After completing Maghrib prayer, Yasser Saqer Rashid sat down in one corner of the al-Marah mosque in the occupied West Bank and started reading the Quran. But moments later, a commotion outside the mosque drew his attention.
Israeli settlers were storming the courtyard of the mosque located in the town of Deir Dibwan near Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority.
Rashid said that a settler poured an incendiary substance on the window of the mosque to start a fire. “He wanted to burn me alive,” the 92-year-old Palestinian American told Al Jazeera.
“I was shocked by a settler holding a petrol bomb, pointing it at my face and clothes near the window,” he said.
While the full extent of the structural damage to the al-Marah mosque remains unclear, surveillance footage documented masked settlers breaking into the mosque’s inner rooms, before stepping outside to torch six vehicles belonging to local residents.
In the neighbouring town of Burqa, another mosque, al-Noor, was targeted by an arson attack shortly afterwards, amid escalating violence by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. Attackers ignited tyres and flammable materials at the doors in an attempt to burn the building down.
Settler attacks have exploded since Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, where more than 73,000 people have been killed. On Tuesday, the Palestinian group Hamas condemned illegal Israeli settlers for setting fire to a mosque in the village of Jiljilya near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
In many cases, settlers are accompanied by Israeli forces. At least 13 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank so far this year, according to United Nations data.
Far-right Israeli ministers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have openly backed settlers and called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories.
“We are steadfast here and will not leave,” said Adel Maatan, the muezzin of the Burqa mosque, who was reciting the Quran during the attack. “This is our land, inherited from our ancestors, and we will remain in it until the Day of Judgement.”
The recent arson attacks on mosques are not isolated incidents but part of a documented pattern of targeting Palestinian religious sites, observers say. According to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, Israeli forces and settlers carried out 22 separate attacks on Muslim religious sites during May 2026 alone. The majority of these occurred in the Hebron governorate, which saw 14 attacks, followed by Nablus, Jenin, Jericho and Ramallah.
In eastern Ramallah, dozens of mosques and homes have been targeted by settlers using flammable materials and arson in highly coordinated attacks aimed at driving Palestinian families from their land.
Despite holding US citizenship, Rashid found his passport offered no protection against the attacks. He issued a direct appeal to Washington, demanding protection for Palestinian Americans who remain vulnerable to escalating settler violence in the West Bank.
Mansour Mansour, the mayor of Deir Dibwan, said that the assailants meticulously distributed roles. While one group targeted the mosque and the elderly man, another attacked nearby homes, and a third group set fire to six vehicles and agricultural crops before withdrawing.
Further north, in the village of Beit Imrin near Nablus, Sadeq Faqih’s dream home has been transformed into a fortress. Faqih, a 41-year-old fabric and furniture merchant, built his home in 2020 in a “beautiful high area with fresh air”.
However, the recent establishment of an Israeli settler outpost nearby turned his dream into a “hell” amid threats of attacks.
On the night of April 21, 2026, a group of settlers breached his property, destroying glass doors and attempting to break into the main house before locals intervened and forced them to flee.
Faqih noted that Israeli forces arrived 20 minutes later and reviewed the surveillance footage, which clearly showed the faces of two unmasked attackers fleeing back to the outpost. Despite filing a formal police complaint and handing over the evidence, Faqih was shocked to learn the case was later closed against “unknown assailants”.
Settlers who commit crimes against Palestinians are generally granted impunity as Israeli authorities rarely punish them. An Israeli court freed a settler accused of killing 31-year-old Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen in 2025.
Forced to protect his family, Faqih surrounded his home with heavy barbed wire and reinforced window guards.
“It became a real prison,” he said, adding that despite the “terror”, “we will not leave our homes under any circumstances.”
More than 117 villages and communities in the West Bank have been subject to either complete or partial displacement due to settler attacks, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Faqih’s wife, Abeer, was 36 weeks pregnant when the armed settlers stormed their yard.
“I didn’t know what to do or what was going to happen to us,” Abeer recalled. “They broke the glass and wanted to come inside. Out of fear, I started running, went down the stairs, and slipped”.
Her water broke amid the panic, prompting doctors to induce a premature delivery. Baby Saleh was born mere hours after the attack on April 22.
Today, the baby remains in the intensive care unit at the Hclinic Specialty Hospital in Ramallah, battling complications from his premature birth. He suffers from a Pseudomonas bacterial infection and lung issues exacerbated by a ventilator.
“Every time they try to remove the breathing tube, his chest struggles,” Abeer told Al Jazeera.
The tragedies suffered by the Rashid and Faqih families reflect a broader, systemic surge in violence across the occupied territory, advocates say.
In May alone this year, the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission documented 1,659 attacks carried out by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinians and their properties. Of these, 551 were carried out by settlers exclusively, with violence heavily concentrated in the governorates of Hebron, Ramallah and Al-Bireh and Nablus.
The economic lifelines and homes of Palestinian communities are the target. Throughout May this year, authorities recorded 436 attacks on Palestinian properties, including 215 specific incidents of vandalism and destruction. Agricultural lands were also severely impacted, with 124 separate attacks resulting in the burning, uprooting or vandalism of 7,222 trees, including 3,317 olive trees. In one such attack on May 8, settlers set fire to a Palestinian home in the village of Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya, south of Nablus.
Religious sites have also increasingly become flashpoints for arson campaigns. On May 15, settlers attacked the village of Jibiya, northwest of Ramallah, setting fire to a local mosque and two vehicles while spray-painting racist graffiti on the walls of residential homes. Rights groups note that this grassroots settler violence operates in tandem with official state policies; during the same month, Israeli authorities carried out 70 demolition operations, resulting in the complete destruction of 155 Palestinian structures across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
According to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, settlers have established at least 165 new outposts since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023, with 89 of those built in 2025 alone.
The settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has gone up from 250,000 in the 1990s to more than 750,000 now. Settlements are the biggest hurdle in the realisation of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state as part of the so-called two-state solution.
Last week, Amnesty International said the displacement of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank forms part of a deliberate Israeli government strategy of ethnic cleansing rather than the actions of a few “rogue” settlers or far-right government ministers.
On Tuesday, Israel seized planning and construction powers covering the Ibrahimi Mosque in the occupied West Bank from the Palestinian authorities.
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