Settlers in shepherd’s clothing: Inside a West Bank village under siege
For Abd Al-Latif Abu Alia, a man in his fifties from the village of Al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank, defending the walls of the house his father built in the 1970s means defending the very existence of a family and an entire village. Settlers attack its land, its farms, and its entrances nearly every day, and outposts besiege it from all four directions.
“I’ll die here.” In words that leave no room for evasion, Abu Alia gives Al Manassa the sum of what years of confrontation with settler terror and the occupation army have taught him. His house sits at the village’s northern edge, now a near-daily target for settlers and their sheep, protected by the occupation army. Its sons fall among the dead and wounded, and residents’ ability to reach their land and work it has shrunk.
At Al Manassa, we spent weeks planning the visit. The only way in was through the neighboring villages; reaching Al-Mughayyir at all is itself a risk.
Deceptively calm
I tracked the news from Al-Mughayyir, waiting for a lull, and called Marzouq Abu Naim, a village council member, to ask if it was safe to enter. He couldn't guarantee it. The same day I called, settlers attacked.
On the day of the visit I left my own car and hired another, driven by someone who knew the area’s roads and conditions, to avoid any added risk. The whole way there I kept tracking news from the village. Which roads were open, which were closed, warnings of settlers on certain routes.
The drive from Ramallah took over an hour; any sign of an attack or a closure would have meant rerouting. It passed without incident, and the driver's knowledge of the roads got us to the village entrance without settlers or army checkpoints stopping us.
Then Al-Mughayyir filled the horizon, deceptively calm: houses scattered across the hills as if at permanent rest, not in a lull before whatever the outposts ringing it, like watchtowers, would send next.
We reached the village's one remaining entrance. Of three original roads in, the occupation has closed two: one on Road 458, known as Allon Road, the other between Al-Mughayyir and Turmus'ayya. Only the route through Turmus'ayya and Abu Falah is left.
On both sides of the road stretch tracts of land covered in yellowed, withering grass, broken by patches of black. The driver said they had been wheat and barley fields, yet settler attacks over the past months left them barren and burned.
At the heart of the village the streets looked nearly empty. A few people crossed the road; others stood at the gates of houses fortified with walls and iron gates. Residents met our car with wary looks. One passerby came up and asked the driver who we were and what we wanted. He glanced at us, then walked on — the suspicion didn't seem to leave him.
Barbed wire
Among the houses, Abd Al-Latif Abu Alia’s stands out: alone on the edge of the village, with its iron gate and its wall topped with barbed wire. From behind its walls rise the voices of children playing in the hidden courtyard of the three-story house where 22 members of the family live, including Abu Alia’s father, his brother, and their children.
Before settler attacks on the village intensified, Abd Al-Latif followed his usual routine, his construction work ran until late at night. Now he has to come home early to protect his family and his house, which he surrounded two years ago with a wall and barbed wire, in his effort to keep settlers and their sheep from getting close.
For this family, simply leaving the house — whether the children going to school or the adults to work — has become a daily ordeal shadowed by dread. Attacks that used to happen a few times a month three years ago have turned, since October 7, into near-daily events. “Nobody rests, night or day. You can’t stay home, and when you go to work your mind stays back at the house,” Abd Al-Latif tells Al Manassa.
Children have nowhere to play but inside the wall. The family takes turns guarding the house, never leaving it empty, fearing settlers will try to seize it, something they have come close to doing more than once. At times settlers have driven their sheep into the courtyard of the house, built before the Oslo Accords and the division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, which is why he put up the barbed wire.
Abd Al-Latif points out that his house is licensed by the Israeli Civil Administration. Even so, it lives under constant threat because it sits just 197 meters from Allon Road — a settler road running along the West Bank’s eastern slopes toward the Jordan Valley — tied historically to the 1967 Allon Plan, which aimed to cement Israeli control over the Jordan Valley and the areas east of the West Bank.
Over the past three years the house’s courtyard has repeatedly become a stage for confrontations between residents and settlers. In July 2026, seventeen-year-old Fadi Al-Naasan was wounded in an attack that targeted the house. Days later, he succumbed to his wounds and declared dead.
Al-Naasan was among the villagers who resisted a settler attempt to tear down the barbed wire around the house. He is one of at least seven Palestinians settlers or occupation forces have killed in Al-Mughayyir in attacks or raids since Oct. 7, 2023.
According to figures Al Manassa obtained from the Colonization & Wall Resistance Commission (CWRC), Al-Mughayyir has seen a sharp escalation in recent years: 84 attacks in 2024, 42 of them carried out by settlers and the rest by the occupation army, rising to 429 attacks in 2025, 140 of them by settlers, while the village recorded 266 attacks in the first half of 2026 alone, 62 of them by settlers. Meaning that, in just six months, the village saw attacks equal to more than 60% of everything recorded through all of 2025.
The most dangerous turn
Outposts began ringing Al-Mughayyir gradually in the late 1990s. The first was Adei Ad, established in 1998 on private land belonging to the villages of Jalud and Turmus’ayya. Settlement has since spread until today seven outposts besiege the village from every side.
Over nearly three decades, residents have grown accustomed to settler attacks on the village. UN documentation dating back to October 2013 recorded repeated attacks during the olive harvest of settlers vandalizing, uprooting, and burning trees, stealing crops, and assaulting farmers.
But Abd Al-Latif calls the period from October 7 to today the “most dangerous turn” the village has lived through: attacks have gone from scattered incidents to a near-daily threat, under the occupation army’s protection.
UN and human rights data show that theft of the olive harvest and attacks on farmers have escalated sharply since October 2023. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented more than 200 olive-season-related attacks in 2024 — roughly double 2023 and more than triple 2022 — before recording 178 attacks in the 2025 season, including assaults on farmers, theft of crops and harvesting equipment, and the destruction of more than six thousand trees and saplings.
In August 2025, the occupation army imposed a three-day siege and curfew on the village. Residents were then shocked to find that settlers, helped by Israeli soldiers, had uprooted some ten thousand olive trees, some more than 90 years old.
Unavoidable confrontation
Marzouq Abu Naim, a member of Al-Mughayyir’s local council, tells Al Manassa that residents stay constantly on alert for settlers, who surge toward the village from every direction, in groups and alone, making it impossible to avoid confronting them.
In November 2025, for example, Ayman Abu Alia and his sister-in-law went out to pick olives on what remained of his land near Turmus’ayya, after the occupation had seized at least 100 dunams of it. Settlers attacked them while they worked. He ran for his car, but they smashed parts of it and slashed the tires, forcing him to flee on foot. Then, about 40 settlers chased him down and beat him with sticks, clubs, and iron bars.
In the middle of the melee, some of the settlers who had attacked him stayed behind in the field and beat his sister-in-law, giving her a concussion that put her in intensive care for three days. He came away with bruises and fractures.
Nor are settler attacks the only threat to the village: the occupation army runs a checkpoint at Al-Mughayyir’s one remaining entrance, holding up traffic for hours and sometimes barring residents from going home at all. When that happens they take refuge in the neighboring village of Khirbet Abu Falah, where residents put them up and feed them. “The people of Khirbet Abu Falah, God bless them. They give us a place to sleep and food and drink when the occupation won’t let us back to our houses in Al-Mughayyir,” Ayman tells Al Manassa.
He recounts: “Soldiers usually take whatever cash is in your pocket, no matter how much. Some people end up hiding their money in strange places just to keep the soldiers from taking it.”
A number of village residents say soldiers abuse them at various checkpoints as soon as their IDs reveal they’re from Al-Mughayyir. They agree this points to a systematic campaign to push them into abandoning the village — which forms the link between the surrounding settlements and the nearby Jordan Valley.
At the heart of danger
According to the Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem (ARIJ), Al-Mughayyir covers more than 33,000 dunams. Under the Oslo II Accord, only about 1,934 dunams, 5.9% of its area, fall within Area B, where most of the housing is concentrated and where the Palestinian Authority holds general policing responsibility while Israel retains full control over security matters. The remaining 31,121 dunams, 94.1% of the village’s land, are classified as Area C, falling under full Israeli military and administrative control.
This strategic position gives settler attacks on the village a weight that extends beyond its borders. Amir Daoud, head of the documentation department at the Colonization & Wall Resistance Commission, tells Al Manassa that Al-Mughayyir, with its farmland and grazing land, sits at the heart of a settlement project aimed at linking the surrounding outposts and controlling the stretch of land between the Ramallah highlands and the Jordan Valley. Allon Road eases settler access and movement, even as the village’s entrances are closed and Palestinians’ access to their own land is restricted.
That is why Al-Mughayyir has become the target of wave after wave of settler attacks — assaults on residents, property and fields burned, trees uprooted, livestock stolen, farming and grazing blocked — gradually pushing Palestinian presence away from both sides of the road and clearing space for the settlement belt around it to grow.
According to Daoud, the escalation cannot be separated from Israeli government support for settlement, which takes multiple forms: legalizing some outposts, funding roads, services, and infrastructure, arming settlers, providing them military protection, and closing land off from its owners. This overlap turns what settlers impose on the ground into facts that planning and administrative measures later lock in.
Multiplying like weeds
Outposts have spread across the West Bank on a large scale since the second half of the 1990s. According to Peace Now, an Israeli NGO founded in 1978 that calls for ending the occupation and reaching a two-state solution, some 400 outposts now exist in the West Bank: 163 conventional outposts and 237 agricultural and pastoral outposts, alongside 146 settlements formally recognized by the Israeli government.
The pace of new outposts has surged in recent years: Peace Now documented 185 new outposts established between the start of 2023 and mid-2025, against an average of fewer than seven a year between 1996 and early 2023. Agricultural outposts now effectively control more than 1.1 million dunams out of the West Bank’s total 5.65 million, including around 750,000 dunams seized since the current Israeli government took power.
Leaving Al-Mughayyir through its one entrance, we saw a group of settlers gathering near the road. Residents couldn’t tell whether it was passing or the start of another attack, the kind they now wait for almost every day.
A few days after the visit, on the evening of Wednesday, Sept. 2, word reached us that occupation forces and settlers had shot dead two teenagers, Omar Mohammed Naasan and Khalil Abu Alia, both 19, during an attack on the center of the village and an attempt to steal sheep.
When residents tried to fend off the attack, snipers opened fire on them with live ammunition, critically wounding the two teenagers before they died in the hospital. That brings the death toll in Al-Mughayyir since October 7, 2023, to nine.