US issues harsher censure of ‘West Bank violence,’ without explicitly blaming Israel

The United States on Wednesday went slightly further in condemning surging West Bank settler violence than it has in the past, urging legal action, though it did not use the word “settler” and avoided criticizing Israel for not cracking down on the phenomenon.

“We condemn criminal violence by any party in the West Bank and call for investigations, arrests and convictions of those responsible,” a US State Department spokesperson said in response to a query from The Times of Israel on the matter.

Previous statements from the State Department on the subject were slightly more vague and largely stressed the importance of maintaining stability in the West Bank, though this one does not mention either Israel or the Palestinians by name.

“We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank,” the State Department spokesperson said, indicating that the US is raising the matter with Israel behind closed doors.

Surging violence by Israeli settlers across the West Bank — largely unchecked by Israeli authorities — has been met with severe condemnation from Western allies in recent weeks.

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has been just about the only member of US President Donald Trump’s administration to criticize settler violence, calling perpetrators “terrorists,” while insisting that they’re not representative of the half-million Israelis living beyond the Green Line.

But he too has refrained from explicitly criticizing Israel’s handling of settler violence, which goes largely unchecked, though President Isaac Herzog insisted to CNN during an interview aired Wednesday that Israeli authorities were taking the issue seriously.

Herzog called the perpetrators “juvenile delinquents” and claimed “there is a major effort by our authorities to undermine these activities and bring people to justice.” He noted that a series of rare arrests were carried out earlier this week, though most of the near-daily settler attacks do not lead to arrests or prosecutions.

Herzog also likened the phenomenon to “inner-city violence,” though they are different, as the perpetrators in the West Bank often profess that they are acting out of ideological nationalist motives, and seek to expel Palestinians from the West Bank.

Still, Herzog called the Jewish extremists behind the daily attacks on Palestinians, a “shame on the face of Israel,” repeating a sentiment he has expressed previously.

Meanwhile, no arrests have been made in a well-documented settler rampage that took place on Saturday in the northern West Bank Palestinian village of Qusra, which was also subject to a siege by settlers.

On Wednesday evening, Palestinian media reported that two of three Palestinians who were shot in the village of al-Mughayyir, in the Ramallah area, died of their wounds after settlers and IDF troops entered the village. The Palestinian Authority’s WAFA news agency identified the two as 19-year-olds.

Settlers were filmed close to homes in the village alongside the soldiers. Additional footage showed the troops detained one of the Palestinians. It was also reported that IDF troops fired tear gas.

According to the IDF, troops were providing police and an Israeli civilian who entered al-Mughayyir to find missing pets, which it said were identified as belonging to Israelis, when the soldiers were attacked with bricks and stones.

The IDF said the troops responded with live fire “toward the primary inciters to remove the threat. Hits were identified.”

The army added that it was investigating “the events that preceded the incident and the management of it.”

عاجل | قوات الاحتلال تعتقل شابًا خلال اعتداء المستوطنين على قرية المغير، شمال شرق رام الله. pic.twitter.com/CwGCOHMAw2

— شبكة قدس الإخبارية (@qudsn) September 2, 2026

Arrests, car seizures and home demolitions

Separately, officers on Wednesday seized a white pickup truck allegedly used on Saturday in a settler attack on Qusra, and were stoned by settlers while taking the vehicle, police said.

Operating in the illegal outpost of Mevasser Hashalom, near Nablus in the northern West Bank, the officers arrested two people from a crowd that had gathered to throw stones and block their path, according to police.

The detainees were taken for questioning and “order has been restored,” police said.

Police added they already seized several vehicles used in the Saturday attack, when settlers took over a Palestinian home in Qusra with a family inside and reportedly injured a woman, weeks after the start of a siege on a number of homes in the town.

While no suspects in the Saturday attack were arrested, police said a “special joint investigative team of the Shin Bet and police” is working to locate the “extremist rioters” and has issued a warrant for their arrest.

“The investigation is ongoing,” police said.

Police also announced the arrest overnight of three suspects as part of an investigation into arson attacks and assaults against Palestinians south of Hebron.

The suspects were residents of the West Bank and of central Israel, aged between 15 and 22, police said, adding that the investigation is ongoing.

Following an interrogation, police will bring the suspects before a court to request that their detention be extended, police added.

On Tuesday, police announced the arrest of eight other suspects in acts of arson and assault against Palestinians south of Hebron, and brought them before a court to have their detention extended.

The court agreed to extend the detention of seven suspects and released the eighth under restrictions, police said.

Police told The Times of Israel on Tuesday that some of the detainees were suspected of setting fire to a mosque and several homes in Khirbet a-Tuba in the South Hebron Hills on August 5, in an incident in which six Palestinians reportedly required medical attention after attackers beat them.

Other detainees were suspected of setting fire to a mosque in al-Tuwani, also in the South Hebron Hills, on July 19.

Additionally, on Wednesday, Israel demolished all the homes in a small Palestinian village in the South Hebron Hills that has a population of 12 families, comprising around 70 people. The village, Khirbet al-Tabban, is located within IDF Firing Zone 918.

????NOW: Israel is wiping out an entire Palestinian village of Khirbet a-Taban, in Masafer Yatta, the West Bank. The IDF has left more than twenty children and their parents homeless. The destruction of the village is part of a decades-long strategy to displace Palestinian… pic.twitter.com/T9MBGhkDtt

— Breaking the Silence (@BtSIsrael) September 2, 2026

In 2022, the High Court of Justice ruled on a petition that had been pending for some 20 years, determining that Palestinians living in the firing zone had not permanently resided there before the area was declared a firing zone, and therefore had no right to live there. Around three years later, the IDF began demolishing some of the Palestinians’ homes in the area.

According to a recent UN report in June, more than 2,200 Palestinians have been displaced this year due to settler violence or restrictions on access, and hundreds more have been displaced due to home demolitions by Israeli authorities.

The report came just days after Amnesty International accused Israel of conducting a “state-sponsored” campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bedouin and Palestinian herding communities in the West Bank over the last three and a half years, designed to accelerate the annexation of the territory. The IDF rejected the charge.