A 61-year-old Palestinian man, Saeed Muhammad Ibrahim Rabah, was struck with a pipe outside his home in Khirbet al-Rakeez, and police arrested a 16-year-old boy from the Israeli settlement of Avigayil in connection with the beating. That’s the machinery on the ground: settlers, soldiers, police, and the people who live under them, all in the same sentence because the violence doesn’t bother to separate itself neatly.
West Bank Rule by Force
Palestinian officials said at least 87 Palestinians have been killed this year in almost 1,500 attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers, while three Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in 2026. The numbers sit there like a ledger from a system that runs on retaliation, occupation, and the routine use of force against civilians. Rabah said two settlers arrived at his home in the occupied West Bank on Saturday afternoon, and that one struck him on his back when he approached. He said, “We will remain, no matter what happens,” and, “This is our land and this is our homeland, and we must protect it.”
Rabah’s account isn’t an abstraction. He said he lost a leg after being shot by a settler a year earlier. This time, the beating came outside his own home. Police arrested the 16-year-old boy, but the broader structure stayed intact: armed settlers on one side, military power behind them, and Palestinians left to absorb the damage.
Separately, the health ministry in the West Bank said a 14-year-old in the Askar refugee camp in Nablus was shot dead by Israeli forces, who did not immediately comment. The uncle of Islam Maher Ajouri, Nehad Ajouri, called the shooting indiscriminate. Israel’s military said it had detained a suspect in a stabbing attack that wounded a 24-year-old Israeli man in the area of al-Auja in the West Bank. Israel’s emergency services said the man was taken to a hospital in moderate condition. The state’s language moves quickly when one of its own is hurt. When a Palestinian child is killed, the comment often arrives later, if at all.
Gaza Under the Same Logic
In Gaza, four-year-old Mohammed Taha died after an Israeli airstrike hit a house in central Gaza on Sunday, hospital authorities said. The strike in Zawaida also wounded at least five other people, including a child, according to Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital, which received the casualties. An Israeli strike in southern Gaza wounded at least seven people, including three children, according to health officials at Nasser Hospital.
The military later said it struck and killed a Hamas commander in central Gaza, and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital confirmed that the man named in the statement, Ismail Abu Ful, was killed. The official phrasing stays tidy. The bodies don’t.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement that he instructed the military to “act immediately and forcefully” to prevent launches of balloons, kites or drones from Gaza toward nearby Israeli communities. “We view every launch as an act of war in every respect,” he said. Before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas-led militants on Israel, when 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, burning kites and balloons were sent from Gaza into southern Israel, causing fires and other damage. The state response to improvised airborne threats is predictably massive. The people under the bombs get the bill.
While the heaviest fighting has subsided since a fragile ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war took hold in October, Israeli forces have carried out repeated airstrikes, killing more than 1,280 Palestinians, according to health officials in Gaza. The Gaza Health Ministry, part of the Hamas-led government, maintains detailed casualty records that are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts, though it doesn’t give a breakdown of civilians and militants. That’s the other side of the same apparatus: a ruling movement with its own bureaucracy, its own records, its own monopoly over a trapped population.
The State System Keeps Its Grip
The West Bank is home to about 3 million Palestinians and around 500,000 Israeli settlers. U.N. bodies and most countries view settlements as illegal under international law regarding military occupations. Arab press commentary cited Hamas’s acceptance of a disarmament provision as a consequential development shaping regional perceptions and policy debates. The diplomats can debate provisions and perceptions. On the ground, the armed institutions keep doing what armed institutions do: police, strike, detain, and bury the consequences in official language.