Prosecutors to charge teen over alleged role in major West Bank settler attack

Charges will be filed against a teenager suspected of partaking in a large-scale arson attack this month on Palestinian factories and farmland in the West Bank, law enforcement announced Saturday night.

It marked the first charges filed against one of the suspected assailants in the raid on November 11, which saw dozens of settlers set fire to a factory and surrounding agricultural lands near the villages of Bayt Lid and Dayr Sharaf, in the northern West Bank.

The defendant, a minor who was nabbed at the scene by security forces, was one of four people who were arrested during the attack. A prosecutor’s statement was filed against him on Saturday, police said, and he was set to be charged Sunday by Central District prosecutors.

Four Palestinians were injured in the attack, and settlers later set their sights on the troops, attacking soldiers who were dispatched to the scene, the IDF said at the time.

According to the police’s statement, “more than 50 indictments have been filed against individuals involved in severe violent incidents in Judea and Samaria” since the start of the year.

However, enforcement against settler violence under National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has plummeted on the whole over the past three years, according to a recent Channel 12 report, with a 73% drop in the number of investigations opened into settler violence since 2023.

The decline in the number of investigations has gone hand-in-hand with a marked rise in settler violence, with over 752 incidents of “nationalistic crime” recorded by the IDF since the start of the year. In all of 2024, the IDF recorded 675 incidents of nationalistic crime.

Police said that the suspect was arrested as part of security forces’ intensifying efforts to fight Jewish nationalist violence in the West Bank, as attacks against Palestinians surge. The officers who detained the suspect were said to be operating within “the special investigative task force established to address recent extreme violent incidents.”

The task force is part of a larger plan, overseen jointly by the IDF, Shin Bet and police, to probe severe cases of “Jewish terrorism” as Israeli and US officials begin to take a tougher stance on the near-daily attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel “will take very forceful action against the riots,” targeting IDF soldiers and Palestinians. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said the attacks “cross a red line and divert the attention of our forces from fulfilling their mission.”

In the wake of a spate of attacks on the Christian Palestinian town of Taybeh, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee condemned the surge in settler violence, branding it “terrorism.”

The plan to combat settler violence was expected to expand the deployment of military and police in Palestinian villages targeted frequently in settler attacks and see the establishment of 14 reinforced security hubs in areas identified as violence hotspots.

It also calls for broadening surveillance networks, installing additional cameras, and increasing enforcement tools against offenders, such as property seizures, fines and revocation of gun licenses, Channel 12 reported.

So far, the Israel Police has done little to enforce the law against Jewish attackers, with few arrests and even fewer indictments against perpetrators. There have been a handful of arrests in recent days following a spate of attacks involving well over 100 Israeli extremists, but many of the suspects have been released.