The attack in Ein Arik came in the middle of the night and was aimed at the rudiments of life: the earth, water, roots and seedlings.
Ilham Karajeh awoke on Friday last week to find her family allotment raided and ruined. The thin black irrigation pipes had been sliced, grape vines cut and 70 young olive trees, the embodiment of the family’s aspirations for the future, had been uprooted.
On Sunday, Karajeh and her husband, Mohammed, were collecting the severed branches. “See – they are still wet with sap,” she cried out in horror at the cruelty of the act.
There was no doubt in this West Bank village about the perpetrators. Since a new settler outpost had been established last year on a neighbouring hill, violence has flowed down into the valleys in a gathering tide.
The outpost, which now calls itself Maoz Tzur, began with just a handful of Israeli settlers but they quickly set about seizing territory. Their first target was the Bedouin shepherd community on the surrounding hills and valleys. Then the pressure was turned up on the villagers. For more than a year they have been prevented from reaching family olive and citrus groves and springs on the hillsides to the south, nearest the new settler outpost. Those brave enough to venture in that direction were repeatedly attacked with clubs and stones.
The night attack on the Karajeh family’s small farm reflects an acceleration in the intimidation campaign around Ein Arik, extending northwards and up the slope towards the neighbouring village of Deir Ibzi. It is part of a surge of settler aggression across the West Bank driven by the febrile dynamics of Israeli politics.
Elections are looming. They must be held by the end of October at the latest and as things stand, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right bloc is facing the prospect of defeat after more than three years of political domination. The radical settler elements in the coalition are scrambling to impose facts on the ground in the West Bank before the vote.
A landscape that has endured for centuries, of steep terraced hills, olive groves, vineyards, lemon trees planted around springs, and fields of herbs and vegetables in the valleys, is consequently being ripped apart at breakneck speed.
“These are going to be very tough months,” said Dror Etkes, the founder of Kerem Navot, an advocacy group dedicated to monitoring the unfolding land grab in the West Bank. “Firstly, it doesn’t look good for the current coalition, so there could be a new government. Secondly, all the attention is on the elections so the settlers can use this period to do whatever they want.”
Throughout 2025 and the first half of this year, the creeping de facto annexation of the West Bank has broken into a gallop, driven primarily by farm outposts such as Maoz Tzur. They require none of the planning and construction work of established settlements, just a small, highly motivated vanguard ready to use violence to drive Palestinians over a wide swath of territory.
According to a report published on Monday by Kerem Navot and its fellow activist organisation Peace Now, farm outposts now control more than 1m dunams (100,000 hectares), 18% of the entire West Bank. Nearly a third of that wholesale seizure took place in 2025 alone.
The report concludes that “the government has advanced de facto annexation at an unprecedented pace”.
“It has done so through structural governance changes, settlement expansion, the retroactive authorisation of outposts, land seizures, the expulsion of Palestinian communities, and increased Israeli control in areas previously under Palestinian Authority responsibility,” the report says, arguing that at its heart, the process relies on a sustained pattern of violence.
“These amount to thousands of incidents, ranging from verbal abuse to murder. The vast majority of these incidents are neither documented nor counted by any authority, as they do not meet the threshold for news reporting,” the report notes, adding: “This violence is part of a funded and institutionalised system whose purpose is to expel Palestinians and take over their land.”
At the top of this system sits Bezalel Smotrich, a hardline settler who was considered far too extreme for mainstream politics until Netanyahu – his grip on power shaken by a string of corruption scandals – first brought him into government in 2019.
Smotrich is now finance minister but his power is far wider than the title suggests. He has taken over the authority to approve settlements from the defence ministry and used the power to retroactively legitimise farm outposts such as Maoz Tzur.
In April, Smotrich came to Maoz Tzur to celebrate its recognition as an official settlement and its 12 “core families” who he hailed as “pioneers”. Outposts like Maoz Tzur, Smotrich said, would “completely destroy the idea of a Palestinian state within our heartland”.
The settlers of Maoz Tzur have no near-term prospect of taking over the Karajehs’ plot in Ein Arik. The aim of such attacks appears to be to demoralise the population while isolating them by blocking the roads between Palestinian communities with steel gates or blocks of stone, and overlaying them with new roads, accessible only to settlers, connecting the new outposts, thus developing a new circulatory system in the West Bank by cutting off the old.
“When you connect something, you always dissect something else – that’s the principle they act on,” Etkes said.
Recourse to the law has also been cut off almost entirely for Palestinians, since another settler extremist, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was made national security minister by Netanyahu at the end of 2022. Villagers in Ein Arik said it has proved futile to complain to the police or go to court for redress.
“We went to so many lawyers but they all said there is nothing they could do as the government is with the settlers,” Ahmad Abu Mayala, whose family was the target of a settler attack on 22 May, said. “They said: ‘Wait for the election to see if it will change the government. Then maybe we can do something’.”
The local mayor, Mohannad Othman, was pessimistic on that score.
“The way things in the Middle East work, there will be someone even worse than Smotrich,” Othman said, though later he speculated that if Palestinian Israeli parties acted together, they could hold the balance of power after the elections, and perhaps bring change.
Othman has only been in office a month and is thinking of inviting representatives of foreign embassies and organisations to accompany villagers into the hills for the olive harvest in the hope it offers some protection against attack.
Last month, the UK, Australia, Canada, France and Norway imposed sanctions on what they called financial and enabling “networks” behind the “horrific levels of settler violence” on Palestinians. France also banned Smotrich from entering the country. He was banned from the UK in 2020.
Such measures are unlikely to have a significant impact at a time when the Israeli government has the support of the Trump administration – which opposes formal annexation but has allowed the continuing informal seizures of territory – and there is disunity within the EU, where Germany and Italy have led the resistance to the suspension of the association agreement with Israel.
Without sustained external pressure, Etkes is pessimistic about how much a new Israeli government could or would do to hold back settler violence.
“Any attempt to change policies in the West Bank will be confronted with the very strong opposition of the people who are today in the government, who will be out there in the field with strong political back-up,” he said. “So it would be very, very hard for any new Israeli government to try to reverse things.”
Quique Kierszenbaum contributed to this report
