmer in Khirbet Sara, a northern community. He said reservist settlers have surrounded it. If he ventures 100 meters (yards) to his grove, he said, soldiers standing sentry scream or fire into the air. He needs permission to leave home and return.

“There is no room anymore for talking to them or negotiating,” he said.

The military said it “thoroughly reviewed” reports of violence against Palestinians and their property. “Disciplinary actions are implemented accordingly,” it said, without elaborating.

THE EVACUATION Rights groups say the goal of settler violence is to clear Palestinians from land they claim for a future state, making room for Jewish settlements to expand.

The Bedouin hamlet of Wadi al-Seeq was pushed to its breaking point by three detained Palestinians' ordeal over nine hours Oct. 12. The harrowing accounts were first reported by Israel’s Haaretz daily.

Weeks of vigilante violence had already forced 10 families to flee when masked settlers in army uniforms barreled through that day, slamming a Bedouin resident and two Palestinian activists onto the ground and shoving them into pickups, villagers said.

One of the activists, 46-year-old Mohammed Matar, told AP they were bound, beaten, blindfolded, stripped to their underwear and burned by cigarettes.

Matar said reservist settlers urinated on him, penetrated him anally with a stick, and screamed at him to leave and go to Jordan.

When released, Matar left. So did Wadi al-Seeq’s 30 remaining families. They took their sheep to the creases of the hills east of Ramallah and abandoned everything else.

The Israeli military said it fired the commander in charge and was investigating.

Matar said that to move on, he needs Israel to hold someone accountable.

“I'd be satisfied with the bare minimum,” he said, “the tiniest shred of justice.”



Trump Wins the White House in a Political Comeback Rooted in Appeals to Frustrated Voters

 Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, in Mint Hill, N.C. (AP)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, in Mint Hill, N.C. (AP)
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Trump Wins the White House in a Political Comeback Rooted in Appeals to Frustrated Voters

 Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, in Mint Hill, N.C. (AP)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, in Mint Hill, N.C. (AP)

Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent insurrection at the US Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts.

With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.

The victory validates his bare-knuckles approach to politics. He attacked his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, in deeply personal – often misogynistic and racist – terms as he pushed an apocalyptic picture of a country overrun by violent migrants. The coarse rhetoric, paired with an image of hypermasculinity, resonated with angry voters – particularly men – in a deeply polarized nation.

"I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president," Trump told throngs of cheering supporters in Florida even before his victory was confirmed.

In state after state, Trump outperformed what he did in the 2020 election while Harris failed to do as well as Joe Biden did in winning the presidency four years ago. Upon taking office again, Trump will work with a Senate that will now be in Republican hands, while control of the House hadn’t been determined.

"We’ve been through so much together, and today you showed up in record numbers to deliver a victory," Trump said. "This was something special and we’re going to pay you back," he said.

The US stock market, Elon Musk’s Tesla, banks and bitcoin all stormed higher Wednesday, as investors looked favorably on a smooth election and Trump returning to the White House. In his second term, Trump has vowed to pursue an agenda centered on dramatically reshaping the federal government and pursuing retribution against his perceived enemies.

The results cap a historically tumultuous and competitive election season that included two assassination attempts targeting Trump and a shift to a new Democratic nominee just a month before the party’s convention. Trump will inherit a range of challenges when he assumes office on Jan. 20, including heightened political polarization and global crises that are testing America’s influence abroad.

His win against Harris, the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket, marks the second time he has defeated a female rival in a general election. Harris, the current vice president, rose to the top of the ticket after Biden exited the race amid alarm about his advanced age. Despite an initial surge of energy around her campaign, she struggled during a compressed timeline to convince disillusioned voters that she represented a break from an unpopular administration.

The vice president, who has not appeared publicly since the race was called, was set to speak Wednesday afternoon at Howard University, where her supporters gathered Tuesday night for a watch party while the results were still in doubt.

Trump is the first former president to return to power since Grover Cleveland regained the White House in the 1892 election. He is the first person convicted of a felony to be elected president and, at 78, is the oldest person elected to the office. His vice president, 40-year-old Ohio Sen. JD Vance, will become the highest-ranking member of the millennial generation in the US government.

There will be far fewer checks on Trump when he returns to the White House. He has plans to swiftly enact a sweeping agenda that would transform nearly every aspect of American government. His GOP critics in Congress have largely been defeated or retired. Federal courts are now filled with judges he appointed. The US Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices, issued a ruling this year affording presidents broad immunity from prosecution.

Trump’s language and behavior during the campaign sparked growing warnings from Democrats and some Republicans about shocks to democracy that his return to power would bring. He repeatedly praised strongman leaders, warned that he would deploy the military to target political opponents he labeled the "enemy from within," threatened to take action against news organizations for unfavorable coverage and suggested suspending the Constitution.

Some who served in his White House, including Vice President Mike Pence and John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, either declined to endorse him or issued dire public warnings about his return.

While Harris focused much of her initial message around themes of joy, Trump channeled a powerful sense of anger and resentment among voters.

He seized on frustrations over high prices and fears about crime and migrants who illegally entered the country on Biden’s watch. He also highlighted wars in the Middle East and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to cast Democrats as presiding over – and encouraging – a world in chaos.

It was a formula Trump perfected in 2016, when he cast himself as the only person who could fix the country’s problems, often borrowing language from dictators.

"In 2016, I declared I am your voice. Today I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution," he said in March 2023.

This campaign often veered into the absurd, with Trump amplifying bizarre and disproven rumors that migrants were stealing and eating pet cats and dogs in an Ohio town.

One defining moment came in July when a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear and killed a supporter. His face streaked with blood, Trump stood and raised his fist in the air, shouting "Fight! Fight! Fight!" Weeks later, a second assassination attempt was thwarted after a Secret Service agent spotted the barrel of a gun poking through the greenery while Trump was playing golf.

Trump’s return to the White House seemed unlikely when he left Washington in early 2021 as a diminished figure whose lies about his defeat sparked a violent insurrection at the US Capitol. He was so isolated then that few outside of his family bothered to attend the send-off he organized for himself at Andrews Air Force Base, complete with a 21-gun salute.

Democrats who controlled the US House quickly impeached him for his role in the insurrection, making him the only president to be impeached twice. He was acquitted by the Senate, where many Republicans argued that he no longer posed a threat because he had left office.

But from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump – aided by some elected Republicans – worked to maintain his political relevance. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who then led his party in the US House, visited Trump soon after he left office, essentially validating his continued role in the party.

As the 2022 midterm election approached, Trump used the power of his endorsement to assert himself as the unquestioned leader of the party. His preferred candidates almost always won their primaries, but some went on to defeat in elections that Republicans viewed as within their grasp. Those disappointing results were driven in part by a backlash to the Supreme Court ruling that revoked a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, a decision aided by Trump-appointed justices. The midterm election prompted questions within the GOP about whether Trump should remain the party’s leader.

But if Trump’s future was in doubt, that changed in 2023 when he faced a wave of state and federal indictments for his role in the insurrection, his handling of classified information and election interference. He used the charges to portray himself as the victim of an overreaching government, an argument that resonated with a GOP base that was increasingly skeptical – if not outright hostile – to institutions and established power structures.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who challenged Trump for the Republican nomination, lamented that the indictments "sucked out all the oxygen" from the GOP primary. Trump easily captured his party’s nomination without participating in a debate against DeSantis or other GOP candidates.

With Trump dominating the Republican contest, a New York jury found him guilty in May of 34 felony charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor. He faces sentencing this month, though his victory poses serious questions about whether he will ever face punishment.

He also has been found liable in two other New York civil cases: one for inflating his assets and another for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996.

Trump is subject to additional criminal charges in an election-interference case in Georgia that has become bogged down. On the federal level, he’s been indicted for his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and improperly handling classified material. When he becomes president, Trump could appoint an attorney general who would erase the federal charges.

As he prepares to return to the White House, Trump has vowed to swiftly enact a radical agenda that would transform nearly every aspect of American government. That includes plans to launch the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history, to use the Justice Department to punish his enemies, to dramatically expand the use of tariffs and to again pursue a zero-sum approach to foreign policy that threatens to upend longstanding foreign alliances, including the NATO pact.

When he arrived in Washington 2017, Trump knew little about the levers of federal power. His agenda was stymied by Congress and the courts, as well as senior staff members who took it upon themselves to serve as guardrails.

This time, Trump has said he would surround himself with loyalists who will enact his agenda, no questions asked, and who will arrive with hundreds of draft executive orders, legislative proposals and in-depth policy papers in hand.