The attack Saturday by Jewish extremists on the village of Qusra was the latest in a yearslong series of violent incidents in which Jews have attacked Palestinian residents, their villages and their fields.
These incidents increased after the formation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government and intensified further after the October 7 massacre. Government condemnations are heard from time to time, usually in muted terms, and police sometimes respond with arrests, but these steps have not stopped the trend. The number of indictments filed against Jewish rioters remains marginal despite the toll Palestinians have paid in lives and property.
In most cases, the rioters’ aim is to make life unbearable for Palestinians. Indeed, in recent years several Bedouin communities have abandoned the places where they lived, but established villages also have come under attack. Qusra, in the Nablus district, is one of dozens of such flashpoints.
Violent clashes broke out in the Qusra area between Palestinian residents and Jewish extremists
On Saturday, rioters were documented arriving there in white pickup trucks. They later barricaded themselves inside a Palestinian home, threw stones and attacked journalists who came to cover the incident, but no arrests were made.
Despite the broad spread of violent incidents across the West Bank, the security establishment insists that they are led by only 70 to 100 young people, classified as “individual targets,” who in turn lead about 300 additional youths.
“These are a few dozen people who direct the others where to go,” a security official told ynet.
“They don’t care about anything. Not the State of Israel and not the IDF. They want to create a kingdom. They only want to blur the lines between Area C,” which is under full Israeli control and where the government officially permits settlement, “and Areas B and A. Some of them are already under house arrest orders and some have also been indicted. But there is still a lot of work to do. They are the engine behind the riots,” according to the official.
Nearly all of the confrontations take place in Area B, which is under Israeli security control and Palestinian Authority civil administration, far from agricultural farms but near outposts established deep inside the territory, close to Palestinian villages.
Jewish extremists arrive in Qusra on Saturday, on foot and in trucks
The roughly 300 youths referred to by the security official came to the hilltops in search of meaning and roam the area without being subject to any real authority.
Some of the young people were directed to farms, where there is a responsible adult and a daily routine, but the situation is very different at the outposts. There, they move from one area to another according to instructions from the hard-core group, remain at an outpost until it is evacuated, then repeat the process elsewhere.
“There really is no law there, and everyone does what is right in his own eyes,” an official in the settlement movement explained.
The profile of these young people is familiar. They are usually teenagers who have dropped out of educational frameworks, some of whom had previous run-ins with the law. On the hilltops, they receive a kind of ideological reinforcement for their violent activity, one that convinces them they are acting as pioneers for the sake of Greater Israel.
“What pioneering are you talking about?” said a senior settlement official. “We created a revolution here and they are destroying it. Every time an attack like this happens, there is enormous criticism from the Americans and it gets echoed everywhere. The settlement enterprise is flourishing and they are harming us. Farms are not being established because of them. This is not Jewish.”
Criticism of the rioters within the West Bank settlement community focuses on the damage caused to the settlement enterprise, not to Palestinians.
“The rioters should have been dealt with through the welfare system, because when they are not treated, they find fertile ground on the hilltops of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank),” another figure in the settlement movement said. “All the welfare agencies need to get involved in this with full force. They need to give them help. And those who won’t accept it — send them to the police. Look at the enormous damage they are causing us. Look at what Israel’s great friend Mike Huckabee said.”
At a joint command center established in the Israel Police’s Judea and Samaria District together with the Shin Bet and the IDF, investigators are continuing to examine the Qusra incident from the weekend. Efforts are underway to locate the vehicles and those involved, and security officials believe arrests will be made in the coming days.
Three vehicles were seized at the scene, but they are apparently “mashtubot” — vehicles that have been taken off the road and are no longer registered — so it is unclear how much evidentiary value can be extracted from them.