It was well past midnight when the masked arsonists sneaked into the hilltop Palestinian village of Burqa. Arriving from the direction of a nearby Israeli settlement, they crept inside a junkyard on the edge of the village.
They sprayed liquid on several cars, security footage showed, and set the vehicles alight. One sprayed graffiti on a barn wall, tagging the name of a nearby settlement, as well as the Hebrew word for “Revenge.”
It was the third attack that July night in this central pocket of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and the seventh attack on this particular junkyard since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, according to its owner.
“Before the war they harassed us, but not like this,” said Muhammad Sabr Asalaya, 56, the junkyard owner. “Now, they’re trying to expel as many people as they can and annex as much land as they can.”
Such attacks were on the rise before Hamas led a deadly raid on Israel in 2023, setting off the war in Gaza, and they have since become the new normal across much of the West Bank. With the world’s attention on Gaza, extremist settlers in the West Bank are carrying out one of the most violent and effective campaigns of intimidation and land grabbing since Israel occupied the territory during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
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