One Palestinian was killed in Qusra and others were injured in Rashayda, amid increasing violence by Israeli settlers.
Posted on March 14, 2026
Israeli settlers attacked two villages in the occupied West Bank, causing casualties among Palestinian residents, according to local officials.
Hani Odeh, mayor of the village of Qusra in Nablus governorate, told the AFP news agency that Israeli settlers shot dead a Palestinian, Amir Moatasem Odeh, 28, on Saturday. Two other neighbors were injured.
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There was also an assault in the Rashayda area, east of Bethlehem, on Saturday, with the local mayor describing settler violence as an almost daily reality for residents.
The Palestinian Wafa news agency said a group of settlers attacked in the Rashayda area, near the village of Kisan, “shooting live ammunition.”
Musa Abayat, mayor of Rashayda, told AFP that five Palestinians were injured in the attack, two of them with gunshot wounds.
In addition to those who were shot, three other Palestinians were hit with sharp objects or stones, and the wounded were taken to hospital. More than 100 sheep were also seized.
“Daily attacks” by settlers, Abayat said, have become a feature of life in the area.
The Israeli military acknowledged that a “violent confrontation” had occurred involving Israeli civilians firing their weapons at Palestinians. One Israeli civilian was wounded, the military told AFP, adding that two Israeli civilians were detained along with three Palestinians.
The attack was the latest in a series of violence that had already left its mark on the town itself.
A day earlier, settlers burned a poultry barn belonging to a local Palestinian farmer, completely destroying it, according to Wafa.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, Wafa reported Saturday that Israeli forces shot a 43-year-old Palestinian, Ahmad Khalil Saleh, at the Beit Iksa checkpoint, northwest of Jerusalem. The soldiers also brutally beat his 20-year-old son in the same place, according to local sources cited by the agency.
At least five Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since early March, according to Palestinian authorities and the United Nations, as part of a broader surge in violence that has accompanied Israel’s war in Gaza.
Israeli troops or settlers have killed more than 1,045 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023, according to an AFP tally based on figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry.
That violence has largely unfolded without legal consequences.
The Israeli human rights group Yesh Din found that more than nine in 10 investigations into ideological crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank ended without charges, a pattern the group describes not as negligence but as deliberate policy.
A comprehensive UN report found that of more than 1,500 Palestinians killed between 2017 and September 2025, Israeli authorities achieved only one conviction.
U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk described conditions in the West Bank as apartheid-like, condemning what he called the “systematic suffocation” of Palestinian rights under two separate bodies of law, one for settlers and one for Palestinians, across the territory that is home to more than three million people.
