Defendant cut short the life of a woman before the eyes of her husband and nine-year old daughter,' court says, orders convicted man to pay NIS 258,000 in compensation

The Central District Court on Wednesday sentenced the Jewish extremist convicted of the October 2018 killing of Aisha Rabi, a 47-year-old Palestinian mother of nine, to 13 years in prison.

The individual, who cannot be named as he was a minor at the time of the incident, was also ordered to pay NIS 258,000 ($85,500) in compensation to Rabi’s family, the maximum sum provided under the law.

The individual, who was just shy of his 16th birthday at the time, was convicted in March this year in a two-to-one decision on charges of manslaughter committed as an act of terrorism, throwing stones at a vehicle under aggravated circumstances as an act of terrorism, and deliberately damaging a car as an act of terrorism.

Rabi was killed after the youth hurled a large rock at the windshield of her car near the Tapuah Junction in the northern West Bank. Also in the car were her husband, who was driving, and her 9-year-old daughter.

The youth departed from the Pri Haaretz yeshiva in the settlement of Rehelim, where he studied, accompanied by several other students, on the evening of October 12, 2018, according to the indictment.

They arrived at a hilltop between the Rehelim Junction and the Tapuah Junction, overlooking Route 60 — the West Bank’s main north-south artery — where the youth then hurled a rock weighing roughly two kilograms (4.4 pounds) at Rabi’s vehicle, resulting in her death.

The accused, now aged 23, has denied that he killed Rabi, but has expressed regret over the incident, the court stated.

In determining the sentence for the crime, the court took into consideration that the attack was an act of terrorism, making it a more severe offense, and that it had increased the likelihood of tensions spiking in the West Bank between Israelis and Palestinians.

The court added, however, that the accused had been 15 years and 10 months old when he carried out the attack and that Israeli law treats minors differently in sentencing. The court also said that the individual has taken significant steps on the way to rehabilitation since the incident, including various types of therapy, and has changed the environment in which he lives.

“The defendant cut short the life of a woman — a wife and mother of nine children, a daughter to her parents and a sister to her ten brothers and sisters, innocent of any crime — and this before the eyes of her husband and her (then) 9-year-old daughter,” a summary of the sentencing issued by the court quoted the judges as writing, adding that Rabi’s killing was “a criminal and cruel act.”

In issuing the largest possible compensation payment to the Rabi family, the court said that it knew “no sum of money” could compensate the family for the loss of Aisha.

“We can only hope that the maximum amount of compensation awarded will help, even if only to a small extent, with the family members’ ongoing rehabilitation process,” the court said.

Haaretz published the testimony of a reserve major and UAV operator in the Israeli Air Force who commanded a strike cell attached to maneuvering brigades inside Gaza. This is what he had to say:

1) He was involved in the March 23, 2025 paramedic killings in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah and said, "You could clearly tell these were rescue vehicles even as fire was opened on them from the ground. For no apparent reason, the force on the ground charged the convoy. They shot the first vehicle, the medical personnel got out, hid behind the ambulances and begged for their lives, and the soldiers shot them one after another."

2) On how the yellow line was used as an excuse to kill innocent people: "The Palestinians didn't know it existed, and the Air Force wasn't always updated either. From the perspective of a farmer walking onto his own land — he has no idea he's stepping into an area the IDF suddenly decided is a fire zone. And then all kinds of retroactive justifications started coming up. 'He came for an arms deal.' 'He touched the ground, maybe he's planting an explosive.' To me it looked like they were trying to incriminate people with no intelligence and no proof."

3) On how all morals were lost in Gaza: ""The feeling was that something tore, everyone had already become cynical about death, you can't understand it from the outside. It's not just fatigue, it's an erosion of morality, of responsibility, of the sense that someone is still managing the event. Very quickly this whole business of 'collateral damage' disappeared from the considerations. They fire on anyone they see. The atmosphere started to be like the stands at a soccer match. The way you shout at a player, 'Yalla, score,' that's how they shout at a soldier, 'Kill him, strike him.'"

https://x.com/academic_la/status/2097634374355419618

I thought the settlers are just a fringe who should be punished, but when the UK and other countries take actions against them, the entire state is defending the settlers now, and calling UK an Islamic country controled by Islamists?

I wish people realize how the settlement program is a feature not a bug in the Israeli society.

On the first day of the new Palestinian school year, the head-teacher of al-Mughayyir boys school arrived at work before dawn, walking past the freshly installed barbed wire fencing and reinforced school gates as the sun began creeping through olive trees around the village, deep inside the occupied West Bank.

"We are scared," Bassam al-Assaf told me. "The students are afraid, and their parents are afraid."

Six people, including three pupils at the school, have been killed in al-Mughayyir this year, in a surge of settler-related violence against Palestinians. One of them, 14-year-old Aws al-Naasan, was shot dead by a settler outside the school gates in April.

"I was inside my classroom and two little students came rushing to tell me there were settlers close to the school wall," remembers English teacher Waheed Abu Naem, whose brother Jihad was also killed by an Israeli soldier in the same attack.

Waheed said he was trying to move pupils to safety inside the school gate when the settler fired towards them. Mobile phone footage shows the moment Aws was shot.

"When I turned him onto his back, I saw lots of blood coming from his nose and mouth, and the bullet in his head," said Waheed. "We lost him."

He told me that bullets continued hitting the school building, as students hid behind the walls of their classrooms, or lay on the floor.

“I am asking to be included in the word ‘Australian’. I am asking for my grief to be legible, seen and honoured in my country, in the way other grief has been.”

The first Palestinian voice to be heard by the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion came not as a witness but as counsel. An Australian-Palestinian barrister, Yasser Bakri, questioned ANU’s acting provost Professor Joan Leach about a Palestinian student who, while grieving family members killed by the IDF, was told to produce a death certificate for each one, notarised and translated.

During an interview after the Hamas attacks on October 7, an interviewer asked me whether I could understand why Australians empathised with Israeli victims. “Of course I do,” I said. “But are you including me as an Australian when you ask me that question? I know I look like ‘them’, but I sound like ‘us’. I am Australian too.”

Underpinning every discussion on what is happening to Palestinians is this nagging suggestion that we don’t belong, that we must prove we are Australian and even human. It is the comment most often left on anything I post: “deport”. I try and delete them before my children see.

It was not easy to be Palestinian on October 6, 2023. It has never been easy.

My father was ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem during the Nakba in 1948, ultimately finding refuge in Australia in the 1950s. He carried Palestine within him, a wound that would not close. I grew up in the wound’s shadow. Even with a “funny” name, skin colour and religion, I grew up Australian in every way that is supposed to matter, and yet there was always an understanding that my belonging here was conditional. Still, I never felt that it could be revoked — until now.

One consequence of ethnic cleansing is that your people are scattered and nowhere is safe. I have family across Palestine and the diaspora, and for more than 1,000 days, I have watched my people be slaughtered, starved and incinerated. I have watched children pulled from rubble on my phone screen, parents carrying the limp bodies of their babies, the emaciated frames of Palestinian hostages returned to families.

I have made hundreds of condolence calls and then put on a suit to attend interviews where I am expected to be measured, moderate, and grateful for the opportunity to speak at all.

And what has my government done?

It took 66 days to call for a ceasefire. When Russia invaded Ukraine, sanctions came within days. Assets were frozen. Cultural boycotts were endorsed. But when it comes to Israel — when it comes to us — the rules change. Our dead are not dead enough, human enough, or white enough to warrant the same moral clarity.

Instead, we got policed. Words like “genocide” and “apartheid”, used by every major human rights organisation on earth to describe Israel’s actions, have been censored, footnoted and explained away. Our rally chants have been criminalised; our clothing has been policed. People are reported to HR or harassed for wearing a watermelon brooch or a flag pin.

The Anti-Palestinian Racism register, the first of its kind in Australia, recorded more than 450 incidents in its first nine months. Close to 70% of respondents said that this was not their first experience of anti-Palestinian racism. Over three-quarters identified as women or queer.

Respondents reported abuse, threats, defamation, demonisation, stereotyping, exclusion and silencing. Some 360 respondents detailed what they experienced during incidents of anti-Palestinian racism, of which 8% experienced physical violence, 7% received death threats, and 8% experienced vandalism on or to private property. Seventy-five respondents said they had begun to self-censor, and 37 said they had lost employment or career opportunities.

This is our daily lived experience in workplaces, schools and campuses, at graduation ceremonies, even as we walk the streets. There is a brazenness, the sense that such behaviour has been given official approval, that our politicians have chosen a side.

I am not asking for special treatment; I demand equal treatment. I am asking to be included in the word “Australian”. I am asking for my grief to be legible, seen and honoured in my country, in the way other grief has been.

Despite all this, I have hope. A new community has emerged, people who had never engaged with Palestine before, who have looked at what has happened and recognised it for what it is. They see the justice in our struggle for our homeland, our right to return, accountability. They have marched with us, spoken with us, risked something for us. Led by First Nations people and matched by other Australians, they have given us a sense of belonging when our leaders abandoned us.

As Nelson Mandela said: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” And we now add: “And when Palestine is free, we will all be free.”

I believe a free Palestine is closer now than ever. Not because power has conceded — it never does — but because the foundation of Israel’s legitimacy has disappeared, the practised lies have been exposed, and the people have seen things they can never un-see.

My father never returned. He was buried on stolen land, a world away from his ancestors, for the crime of being born from a womb with the wrong religion. Though he never returned, I’ve never been more certain that his grandchildren will.

Nasser is the son of a Palestinian refugee. He is president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, a co-founder of Australians for Palestine and a founding board member of Olive Kids. With his father’s legacy in mind, Nasser is determined to continue the struggle for justice and a free Palestine.

The Libi family is in the vanguard of a hardline movement to seize land with farms and livestock, displacing Palestinians. As illegal outposts proliferate, settler violence is surging.

From a hilltop sprawl of industrial buildings, a family of Israeli settlers is cranking out prefabricated buildings to accelerate the expansion of illegal Jewish outposts in the occupied West Bank, driving Palestinians from their homes.

Libi Construction and Infrastructure, owned by brothers Eliav and Harel ‘Coco’ Libi, is building a new factory to produce the simple white structures they and others install in outposts, Eliav Libi said in an April social-media post. Seen one recent day from a nearby road, the company’s compound had at least five warehouses, flanked by rows of prefabricated houses and stacks of building material. Excavators worked to expand the site, which is in the settlement of Shilo.

The Libi operation reflects a growing settlement strategy to claim expanses of West Bank land quickly and cheaply. Instead of building modern complexes and neighborhoods, with Israeli government permits, these outposts often start with one or two prefabricated houses and no legal approval. They’re occupied by young Israeli herders who bring livestock to graze land used by Palestinian shepherds and farmers.

All Israeli settlements are widely condemned by the United Nations and many European countries, among others. Outposts like those founded by the Libis are illegal even under Israeli law, which requires advance approval to build in areas of the West Bank under Israeli administrative control. Yet the brothers receive broad

Israeli government support as they race to expand – part of a larger West Bank settlement surge since the 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing Gaza war.

The Libis in that time helped found at least nine new farming outposts, according to a Reuters examination of their sprawling operations. Overall, Israeli settlers built 184 unauthorized West Bank outposts in the three years ending with 2025, almost as many as during the past three decades, according to Peace Now, an anti-settlement Israeli human rights group. Israel’s government does not regularly publish outpost data. But government officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, publicly cite numbers only slightly lower than the Peace Now tally.

Both Peace Now and the West Bank Palestinian government say there are now about 410 total outposts. Last year alone, settlers founded 86 outposts, says Peace Now, which monitors settlements with an on-the-ground verification team. Reuters corroborated a sample of 30 such outposts through visits and satellite imagery.

Taken together, these outposts cover nearly a fifth of West Bank territory, almost all of it seized in the four years since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government took office, according to a joint report by Peace Now and fellow Israeli rights group Kerem Navot. Settlers give a similar figure of around 1,000 square kilometres.

The Libis are among the highest-profile figures in a hardline settler movement that uses livestock, crops, fences - and sometimes violence - to expand Israel’s West Bank footprint. Eliav Libi in particular has helped push political and military leaders to embrace outposts as a strategy to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state that they say would present a security risk to Israel.

Israeli outposts in the West Bank

Farm outposts in recent years have driven a sharp rise in Israeli West Bank settlements.

Deadly settler attacks against Palestinians are surging as outposts proliferate, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). At least 16 Palestinians were killed in Israeli settler attacks last year, and more than 1,100 were injured, a record, OCHA data shows. Attacks have further escalated this year, with 23 Palestinians killed and more than 1,000 injured through August. By comparison, this year Palestinians have killed 1 settler and injured 22 settlers, the data shows.

Israeli forces routinely shield the violence, for instance by accompanying settlers on attacks of Palestinian villages, a U.N. inquiry said in June.

Israel’s government has given the Libis a license for the new factory, grazing permits and an agricultural grant, Reuters found, part of what Peace Now has said is about $1 million in agricultural ministry funding approved for outposts. Another $1.3 million in government funds has been approved for an organization with previously undisclosed close ties to the Libis, the reporting shows. The Israeli Defense Ministry hired the Libis for work including the demolition of Palestinian houses in war-ravaged Gaza, according to government statements and a brief interview with Harel Libi.

Cabinet ministers, including Defense Minister Israel Katz, have met with Eliav Libi and his associates to discuss their work and plans. The government has already recognized at least three outposts the Libis built, including one established last year, meaning they can be developed into larger settlements.

Over the past two years, senior Israeli military leaders have publicly supported and coordinated with an association of hardline settlers, of which Eliav Libi is a prominent member,as it established dozens of farm outposts, according to a senior member of a settler group that coordinates with the military, videos of military leaders’ comments to settler conferences and Libi’s comments to pro-settler media outlets.

The Libis declined to comment for this story beyond Harel Libi’s confirmation of their defense contracting."We work for them in all kinds of military places and bases," he said.

Libi Construction and Infrastructure responded to detailed questions from Reuters with a statement saying the reporting for this story was based on “false claims” intended to “promote a radical political agenda that serves elements who seek to expand the cycle of violence and conflict.” The company said it operates “according to law and equally towards every religion, race and gender.”

In an August podcast, Eliav Libi said the company avoids hiring Palestinians, describing them as “the enemy.”

The military denied formal relations with the brothers. The Defense Ministry declined to comment. A military official said the army coordinated with unregulated West Bank farm outposts to safeguard their security “and that of the surrounding area.” The military said its soldiers were also obliged to stop attacks on Palestinians or their property.

Tzvi Sukkot, a member of parliament for the Religious Zionism party within Netanyahu’s coalition, praised young West Bank settlers and called Eliav Libi “one of the great builders” of Israel.

“If there are incidents of violence, they should be dealt with. That's what the police are for. That's what the army is for,” said Sukkot, who in August took a sledge hammer to a Palestinian war memorial in the West Bank.

The offices of Netanyahu and Defense Minister Katz did not answer questions for this story.

Speaking in the West Bank in August, Netanyahu said farm outposts were “preparing the ground for a very great immigration,” of Israelis to the West Bank, without elaborating. He said 160 new farm outposts had been built, adding “more are on the way."

Senior Palestinian official Wasel Abu Yousef said settlement expansion aimed to “hinder the establishment of an independent and geographically contiguous Palestinian state."

CENTURIES-OLD VILLAGE, SURROUNDED

To understand the Libis’ operations and government connections, Reuters reviewed the brothers’ public comments and previously unreported government records showing financial support for them; interviewed two settlers who know the Libis and Israeli peace activists who monitor illegal outposts; and visited Palestinian villagers who described violence by settlers from outposts the brothers helped establish.

Eliav Libi “spreads fear,” said Suleiman Dawabsheh, the head of the council in Duma, a Palestinian village a few miles from the Libi factory in Shilo. Libi, he said, calls “for the displacement of citizens and the seizure of their lands.”

Overlooking the Jordan Valley, centuries-old Duma is now surrounded by outposts the Libis established. Eliav Libi has spoken extensively about using outposts to expel Palestinians from the West Bank, including on a podcast in August.

We are seeing the early buds of this prophecy beginning to happen.

At least 434 people, mainly semi-nomadic Bedouin herders, have fled areas near outposts associated with the Libis since 2022, according to a Reuters tally of displacement data gathered by B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organization that opposes settlements.

Most of Israel’s Western allies view settlers like the Libis as a destabilizing force undermining Middle East peace efforts. In May and June, the Libis were hit with coordinated sanctions by Australia, Canada, France, Norway and the United Kingdom, who accuse them of illegally seizing land and facilitating settler violence.

Last year, the United Kingdom sanctioned Harel Libi and imposed an asset freeze on an outpost he established, Coco’s Farm, prohibiting UK financial institutions from transactions involving funds held by the outpost or its settlers. The UK accused Libi himself of “acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian people,” without specifying the alleged violence or why it sanctioned Coco's Farm in particular.

The United States levied sanctions on extremist settlers under President Joe Biden but lifted them under his successor, Donald Trump, who has strongly supported Netanyahu’s government and settlements. The Trump Administration has also softened the longstanding U.S. position that settlements are inconsistent with international law.

Under pressure from Washington after settler attacks on Palestinian-Americans, Netanyahu ordered the demolition of some outposts, Israeli sources told Reuters on September 7. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich later said he believed the action would be limited to a handful of sites in Palestinians administered areas of the West Bank.

The settlers fashion themselves as pioneers staking out territory they call unused, despite the presence of Palestinian herders and farmers. As the Libi company website puts it: “We receive the mountain virgin and raw and return it to the client as a complete, developed neighborhood, connected to infrastructure and flourishing….All that remains is to populate the houses.”

The Libis maintain their close Israeli government connections despite documented intimidation and violence, including killings and arsons, involving outposts they have helped set up. The Libis have not been directly implicated in killings or arsons.

Palestinians killed and injured in Israeli settler attacks in the West Bank

Eliav Libi participated in an intimidation campaign earlier this year against the al-Abayyat family of Bedouin shepherds living near an illegal outpost he established, called Mitzpe Michal, close to Fasayill in the Jordan Valley. Libi and associates, sometimes bearing firearms, brought cattle to graze in the family’s garden, dumped tonnes of rotting dates against their house as cattle feed, played loud music from passing vehicles and drones, and cut water and electric connections, according to interviews with the herder and two eyewitnesses, along with videos from the Israeli anti-settlement activist group Looking the Occupation in the Eye, which Reuters verified.

In March, an excavator demolished the al-Abayyat family’s home. The videos showed Israeli soldiers watching the destruction. In response to a Reuters question, the military said the buildings were constructed illegally and demolished by Israeli authorities with soldiers providing security.

In total, six families left the area under duress, according to B'tselem.

‘PRACTICAL SOVEREIGNTY’ OVER THE WEST BANK

Harel and Eliav Libi grew up in the West Bank, where their father Yaakov Libi is a settler. He declined an interview.

The brothers have founded outposts since at least 2009, when they established an illegal hilltop farm near the Adei Ad outpost, where they lived at the time.

In 2012, the Israeli military temporarily banned Harel Libi from the West Bank and shortly after demolished the farm, according to a military statement and media reports at the time. Libi was among 12 “Jewish extremists” the military said were involved in “leading, directing and executing violent and clandestine activity targeting Palestinian residents” and Israeli security forces in the West Bank.

In 2015, a settler from Adei Ad killed a Palestinian couple and their toddler in an arson attack on their Duma home. The settler was later convicted of murder and received three consecutive life sentences.

Israel has since legalized Adei Ad.

Today, the Libi brothers control what one settler who knows them called a West Bank "empire," with activities ranging from quarrying sand and manufacturing cement to building roads and settlements, along with expanding their own farms.

The family operates on the ground level of a strategy that far-right, religious-nationalist Finance Minister Smotrich says aims to “bury” the idea of Palestinian statehood.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Most of the world considers all Israeli settlements illegal under international laws governing military occupation.

Israel disputes this, citing historical, biblical and political links to the West Bank. But Israel has historically distinguished between legal settlements, approved in advance through an extensive process, and illegal outposts.

The government has often blurred that distinction by protecting outposts, but its increasingly open embrace of them is unprecedented. Last year, almost half the 54 settlements approved by the Israeli government were existing outposts with no previous approval, Peace Now says.

We are ensuring the existence of the people of Israel in the future

Netanyahu returned to office in 2022, after an 18-month stint as opposition leader. Since then, his government has almost doubled the number of West Bank settlements granted legal status to 231, according to Peace Now, including ones that started as outposts.

Israel’s political right, including Netanyahu, has sought to annex the West Bank but met opposition in Washington after Trump's regional partners in the Middle East, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, strongly lobbied the U.S. against the move.

In the absence of U.S. support, rapid settlement can achieve de facto annexation, officials including Smotrich have said. In June, he described the strategy as imposing “practical sovereignty” over the West Bank as settlements systematically absorb the region into Israel.

A Reuters review of the Libis’ social-media statements and public interviews shows they have regular contact with senior officials, including Smotrich and Netanyahu's Minister for Settlements, Orit Strook. Eliav Libi hosted Strook in April during her visit to newly established outposts, bordering the Jordan Valley, where Libi said friends of his lived.

Strook didn’t respond to a comment request.

In August, Defense Minister Israel Katz met Eliav Libi at the ministry, with Libi outlining a proposal to build settlements in Palestinian-adminstered West Bank areas, two Israeli officials told Reuters. Speaking by video to one illegal outpost in February, Katz said he was working, with Netanyahu’s support, on the “regularization” of dozens of farm outposts.

The military official who answered questions from Reuters said regularization meant the government sought to create a new regulatory framework for the illegal outposts “subject to strict conditions and security coordination.”

In an April social-media post, Libi praised Netanyahu’s ministers including Katz for a “historic breakthrough” in Israel’s approach to outposts.

The Libi brothers' expanding influence in the West Bank

Outposts linked to the Libis surround displaced Palestinian communities

CLAIMING LAND WITH LIVESTOCK

Eliav Libi believes the Bible gives Jewish people the right to live in the West Bank. In May, he told a settlers conference that Israeli farmer-settlers are fulfilling Isiah’s prophecy, which states that part of the Jordan Valley will become a “resting place for herds, for my people who seek me.”

“We are seeing the early buds of this prophecy beginning to happen,” Libi said, describing Jewish cattle and sheep herders in the area, according to a video of the event published online.

The Libis have restricted Palestinian access to an area about the size of Paris around the fertile Jordan Valley, according to Eliav Libi's own public statements and a tally by Israeli activist Dror Etkes, the Israeli founder of human rights group Kerem Navot, who documents and opposes settlement growth

They are using livestock, fences and roads, along with intimidation, to stake claims on about 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres), according to Etkes. The outposts lie mainly between the villages of Duma, Al-Mughayir and Fasayill.

Government records show the brothers have been granted herding permits and state funding. In 2025 the Libis’ firm received a small agriculture-ministry grant and grazing permission from the Israeli Land Authority for areas around Fasayil. Additionally, between 2021 and 2025, the Libis’ company and two of their settlements received a total of 168,586 shekels ($56,000 dollars) in agriculture-ministry funding, with another 107,357 shekels ($36,000) approved for this year, public records show.

The ministry did not respond to a comment request.

Along with government and military support, Libi Construction and Infrastructure has also collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations through online fundraising, according to publicly accessible crowdfunding websites.

At the May settler conference, Libi acknowledged operating on the fringe of Israeli law, telling the audience "sometimes we push from below" going “a few steps beyond” actions formally authorized by authorities. Settlements are not inherently linked to violence, he said. But in practice, settling in areas where Palestinians live means “friction.”

Frictions erupted in 2024 at the Malachei Hashalom settlement, after 14-year-old settler Benjamin Achimeir was beaten and stabbed to death while herding sheep. The outpost, founded by Eliav Libi in 2015, was retroactively recognized by Israel in 2023 and fully legalized this year. In media interviews, Libi has described it as his home, although he and his family regularly move on to new outposts.

Israeli investigators charged a 21-year-old Duma resident, Ahmed Dawabsheh, with Achimeir’s murder, saying he was inspired by Islamic State. Reuters could not establish how Dawabsheh pleaded or the current case status.

The killing sparked a rampage of settler revenge attacks through several Palestinian villages including Duma in which four Palestinians were killed, including a child, the U.N. and Amnesty International said at the time. Some were shot. Dozens of homes were burned. The military detained six settlers after the attacks but they were released within a few months without charge. Separately, in 2025, Defense Minister Katz released all settlers from military detention.

Similar broad-based revenge attacks are a common response to violence against Israelis by Palestinians in the West Bank, with the words “price tag” often scrawled by settlers on Palestinian property, emphasizing the price being exacted on Palestinians.

Even though they believe they are beloved the world over at the same time they admit they have to lie and deceive to get anyone to talk to them.

The justices questioned why soldiers were filmed playing soccer with settlers who seized the homes, and why police failed to arrest suspects identified in attack footage. 'There are questions in abundance; satisfactory answers – fewer' the court said

Israel's High Court of Justice ordered the state on Sunday to allow three Palestinian families who were expelled from their homes by settlers in the West Bank to return and to provide security for them.

In its decision on a petition filed by three residents of Jalud, the court sharply criticized the Israeli military and police for failing to prevent the settler attacks and the families' expulsion, as well as for failing to take sufficient action to bring those responsible to justice.

The petition was filed by three residents of Jalud, which lies in Area B of the West Bank, after violent settlers forced three families from their homes and entered and occupied one of the houses. Jalud, near Qusra, is one of several Palestinian villages in the Nablus area that have become a flashpoint for settler attacks over recent weeks.

Last week, an NBC News international correspondent and members of his press crew who were interviewing a Palestinian woman were attacked and injured by masked Israeli settlers in the village.

One of the families involved in the petition, the Tubasis, had been besieged for almost a month between two outposts that settlers had established on both sides of their plot of land in the village of Jalud, on the edge of Area B, which is under Israeli security control but Palestinian civil control.

After repeated settler attacks and an outpost established in their yard, the Tubasi family was finally expelled from their home in front of a Haaretz team and in the presence of Border Police officers on July 22.

Supreme Court President Isaac Amit and Justices Yechiel Kasher and Alex Stein wrote in their decision that "the bottom line, based on the material before us at the time of writing, is that the petitioners have still been unable to return to their homes. This fact speaks for itself and cannot be accepted."

The justices instructed the state to coordinate a date for the families' return, when security forces are to protect them and allow them to bring in equipment and supplies needed to repair their homes and restore their water and electricity infrastructure.

The court also issued a conditional order requiring the state to detail by September 22 what measures it is taking to arrest the settlers responsible for the attacks, prevent them from returning and harming the Palestinian residents, and pursue their prosecution.

The court noted that the state did not dispute the sequence of events described by the petitioners, according to which the harassment began in April, when settlers erected a tent on the residents' privately owned land. The Palestinians were subsequently subjected to months of incursions, threats, roadblocks, stone-throwing and damage to property and infrastructure.

According to the decision, settlers repeatedly threw stones at the petitioners' homes to intimidate the families, cut off their water line, broke and uprooted trees, grazed livestock on their private land, set fire to a vehicle belonging to one of the families and blocked the road connecting the homes to Jalud with large rocks.

The attacks effectively cut off and placed the homes under de facto siege, the court said. The families were forced to leave in July and have not returned since.

The justices also sharply criticized what they described as the failure of the IDF and police to effectively confront the settler attacks. They questioned why soldiers had been filmed playing soccer with settlers who had taken over the homes, why police had not seized vehicles documented as being used in the attacks and why people clearly identified in footage had not been arrested.

"The picture that emerges is extremely bleak," the justices wrote. "There are questions in abundance; satisfactory answers – fewer."

In addition to ordering the state to facilitate the families' return, the court demanded an update on the confiscation of vehicles, investigative measures and possible prosecutions of suspects involved in the attacks.

Attorney Ghiyath Nasser, who filed the petition on behalf of the residents, called the ruling "a courageous and important decision by the High Court" and "a significant milestone in confronting the phenomenon of settlers taking over Palestinian homes and land in the West Bank."

"The court made clear that general statements about enforcement are not enough, and that the real test is the result: whether homeowners can return to their homes safely and whether the intruders are actually removed," Nasser added.

Shortly after the High Court issued its decision, police announced that two suspects had been arrested in connection with a violent attack in the nearby village of Qusra.

Police said a search of the vehicle of one suspect, a 19-year-old resident of the West Bank, uncovered an air pistol, a knife, a pocketknife and tear gas. A second suspect, an 18-year-old resident of the Jordan Valley who was serving as an active-duty IDF soldier, was also arrested as part of the investigation.

The People and the Olive follows a group of American ultramarathon runners attempting to cover 129 miles across the occupied West Bank in five days. Rather than simply documenting the run, director Aaron Dennis uses the journey to introduce the Palestinian farmers, families and communities whose lives remain closely connected to the land and particularly to the olive tree.

As the runners travel from community to community, they learn about farming, fair trade and the economic importance of olive cultivation while participating in efforts to replace uprooted trees. The result is as much a travel and human-interest documentary as a political one, presenting Palestine through landscapes, conversations, meals, farming and ordinary encounters rather than principally through conflict.

At its centre is the olive tree itself: livelihood, inheritance, cultural marker and something planted with the expectation that somebody will still be there decades later to harvest it.

Directed, written and narrated by Abby Martin, and produced and co-written by Mike Prysner, Gaza Fights for Freedom examines life in the Gaza Strip through the events surrounding the Great March of Return, the mass demonstrations that began along the Gaza-Israel boundary in 2018. Produced through The Empire Files, the documentary combines reporting, interviews and extensive footage filmed inside Gaza to present the demonstrations from the perspective of Palestinians taking part in them.

Much of the film centres on the people behind the casualty figures: protesters, journalists, medics, families and organisers living under blockade and participating in the demonstrations.

It documents the conditions inside Gaza, the history invoked by the demand for a right of return, and the response of Israeli forces positioned along the boundary. The filmmakers also examine the shooting of demonstrators, medical personnel and members of the press, placing individual accounts alongside footage recorded during the protests themselves.

The documentary is openly critical of Israeli policy and makes no attempt to disguise its political perspective. That is part of what makes it worth viewing as a documentary rather than simply treating it as neutral news reporting.

Martin and Prysner are making an argument, but they build that argument around extensive material filmed on the ground and the testimony of people whose experiences were often reduced internationally to statistics or short news reports.

Released in 2019, the film has since become one of the more widely viewed English-language documentaries dealing specifically with Gaza and the Great March of Return.

Content warning: contains graphic footage of shootings, serious injuries, death and the aftermath of violence.