When burning homes no longer count as terrorism in the occupied West Bank

“About twenty settlers came,” Tawfeeq Ali says from a hospital bed in Ramallah, his head still wrapped in bandages after a settler attack left him with a fractured skull.

“They surrounded me and my cousin on our land in Al Khalla. They held us for nearly an hour and beat me on the head with sticks,” he tells TRT World.

Ali, 35, a resident of Rummon village east of Ramallah, says the attack took place on his privately owned farmland, where he works with his tractor to support his family. He recalls the attackers repeatedly telling him, “This land belongs to Israel.”

“We told them, ‘We never sold it. No one gave it to you. You can’t just take it by force,’” he recalls.

No one has been held accountable.

“There is no real justice. Even when someone is badly injured or killed, extremist lawyers get the attacker released in hours,” Ali adds. 

His story is far from unique. Across the occupied West Bank, Palestinians are watching their homes burn. Their cars. Their fields. And it is happening more often than it used to.

These attacks are carried out by illegal Israeli settlers, sometimes under the protection of the Israeli army. But something else has changed recently.

Last week, Israel’s Shin Bet revised how it classifies these attacks. According to public broadcaster Kan, only incidents showing a “clear intent to kill” are now counted as terrorism. Everything else, torched homes, burned cars, vandalised farmland, is downgraded to “serious incidents.”

The impact is already visible.

This month alone, settlers carried out more than ten arson attacks. Three were classified as terror. The rest? Logged as incidents. Some January cases got downgraded after investigators said there was no evidence anyone meant to kill, even when homes were burning.

For families like Ali’s, a settler attack destroys livelihoods regardless of intent.

When a car is burned, getting to work becomes impossible. Reaching a hospital turns into a struggle. When fields are torched, income disappears. Children watch their neighbours’ homes go up in flames and learn early that no one is coming to protect them.

In villages around Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, people say they understand the message clearly. Israel, yet again, renames the violence, softens it, and moves on. 

When Abdelhadi Ali Hussein Ubayyat from Fasayil, in the central Jordan Valley heard about the new classification, he felt stunned.

“They stopped calling this terrorism and now say it’s just ‘incidents’. What does that mean? That settlers can do whatever they want? That it’s legal?” he asks.

“Of course, attacks will increase. If it’s not terrorism, then it’s allowed. There’s no law, no deterrence, no accountability. This only makes our lives harder,” Ubayyat tells TRT World.

“They stop you from living, from working, from existing. What more of an attack is there than that?”

The shift comes at a time when settler violence is surging to record levels across the occupied territories.

According to the Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission, illegal settlers carried out around 4,723 attacks in 2025 alone, killing 14 Palestinians and forcing the displacement of 13 Bedouin communities, affecting more than 1,000 people.

Official Palestinian figures show that by the end of 2024, nearly 770,000 illegal settlers were living in the occupied West Bank, spread across more than 180 settlements and 256 outposts.

Since October 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 1,111 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and injured more than 11,500 others, according to Palestinian data.

Two standards, one reality

The new classification also exposes a long-standing double standard in the occupied territories. Similar acts are treated very differently depending on who commits them. 

Palestinians are routinely charged under terrorism laws for defending their property, while settlers who burn homes and destroy land are shielded by the Shin Bet.

On Sunday, Israel's Security Cabinet made that imbalance official in another way. 

It approved measures that fundamentally reshape control over the occupied West Bank, including repealing restrictions on the sale of Palestinian land to Jews, unsealing land ownership records, and transferring building permit authority in a Hebron settlement bloc from the Palestinian municipality to Israeli hands.

The measures also expand Israeli enforcement into Areas A and B, zones meant to be under Palestinian civil authority under the Oslo Accords. 

Israel can now demolish Palestinian homes and seize property in these areas, citing unlicensed construction or environmental violations, under a system where permits are virtually impossible for Palestinians to obtain.

For Ali, all of these moves serve the same project. 

“Around Rummon, there are three or four settlement outposts surrounding the area. The land is classified as Area B and C, and settlers attack cars, block village roads, steal livestock, and terrorise people. They leave nothing untouched,” he says.

“Settlers attack with the intention to kill. They say it openly as ‘I want to kill you’. Calling these individual incidents are lies. They are completely backed by the army, the police, and intelligence.”

Laith Barakat, a Palestinian resident of Burqa village, east of Ramallah, agrees.

“This is clearly a systematic state policy. The occupation army and the settlers are two sides of the same coin,” he tells TRT World.

“It’s obvious they try to remove responsibility from the state in front of global public opinion by portraying settler violence as individual acts, even though settlers are never truly prosecuted,”

Past cases show what that means.

“A villager was killed by a settlement guard three years ago. We documented everything. He was released after a day or two. That’s it. The settlers who attacked us have never been held accountable in any way,” he explains.

“They break cases into small pieces so no one is accountable. Violence will continue. But we will stay here, God willing.”

Deceptive rhetoric

Israeli authorities insist that settler extremism cases are still investigated and suspects pursued. 

A special police unit has supposedly been established to counter Jewish extremism, and arrests have been announced in several arson cases. President Isaac Herzog has previously condemned such attacks as “shocking and severe”.

Last week, Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir also acknowledged an upsurge in attacks by illegal settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Zamir urged security agencies “not to stand idly by” in the face of “nationalist crimes.”

Yet the gap between rhetoric and reality remains wide.

Just a week ago, illegal Israeli settlers set fire to homes belonging to the Palestinian Bedouin community of Mikhmas, in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said its crews transferred a 28-year-old man to hospital after he was shot by Israeli fire in the thigh near the Jenin refugee camp.

In another attack, a Palestinian woman and her daughter were injured after illegal settlers assaulted them between the towns of Osarin and Beita, south of Nablus.

According to Ubayyat, violence is not always covert. Much of it comes through daily harassment and constant pressure, which go unnoticed and unpunished. 

“They dump garbage near our homes. It brings flies and filth. They walk into our yards just to scare us. They bring their cows onto our land and let them eat everything. Our vegetables, our barley, whatever we grow. Then they tell us, ‘This land is ours’,” Ubayyat explains.

For Palestinians, the threat is made up of relentless, suffocating intimidation designed to force them off their land. These daily acts of coercion shape every aspect of life. And now, under the new classification, much of this violence is no longer even described as terrorism.

That shift, Palestinians warn, means less accountability and more attacks. Over time, routine violence becomes ordinary life.

Ameer Daoud, Director General of Publishing and Documentation at the Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission, says Israeli claims that settler violence will still be properly investigated are deeply misleading.

“All the discussions about supposed regulations are nothing more than attempts to manipulate global public opinion, which has become increasingly aware of the reality that the occupation government sponsors, funds, enables, and provides a protective legal environment for settler terrorism,” Daoud tells TRT World.

“Recently, there were statements by the prime minister and the defence minister about ‘reining in rogue groups,’ yet nothing changed. On the contrary, settler terrorism intensified, financial allocations and support increased, and settlers’ actions began to receive legal cover, retroactive authorisation, and formal recognition.”

“We are firmly convinced that the occupation government is the one that shelters settler terrorism, and that all these leaked debates are simply tools to mislead international public opinion,” Daoud adds.