Israeli Settlers Torch Palestinian Family's Home Hours After Court-Ordered Return in West Bank Village

A Palestinian family in the occupied West Bank got their home back for about ten minutes before it was set on fire again.

Mahmoud Tubasi, his wife Aida, and their son Wael were escorted back to their houses in the village of Jalud, south of Nablus, by Israeli military and police late Monday night into Tuesday, September 29, according to the BBC and Reuters reporting carried by the Irish Times and KELO-TV. The move followed an Israeli High Court ruling earlier this month ordering that the family be allowed to return to property that settlers had seized weeks earlier.

The return didn't last. Roughly ten minutes after the family reached their houses, more than 100 settlers descended on the scene, according to witnesses cited by Reuters. Settlers set both homes and the family car ablaze, blocked access roads, and threw rocks at Israeli security forces. Three border police officers were injured and a security vehicle was damaged, the Israeli military said in a statement reported by Reuters.

"It was extremely terrifying, beyond words," Mahmoud al-Tubasi told the BBC. "My feeling now is that I am happy to have escaped death. I genuinely expected they were going to kill us."

Al-Tubasi told the BBC he received a call around midnight instructing him to move immediately with the army and border police if he wanted to reclaim the property. When the family arrived, the houses had already been extensively vandalized: doors smashed, tiles ripped up, electrical fittings torn out, windows broken, and a toilet described as full of human waste. Wael Tubasi told Reuters the damage was "beyond description."

When the crowd of settlers arrived, Israeli troops moved the family to the roof and later evacuated them by armored vehicle as the tires of a military van were slashed, according to the BBC. Reuters journalists who reached the site Tuesday afternoon described walls blackened with tar and residue from tires the settlers had burned inside the homes.

The Israeli military confirmed it arrested two settlers and opened an investigation. In its statement, the military said the "mission to return the family to their homes was not completed" due to the violence.

Netanyahu Calls It a 'Handful of Rioters'

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attack and called on law enforcement to prosecute those responsible, according to CNN and Reuters. But CNN reported Netanyahu also characterized the perpetrators as a "handful of rioters" — a framing his opponents reject.

Gadi Eisenkot, described by CNN as Netanyahu's main challenger in Israel's upcoming general election, blamed the violence on what he called a "dangerous [government] policy." This is a direct political dispute over responsibility playing out as campaign rhetoric ahead of the vote.

The defense Netanyahu's government can point to is real: he did publicly condemn the attack, called for prosecution, and the military did make two arrests and open a formal investigation within hours. That's more than a shrug.

But Israeli and Palestinian rights groups, cited across the BBC, Reuters and CNN's reporting, say settler perpetrators are rarely punished for violence, and this incident happened despite an active High Court order and a live military escort. Whether two arrests translate into actual prosecutions is the open question, and it's one Israeli courts, not press statements, will answer.

Not an Isolated Incident

The Jalud attack wasn't a one-off. Reuters reported that elsewhere in the West Bank the same day, settlers set fire to cars in the village of Al Mughayyir and spray-painted the word "revenge" on an apartment building. Village resident Moussa Mohammed Hamdan told Reuters: "Wherever they see cars, livestock or olive trees, they destroy them — anything that can hurt us. But God willing, we will remain patient."

Fox News separately noted that masked Israeli settlers attacked an NBC News crew and a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Qusra, a different location from Jalud, which also drew condemnation from Netanyahu. That incident underscores a broader pattern rather than a single episode, though it should be treated as a distinct event, not folded into what happened in Jalud.

The strongest concern raised by rights groups isn't that Netanyahu failed to say the right words. It's that saying the right words, arresting two people, and opening an investigation has repeatedly not stopped settlers from acting again days or weeks later, even against families with a High Court order in hand and soldiers standing next to them. Whether the current investigation into the Jalud attack produces charges, and whether it changes anything on the ground before the next incident, remains unresolved.