Settlers raid Palestinian village in southern West Bank, leave before cops arrive

Around a dozen armed settlers raided the Palestinian village of Tuba in the West Bank’s South Hebron Hills on Saturday, in a coordinated attack that locals said was aimed at intimidating Palestinian villagers into fleeing their land.

Police were dispatched to the scene but only arrived after the settlers left, according to residents.

The goal of the raid was to try to provoke Palestinian locals into providing a “pretext” to attack them, the Israeli Beyond the Herd activist group said. The group works in solidarity with Palestinians in the southern West Bank who face regular attacks from settler extremists.

One of the settlers involved in Saturday’s raid was Issachar Manne, a US citizen sanctioned by the Biden administration due to his involvement in attacks on Palestinians. Manne and another US citizen filed a lawsuit against the sanctions that were pending when the Trump administration scrapped them altogether upon taking office.

Tuba is one of a group of Palestinian villages located in Masafer Yatta, which was the subject of “No Other Land,” the Oscar-winning documentary on settler violence and IDF demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank. Since the movie gained notoriety, villagers have faced an uptick in settler attacks.

Locals have said the attacks are designed to intimidate Palestinians into fleeing their land and that they are backed by the state, which rarely prosecutes such incidents.

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כעשרה מתנחלים, בניהם יששכר מן הבעלים של המאחז משק מן, פלשו היום לכפר טובא כשחלקם חמושים, ונכנסו לחצרות הבתים. המשטרה דאגה להופיע ברגע שהמתנחלים עזבו את המקום. https://t.co/Bop7BdzLNJ pic.twitter.com/IE3OwcxUXg

— מחוץ לעדר (@masafering) April 5, 2025

Last week, around 50 settlers attacked homes in the northern West Bank village of Duma, reportedly injuring three Palestinians, as the settlers torched property and assaulted residents.

After the settler rampage in Duma, Defense Minister Israel Katz on Thursday declined to characterize it as terrorism, saying: “I don’t define this as ‘terror.’ This is my perspective.”

“There was lawbreaking here, and we must deal with it. We must enforce [the law] against whoever did this,” Katz said of the rampage in Duma. He added, “I am against violence, I support enforcing the law,” and said such acts should not be allowed.

The West Bank has seen a spike in violence since October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.

In the West Bank, the military has undertaken large-scale counterterrorism operations that have killed hundreds of people — the vast majority of them combatants, according to the IDF — and displaced tens of thousands.

Arrests of Israelis in incidents of settler violence are extremely rare. The head of the police’s West Bank division is currently under investigation for allegedly refusing to crack down on the phenomenon to curry favor in the eyes of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

Israel’s failure to prosecute near-daily incidents of settler violence led the previous White House and multiple European governments to begin sanctioning violent settlers last year. US President Donald Trump scrapped his predecessor’s sanctions shortly after taking office in January.