Live Update arrow right icon From the Liveblog of Friday, September 4, 2026

Child wounded in settler raid of West Bank village; IDF detains Palestinian local upon arrival

4 September 2026, 8:36 pm
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Settlers and soldiers are filmed raiding the Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair in the Jordan Valley of the West Bank.

A Palestinian child was injured by an object thrown at him by one of the invading settlers.

The Mothers Against Violence group of Israeli solidarity activists says settlers raided the village first and harassed Palestinian children playing on the village’s soccer field.

The settlers also cut a fence that the Palestinians had installed around the village to try and prevent such raids, which have been taking place on a regular basis.

Soldiers then arrived at the scene shortly thereafter but did not apprehend the invading settlers, Mothers Against Violence says.

The soldiers then declared the soccer field a closed military zone and ordered the Palestinian residents of the village invaded by settlers to enter their homes and not come out, the activists say.

Closed military zone orders are regularly used by the IDF to limit altercations in the West Bank between settlers and Palestinians.

However, the directives are often only enforced against Palestinians, while settlers are able to violate them with impunity, as has been the case in the northern West Bank village of Qusra.

While one arrest was carried out by the IDF, it was not of one of the settlers, but rather a Palestinian villager Aziz Hathaleen, whose brother Awdah was shot dead by extremist Israeli settler Yinon Levy last year.

Activists say today’s incident shows how Israeli authorities are working with extremist settlers to embitter the lives of vulnerable Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

An IDF source later says that its forces arrived at Umm al-Khair to break up a clash between settlers and Palestinians. The source says that one Palestinian was detained but was released several hours later.

No reason was given for why the man was detained in the first place.

Umm al-Khair has been targeted by settlers for years and was the subject of the 2024 Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land.

Elsewhere in the West Bank on Friday, an Israeli settler was filmed raiding the Palestinian village of Turmus Ayya, where he climbed on top of a home and declared, “You need to understand [that] this country and this land [are] Jewish. This is my land. This is my country because Allah promised [it to] me.”

The settler is filmed wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the outlawed Kach movement, which was founded by the late extremist rabbi Meir Kahane and outlawed by Israel as a terror group in 1994.

Israeli solidarity activists also paid a visit on Friday to Tarqumia, another village in the West Bank that has come under frequent settler harassment since Hamas’s October 7 onslaught.

Mickey Gitzin, the acting CEO of the New Israel Fund, photographed one of the homes recently ransacked by settlers who graffitied “Kahane lives” on one of the walls.

“It was moving to be there with a group of truly righteous Bnei Avraham activists who, with their bodies, their kindness and their moral compass, are trying to influence reality and fight this evil, while at the same time presenting other faces of Judaism and Israel,” Gitzin wrote.

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