Israeli settlers attack Christian village in West Bank, leaving 3 dead and homes burned

JERUSALEM (OSV News) -- Israeli settlers attacked homes and lit a fire at the eastern entrance of the Christian West Bank village of Taybeh on June 26, as they rampaged through the neighboring village of Kafr Malik.

The rampage resulted in the deaths of three people from Kafr Malik, the Palestinian health ministry said, and the burning of several homes and vehicles. No injuries were reported in Taybeh.

"These days, we are living under the fire, barbarism and brutality of the settlers ... and under the direct protection of the Israeli occupation army," Father Bashar Basiel, priest at Christ the Redeemer Parish, wrote in a post he sent out to journalists. "We will win with hope. We are Palestinian Christians. We resist with our faith."

On June 25, a Palestinian boy was shot dead by the Israeli army during a raid on Al-Yamun, a West Bank town west of Jenin, the Palestinian Red Crescent said, as reported by Reuters.

Hussein al-Sheikh, the deputy to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, posted on X: "The government of Israel, with its behavior and decisions, is pushing the region to explode."

"We call on the international community to intervene urgently to protect our Palestinian people," he said, Reuters reported.

In a statement, the Israeli Defense Forces said dozens of Israeli civilians set fire to property in Kafr Malik, and after a confrontation between the Israelis and Palestinian developed including "mutual rock-hurling," the IDF and Israeli police were dispatched to the scene.

The statement said several people whom the IDF termed "terrorists" from within the village fired toward the forces who returned fire, with fatalities reported. Five Israeli suspects were apprehended and transferred to the Israeli Police for further processing, IDF said.

Settler violence in the West Bank, including Taybeh, has grown in severity over the past year and five months since the war in Gaza has continued, said Taybeh resident Nadim Khoury, owner of the well-known Taybeh Brewery and Winery, with settlers encroaching on Taybeh agricultural land with their sheep and cows, preventing farmers from reaching their crops.

"Settlers have been coming to Taybeh property and grazing their sheep and cows on the wheat and barley crops the people of Taybeh have planted. No one is stopping them," he told OSV News.

"Last night they started fighting with the Arab Bedouin and then they made it to the entrance of Taybeh. We can't do anything. Everybody is afraid and panicked but don't know what to do. Taybeh depends on its agriculture and olive trees. People don't know what to do or who to complain to if the government is with them, what can we do?"

Palestinian shepherds and Israel activists maintain that soldiers and police who are deployed to such incidents rarely do anything to stop the settlers and in fact seem to be supporting them, noting that the situation has gotten worse since the war as attention is placed on Gaza.

In May the Israeli government, the most extreme right-wing government in its history, said it would establish 22 new settlements throughout the West Bank. Most of the settlers who clash with Palestinian shepherds and farmers are from small illegal sheep and goat homesteads who use their animals as a way to encroach on Palestinian land.

Khoury said earlier in June settlers entered land belonging to his cousin and let the sheep eat all the new crops he had planted and took his water tank so he would not be able to water any new crops he planted.