Two Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, were shot and killed on Tuesday morning in the village of Al-Mughayyir in the central occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Authority announced. Witnesses and video footage show a group of young Palestinian men and teenagers fleeing toward the village school when gunfire erupted, with two individuals — a man aged 32 and the adolescent, identified as Hamdi Al-Nasaan — collapsing and dying from their wounds. Multiple eyewitnesses say Israeli settlers carried out the attack with the Israeli army present at the scene. The army confirmed it deployed forces to the area to stop the clashes and said the incident was "under review," while acknowledging uncertainty over who fired the fatal shots. The killing carries particular weight for one family: Hamdi Al-Nasaan's father was also shot dead by Israeli settlers in 2019.
Tuesday's killings are part of a broader and worsening pattern of settler violence across the West Bank, the Palestinian territory that has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Human rights organisations recorded an average of nearly ten settler attacks per day in the first forty days of the current Gaza war alone, with at least eight Palestinians killed and over 200 wounded in that period. Dozens of Palestinian communities have since been displaced entirely. In one Bedouin village, Umm al-Khair in the southern West Bank, residents describe living under daily assault: houses destroyed, livestock stolen, and roads to the local school blocked by settler-placed barbed wire. When Israeli soldiers arrived at the school blockade, witnesses say troops fired tear gas at the children and their parents rather than removing the obstruction. Months after a resident was shot dead by a settler while filming an incursion, caravans housing new settlers were erected on the very spot where he was killed.
The violence has drawn fresh international condemnation. Pakistan's Foreign Office described the storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem — a site of profound significance to Muslims — by Israeli settlers as "reprehensible," noting that settlers raised the Israeli flag inside the compound and performed religious rituals there under heavy police protection. Pakistan called for measures to protect holy sites and end what it termed the "impunity of illegal settlers." Concern is also emerging, more quietly, within Israeli civil society: a protest against settler violence held in central Tel Aviv — described as the largest Israeli-led demonstration of its kind to date — drew several hundred participants. Israeli activist Omri Evron, one of the organisers, called settler attacks "barbaric" and warned they "stand in the way of any chance of peace," though the event was a stark contrast in scale to the tens of thousands who have recently rallied in the same square over other issues.
Why this matters: the United Nations estimates that 224 Palestinian minors have been killed by settlers or the Israeli army in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023. Despite sustained international criticism, settler activity has continued to expand — Israel's government is reported to have quietly approved 34 new settlement outposts during the war. For Palestinians on the ground, the calculus is straightforward and grim: as global attention focuses on Gaza, the space for settler violence in the West Bank has grown wider, with communities facing displacement not through a single dramatic event, but through relentless, daily pressure.