MUAWIYA Sedeh, a 38 year-old father of five, was at home in the West Bank village of Jit on Thursday night when his house was torched by a band of Jewish settlers, some masked and wielding Molotov cocktails.
He escaped with his family with only minutes to spare. When he returned, he said the settlers were jeering and taunting him, saying "We will come back and kill you!" and telling him to go to Jordan or Syria.
Residents said more than 100 people took part in the attack, many clad in black, and appeared well-coordinated, dividing into groups armed with guns and others throwing stones and Molotov cocktails.
Sedeh said: "I was lucky. It was a matter of minutes between life and death."
Video shared on social media showed cars and houses ablaze and Palestinian emergency services reported that a 22-year-old man was killed by gunfire from the settlers.
The Jit attack was larger than recent raids by West Bank settlers but was hardly unique, with violence against Palestinian villages on the rise as settlement building has spread unchecked across the West Bank.
Since the start of the Gaza war, they have picked up even more rapidly. Between Oct 7, when Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel, and last week, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA recorded around 1,250 attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians, or around four per day.
Of these, around 120 led to Palestinian deaths or injuries and around 1,000 damaged Palestinian property.
Thursday's attack took place as negotiators met in Doha for last-ditch talks aimed at halting the fighting in Gaza and heading off the looming threat of a wider regional war involving Iran and its proxies.
Jit, located between the flashpoint cities of Nablus and Qal-qilyah, in the northern West Bank, has not seen settler attacks on a comparable scale in the recent past, residents said, but they said there had been tensions as nearby settlements have grown and expanded.
Palestinians in the West Bank have complained about the growing violence and strength of settler incursions in Palestinian areas like Huwara or Burqa, which have seen repeated attacks and there was a feeling of shock in the village.
Hassan Orman, a resident who saw the attack, said: "What happened wasn't about four or five settlers who wanted to carry out an attack.
"What happened was something organised.
"They planned for it for days, they had weapons, tear gas, pepper spray, knives, all kinds of weapons."
It took around an hour for the first security forces to arrive at the scene. "If anyone from the village goes to the settlements, they're there in minutes," said Saddam Kahder, 40.
Palestinians and rights groups accuse Israeli forces of standing by as attacks take place and even joining in themselves.
Legal action against violent settlers is extremely uncommon.
"How can these terrorist gangs mobilise 100 of their members and attack a Palestinian village if they did not feel protected?" the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said.
In a report from January, Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group that monitors settler violence, said an analysis of 1,664 investigation files between 2005 and 2023 showed almost 94 per cent were closed without an indictment.
But as global pressure has mounted on Israel over the Gaza war, now in its 11th month, the patience of Israel's allies, including the United States, has been strained by incidents that cause deep anger in their home countries.
Many, including the US, have begun imposing sanctions on individuals and face pressure to do more and to curb the expansion of settlements on land the Palestinians want as the core of a future independent state, a key part of the two-state solution fav-oured by Western countries.
Most countries deem the settlements, built on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, as illegal.
The writer is from Reuters
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times