TEHRAN — Israeli soldiers shot dead a 14-year-old boy in the West Bank village of Burqa on November 9, kept ambulances from reaching the wounded and briefly held the paramedics who tried.
By November 10, the occupying military was still holding his body, Israel’s outgoing government had put 823 more settlement homes out to tender, and October’s figures showed settler violence at a monthly level the United Nations has never recorded before.
The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the boy as Moataz Iyad Daghlas and said Israel is refusing to hand over his body.
Two other teenagers were hit by live fire during the raid, northwest of Nablus: a 17-year-old in the abdomen and pelvis, a 19-year-old in the hand.
Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, reported that soldiers detained the boy’s father, Iyad, and a young man, Rayan Daghlas, and held three Palestine Red Crescent volunteers who were working in the village. Local sources said troops also closed the main road in both directions.
The Israeli military confirmed the shooting. It said soldiers opened fire to keep Palestinians from throwing stones at Israeli vehicles and that “several hits were confirmed.”
Rifles answering stones is a ratio the West Bank has lived with since October 2023. The UN counts at least 1,143 Palestinians killed there in that time, 250 of them children, a figure that includes people killed by settlers.
Burqa was one scene among several that evening. Settlers burned three bulldozers, vehicles, and equipment at stone-cutting workshops in the Beita industrial zone while soldiers stormed the town.
In Khallat al-Hummus, near Yatta, armed settlers attacked a woman’s home and one slapped her for filming; a local activist said they operated under army protection.
The UN logged 457 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage in October, the most in any month since it began counting in 2006.
The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission counts far higher: 1,369 attacks in October and 12,506 since October 2023, with 52 Palestinians killed and 890 fires set on Palestinian property and farmland.
A Palestinian monitoring center, Mu’ta, counted 2,000 violations by soldiers and settlers between October 30 and November 5, including 463 road closures, 252 raids, 233 arrests and 190 settler attacks. ACLED, the conflict data project, says 2026 is on track to be the worst year for settler violence in its decade of monitoring.
In July, 11 people were killed in four incidents in which armed settlers acted alongside Israeli forces.
Al Jazeera’s investigation, broadcast November 9, shows why the line between settler and soldier is so hard to draw.
Of the 63 Palestinians killed by settlers since October 2023, it found that 14 were shot by people serving in the army or wearing its uniform.
In Tal, southwest of Nablus, facial matching and local testimony identified Yitzhak Levi Filant, a settler from Yitzhar known as “Yaqoub,” assaulting farmers in civilian clothes, then returning in military uniform with an army-issued weapon to give the villagers orders.
Washington sanctioned Filant in August 2024 under Joe Biden. Donald Trump’s administration took him off the list early in 2025.
Abbas Melhem of the Palestinian Farmers Union described the routine: a farmer threatens to call the army, the settler walks to his car, changes, and comes back to announce, “I am the army!”
In Hebron on March 7, a settler named Nahman encroached on Palestinian land near Susya and summoned reinforcements. Brothers Shem Tov and Luria Luski arrived in an off-road vehicle.
Luria Luski, who appears in army uniform in other footage, opened fire and killed Amir Shanaran, wounding his cousin. Amir’s father says his son was shot on the spot after he pushed a settler away from him.
Institutions make it possible. The army’s Hagmar regional defense battalions have grown sixfold since 2023, and their job has shifted from guarding settlements to backing settler operations.
Assaf Surya, the deputy commander of the Hebron battalion, told Israeli media that most Hagmar members are settlers serving in the reserves.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir says at least 120,000 civilian weapons licenses have been issued to settlers under this government. Settlers now control about a fifth of the West Bank and have forced out 118 Palestinian communities, according to the investigation.
Consequences are rare. Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group, found that 93.6 percent of settler criminal cases opened by police since 2005 were closed without indictments.
Melhem says about 50 tons of olives have been stolen this season with army participation, much of it hauled in military vehicles.
Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy was blunter: a soldier who shoots a dog will face justice sooner than a settler who shoots a farmer.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition lost its majority in October’s election, and opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot is trying to form a government. The outgoing cabinet has not slowed down.
It has put out tenders for 732 homes in Gva’ot, west of Bethlehem, where bidding runs from December 1 to December 28, and 91 in Oranit, south of Qalqilya.
Peace Now, the Israeli settlement monitor, called for their cancellation, saying a transition government has “no mandate to advance irreversible moves in the settlements that deepen annexation.”
Palestinian officials count at least 28 land tenders since January, 18 of them covering 7,815 housing units. More than 750,000 settlers live in the West Bank and East al-Quds (Jerusalem), in settlements the Security Council declared legally void in Resolution 2334, a text Washington let pass by abstaining in 2016 and has never pressed Israel to honor.
About 9,350 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, among them 350 children and 90 women. The Palestinian Prisoner Society says roughly 80 percent of prisoners have scabies, citing clothing shortages, overcrowding, poor medical care and raids by prison units with dogs, rubber bullets, and tear gas; some wings are hit every two or three days.
Schooling is fraying too. For a fourth year, government schools in the West Bank run only part of the week because the Palestinian Authority cannot pay full salaries while Israel withholds the tax revenue it collects for it, which Mahmoud Abbas said reached $6 billion in September.
More than 600,000 pupils are affected, and in Hebron’s H2 area, where checkpoints and fences lengthen the walk to class, government school attendance has fallen 25 percent since October 2023.
Violence is also reaching inside Israel. On November 8, a far-right mob marched through Palestinian neighborhoods in Lod, throwing stones and shouting racist slurs. Police arrested 11 people and released all of them by morning. Haaretz reported that allies of Ben-Gvir promoted the march online as a “sovereignty march.”
Britain’s pledge meets its own contracts
On September 8, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons that those who finance or facilitate settlements “will face the full force of UK sanctions.”
Since then, Al Jazeera found, British public bodies have published 18 contracts worth 10.7 million pounds ($14.4 million) with firms linked to settlements.
14 went to Heidelberg Materials subsidiaries, whose Israeli unit owns a quarry on land belonging to the villages of az-Zawiya and Rafat, Who Profits says.
The Cabinet Office says procurement cannot be used to boycott firms absent formal sanctions. Jeremy Corbyn called the contracts “outrageous and frankly insulting.”
In Burqa, the Daghlas family is still waiting for Israel to return their son.