By Patrick Kingsley and Isabel Kershner

HUWARA, West Bank — When a Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israeli settlers Sunday (26) afternoon in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, the residents of nearby Palestinian towns knew from long experience to await sporadic acts of revenge.

But few anticipated the systematic ferocity with which mobs from nearby Israeli settlements responded Sunday night. Settlers burned and vandalized at least 200 buildings in four Palestinian villages near the site of the killings, according to initial tallies from Israeli rights groups and Palestinian officials. And a Palestinian official said one Palestinian had been killed in the settler attack.

It was one of the most intense episodes of settler-led violence in memory and worsened what had already been the deadliest start to a year in the West Bank since 2000, according to Palestinian officials. The surge in violence has shown little sign of abating, even as Israeli and Palestinian leaders and their regional neighbours stepped up efforts to calm the crisis at a meeting in Jordan on Sunday.

Hopes of a rapprochement were slim, however, with Israel’s government, the country’s most right-wing and religious administration ever, counting settlers among its ministers, and Palestinian leaders losing control over armed Palestinian groups. On Monday (27) evening, another shooting attack was reported in the southern West Bank, with one person critically injured, medics said.

Often acting within sight of Israeli soldiers, hundreds of settlers, some of them armed with knives and guns, set ablaze hundreds of cars and homes in a five-hour rampage Sunday after the killing of the two settlers, brothers who had been shot dead as they drove through the Palestinian town of Huwara hours earlier.

“We usually say ‘God help the neighbours,’ because we aren’t usually affected,” said Ammar Damedi, 37, a gold trader in Huwara whose family lives beyond the areas habitually targeted in reprisals by settlers, who are rarely convicted of such attacks.

But Sunday night, Damedi’s family compound was one of the worst hit. On Monday morning, the embers were still burning in his guesthouse.

“This is the tax for living in Palestine,” added Damedi, his arm in a sling after he said he was hit by a stone thrown by a settler.

About 60 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the start of 2023, mainly in gunbattles between Palestinian armed groups and Israeli soldiers, and at least 13 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The violence is increasing despite US-led efforts to calm the situation, culminating in a rare, one-day summit Sunday of Israeli and Palestinian officials, along with American, Egyptian and Jordanian representatives, in the Jordanian resort of Aqaba. The conference was intended to discuss how to deescalate tensions before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which starts in late March, but ended with no concrete plans.

The same day, settlers began to surge through the northern West Bank, undermining the aims of the conference while underscoring its necessity.

On Monday, more violence seemed inevitable after armed Palestinian groups warned of further attacks; protesters in the Gaza Strip held demonstrations at the edge of the enclave, risking confrontations with Israeli soldiers there; and settler activists — backed by some far-right members of the governing coalition — called for Israelis to gather at friction points in the West Bank after the funerals of the two brothers.

Senior government ministers, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called for calm and condemned vigilantism, while the Israeli army said it would send two additional battalions to the occupied territory. “I ask — even when the blood is boiling — not to take the law into one’s hands,” Netanyahu said Sunday night.

But other figures in the coalition set a different tone. One far-right lawmaker, Limor Son Har-Melech, travelled Sunday night to the area where the brothers were killed and where settlers later attacked Palestinians to “support the righteous cry” of settlers who “came out to protest and demand security.”

A second far-right coalition lawmaker, Tzvika Foghel, said the settler violence had created a deterrent. “I am very pleased with the result,” he said. “Wherever terrorists come to murder me, I want to see that place in flames. Metaphorically.”

Among Palestinians attacked Sunday night, there was a strong perception that the settlers had been galvanized by the governing coalition, which includes several settler leaders in key ministries, including finance and national security.

The government was “the main reason” for the settler violence, Damedi said. Even during earlier periods of heightened violence, in the late 1980s and early 2000s, violent settlers “never came this far into the town and never went from one village to another like they went last night,” he added.

His own compound was testament to the spread of the violence. Settlers smashed most of the compound’s windows, burned several cars outside, and stole electronic equipment and perfume before setting ablaze a guesthouse and prompting several children to shelter in a bathroom for several hours, several family members said.

The family cat was burned alive, they added, and the embers were still smouldering Monday  morning.

Asked why the Israeli army had been unable to prevent the settler violence and even stood by as some attacks took place, a military official, who requested anonymity in line with protocol, acknowledged that mistakes had been made and that commanders had not expected the settlers to fan out through Huwara’s backstreets instead of remaining on the main thoroughfare.

The official said that the army and other security services, including police, were scaling up efforts to arrest the settlers involved in the attacks, and that 10 had already been apprehended. But he said there were no plans to install additional checkpoints outside nearby settlements to detain suspects — even though similar posts were placed outside nearby Palestinian towns after the brothers’ killing, creating hours-long tailbacks.

The brothers, Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, were buried in Jerusalem on Monday afternoon. Both in their early 20s, they were residents of Har Bracha, a Jewish settlement built in the hills above Nablus in 1983 and considered illegal under international law by most countries after Israel captured the territory during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.

Hillel Yaniv, a student at a religious seminary, had served as a staff sergeant in the Israeli navy, while his younger brother, Yagel, was also a seminary student. Hillel was the “hardest-working man we knew — whatever he could do, he would,” his aunt, Tamar Naumburg, said in a eulogy Monday. Yagel was “filled with life and fun,” Naumburg added.

Long-running tensions between residents of settlements such as Har Bracha, which have expanded considerably since their creation, and the surrounding Palestinian towns, including Huwara, have led to frequent outbreaks of violence.

More than 100 Palestinians were reported injured in the settler rampage Sunday, most from inhalation of smoke or tear gas. One man, Moataz Deek, 28, said he had been stabbed multiple times by several settlers, narrowly avoiding serious injury, and held up his shirt to show at least 22 fresh knife marks.

Palestinian officials said another person had been hit with an iron bar.

Israel’s two-month-old government had vowed a more aggressive stance toward Palestinian attackers and more support for Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

But Sunday night, as fires raged in Huwara, many Israelis expressed the sense that the security forces had been unprepared and that things were spinning out of control. Israel is already in turmoil, deeply divided over the new government’s plans for a drastic judicial overhaul that critics say will undermine the country’s democratic foundations and, indirectly, its armed forces. Reservist soldiers have increasingly expressed reservations about serving a country undergoing such judicial change.

Settlers also returned Sunday night to an unauthorized Jewish settlement outpost, Evyatar, another West Bank friction point that was evacuated by the previous government. Israeli forces were trying to evacuate the outpost again Monday.

In Huwara, Palestinians were bracing for more violence.

The Damedis recounted how four generations of the family had taken shelter in bathrooms and bedrooms to avoid the stones being thrown through their windows by settlers.

But worse was to come, according to Jamelah Damedi, 59, Ammar’s mother.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” she said.

-New York Times