TURMUS AYYA, West Bank — Fayez Hijaz thought he was safe picking olives in his own yard, in a village where his family has lived for generations, in a part of the West Bank that even Israel’s settlers had long considered off limits. The Israeli settler who followed him to his tree on a recent Thursday had other ideas.
“Go,” the man said, repeating that one word of Arabic amid a torrent of Hebrew that Hijaz, 71, couldn’t understand. But the threat was clear: The settler movement, financed by the government, enabled by security forces and increasingly violent, had reached his front door.
“Now they have come into my own garden,” Hijaz said, soon after the settler chased him away and scattered the olives he’d picked. “They are not supposed to be here, but we are the ones they want to leave.”
Hijaz has the Oslo accords on his side. Signed by Israel three decades ago, the agreement puts his village in Area B, where civilian life is under Palestinian control, a policy meant to set a foundation for self-rule.
Now, the outposts — and the violence that emanates from them — are spreading across Area B. Critics blame a newly aggressive Israeli policy, one that world powers have done little to rein in and that threatens the last negotiated blueprint for Israelis and Palestinians living side by side.
The Netanyahu government, and its supporters, blame a radical fringe for the violence and harassment. But many investigators see an organized force, mobilized from clusters of outposts, armed by the government and at times working in concert with soldiers and police sent to keep order.
The question of whether the violence is official state policy could be answered soon — if ex-military chief Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main opponent, succeeds in forming a new government.
Eisenkot, who was tapped Saturday evening by President Isaac Herzog to try to form a governing coalition, has condemned settler attack as “Jewish terror under the auspices of the government of Israel” and pledged to dismantle “all illegal outposts in Areas A and B.”
Palestinian victims and former Israeli soldiers, as well as organizations that monitor settler activity, say the aggression is the culmination of three years of local coordination, national policy and state money.
“That’s the Israeli government, full stop. We’re talking about policy,” said Tamir Pardo, a former head of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, who was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“When you see who supports them with vehicles, with money, with permission to do whatever they’re doing, it’s clear,” Pardo said.
This account of how new swaths of the West Bank came to be consumed by new levels of violence draws on more than 20 interviews with victims, activists and researchers, as well as reports by monitoring organizations built on hundreds of witness accounts.
Together, they portray an amalgam of zealotry, national policy and international money whose effect, if not its goal, is to squeeze Palestinians into an ever-smaller footprint while extending Israeli control across the West Bank.
Two days before Hijaz was attacked in his garden, 15 masked men coming from the direction of nearby settler outposts had firebombed his neighbor’s house, burned two cars and bludgeoned another man in his front yard, according to security footage reviewed by The Washington Post.
Two days before that, a similar band attacked European diplomats in the area, a day after settlers beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine, who was seriously injured, in the adjoining village of Abu Falah.
“Instead of talking about settler violence, I think that what we are actually seeing is state violence,” said Jonathan Pollak, a longtime Israeli anti-settlement activist. “And that’s not something that a bunch of kids can do.”
Doron Spielman, a spokesman for Netanyahu, dismissed the accusations that settler violence represents government policy as “absurd.”
The prime minister has condemned the attacks, Spielman said, presided over an increase in arrests and directed Israel’s domestic intelligence agency to handle enforcement. The accusations are a distraction, he said.
“What this is doing is covering up the much larger and much more dangerous phenomenon of the Palestinian Authority’s terrorism, Hamas’s terrorism in Judea and Samaria,” Spielman said, using Jewish biblical names for the West Bank.
The village of Turmus Ayya, where settlers’ tents appeared earlier this year, is a case study, critics say, in how outpost dwellers act as the shock troops of Israeli expansion, pushing past old boundaries and deeper into Palestinian territory — claiming they have government approval.
Hijaz identified the man in his garden as Amishav Melet, a settler from a nearby outpost whom residents, activists and Israeli media accounts have singled out as a central figure in the harassment of Turmus Ayya.
Melet patrols its groves and streets almost daily on an all-terrain vehicle, residents say, filming people on his phone, ripping up harvest tarps and ordering farmers off their land. Activists have photographed him at the edges of several attacks, usually just before or after, often standing with soldiers.
A year ago, an activist filmed him in the road with a gun and a phone as the village’s farmers set out together for the harvest, minutes before a masked mob swept down on them, burning cars and clubbing Afaf Abu Alia, a 55-year-old grandmother, unconscious.
Last month, Melet was photographed with soldiers after the firebombing near Hijaz’s home.
As often happens, the military responded to that attack not by detaining settlers but by declaring a closed military zone and ordering Palestinians out of their groves, preventing for another day the harvest that many families depend on for their livelihood.
In September, visiting the village at the request of several U.S. citizens who lived there, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee witnessed Melet drive “right through their olive groves right in front of us,” he said in an interview.
The ambassador posted video of it, decrying “criminal terror acts by a band of trespassers.”
Melet, reached by The Post via text messages, denied he had been involved in violence or harassment, describing himself as a “peace activist and shepherd” who works in full cooperation and coordination with the relevant authorities.
“Any such false claim against me is an antisemitic and anti-Zionist blood libel,” he said.
Instead, Melet described Turmus Ayya as “a terrorist village” occupied by “Palestinazis who stole our land and are fighting against our very return to our land.”
“Our entire Bible happened here,” Melet wrote. “Our forefathers lived here! Here the covenant between God and humankind will be upheld, fulfilled and tested.”
Huckabee described the beating of Levine and similar attacks as “the most disgusting and inexcusable display of thuggery.” Washington wants the perpetrators jailed, he said.
But he dismissed any broader pattern backed by Israel or most West Bank settlers.
The attackers are “a very, very small number,” Huckabee said, in an interview, “in some cases, drug-addled teens, in some cases it’s just people who are mean.”
That’s not reality for residents of Turmus Ayya, who say the army comes when settlers call, not when Palestinians do.
Yasir Alkam, a spokesman for the town, said he regularly sees troops arrive, consult with Melet and then order away Palestinians and the Israeli and international activists who come to monitor the harvest.
“Of course the settlers remain free to be in closed military zones,” Alkam said. “But not our farmers. They protect only them.” When Palestinian residents call the Israeli police, he said, they are told their officers cannot enter Area B.
Those accounts are corroborated by former soldiers who have given whistleblower testimony to Breaking the Silence, an Israeli advocacy group.
In an interview with The Post, one former Israel Defense Forces soldier said it was made clear which side his unit was there to protect. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about possible retribution.
“It was something that was very organized; ‘This is what you are supposed to do,’” he said. “In every incident I witnessed, I never saw any settler arrested even though it was very, very clear that settlers had started the acts of violence and they were invading territory that was not theirs.”
In response to a query from The Post, the IDF denied that its soldiers participated in or allowed acts of violence by settlers.
“The Israel Police is the authority responsible for enforcing the law in cases involving offenses committed by Israeli civilians,” the IDF said in a statement. “However, due to their operational presence in the area, IDF soldiers are sometimes the first to arrive at the scene and are obligated to intervene in order to stop acts of violence and restore order.”
Israel’s settlement project, deemed illegal by most of the world, was turbocharged at the end of 2022, when Netanyahu returned to power in a coalition with two hard-line settler parties and gave their leaders, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, sweeping powers over the West Bank.
Both men and their parties won enough votes to remain in parliament and could obstruct efforts to rein in settler violence. Whether they remain in the government will depend on the coalition talks about to begin.
In the Netanyahu government, Smotrich took control of settlement planning, permits and demolitions. His Finance Ministry routed about $18 million to farm outposts in 2023 and 2024, buying ATVs, drones and cameras, according to research by Peace Now and Kerem Navot, two Israeli civil society groups opposed to settlement expansion.
Private donations flow through nonprofit settler support groups in the U.S. and Israel, such as Ahavat Gilad, which Britain placed under sanctions in June as the outposts’ “financial conduit.”
Smotrich’s once outlying views of settlement expansion were now state policy.
“The moment they joined the government, Prime Minister Netanyahu adopted Smotrich’s view,” Pardo said.
After the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, the settlement push was accelerated, and armed.
National Security Minister Ben Gvir said his ministry was buying 10,000 rifles for civilian security squads, including in West Bank settlements. In 2007, Ben Gvir, who has long lived in a settlement in the West Bank, was convicted of supporting a Jewish extremist group designated a terrorist organization by Israel.
With units rushed to Gaza and Lebanon, the military expanded settler regional defense units — known by the Hebrew acronym Hagmar — as much as sixfold, to about 7,000 armed settlers, according to the group Yesh Din.
For Palestinians, it meant that when they called the army for help with settlers, it was often settlers who responded.
The soldier who served in the South Hebron Hills described Hagmar units operating as an authority unto themselves. He saw them set up rogue checkpoints, and search Palestinian cars. In one case, he witnessed them blindfold and zip-tie the civilians, leaving them in the sun for hours.
Uniformed Hagmar troops entered Palestinian villages unannounced “just to demonstrate their presence,” the former soldier said. “They did whatever they wanted.”
One deadly encounter last March started when Palestinians tried to drive settler cattle from their farm south of Hebron, according to Israeli media and B’Tselem, an Israeli rights monitor.
A uniformed settler from a Hagmar unit arrived in an off-road vehicle and allegedly opened fire, killing Ameer Shnaran, 27, and seriously wounding his brother.
The IDF said the soldier was stripped of his reserve status and the case remains under investigation.
“Like all IDF soldiers, HAGMAR personnel are required to act in accordance with military orders, procedures, and the authorities defined for their roles,” the IDF said. “Any instances in which soldiers exceed their authority are thoroughly examined and addressed.”
Few cases reach a courtroom. When a suspect wears a uniform, the military’s legal division says off-duty offenses are jurisdiction of the police. The police say soldiers belong to the army. Of 16 complaints about settlers in uniform that Yesh Din filed from 2023 to 2025, 10 were closed, eight as “offender unknown.” The group knows of no indictment.
When the military does respond by making arrests and dismantling an implicated outpost, the changes often stick, said Ziv Stahl, executive director of Yesh Din.
Following the attacks on Levine, The Post photographer, police arrested 10 settlers and the military dismantled one outpost above Abu Falah. Within two days, all but one of the suspects had been released, according to court reports.
Days later, a Post reporter observed several individuals at a new structure erected in place of the dismantled outpost.
Huckabee said he was unaware of the suspects’ release but that the U.S. government would continue pressing for a full investigation and prosecution of those who attacked Levine.
Denials of coordination aside the results of setter activity match what government ministers in charge of Israel’s settler program say they want. Unveiling a 2025 plan to annex about 82 percent of the West Bank, Smotrich said the guiding principle was “maximum territory and minimum population.”
Settler violence has fully emptied 46 Palestinian communities since January 2023, according to the United Nations. Settlers set up 86 new outposts last year, and the government approved or legalized a record 54 settlements.
“The war gave them the opportunity to go about it very fast,” Stahl said. “I think they are also surprised at how well they could implement their own plan.”
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