A Palestinian man was killed on Saturday in the West Bank amid an ongoing wave of violence that has claimed 22 lives since the start of the Iran war, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The killing landed in the middle of a familiar machinery of domination: military force, settler expansion, and official silence wrapped around both.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health identified the dead man as Ali Majed Hamadneh, 23. Israel’s military said it responded to a violent riot in the village of Deir Jarir, northeast of Ramallah, and said a soldier in the reserves shot a Palestinian who was evacuated for medical treatment and later died at the hospital. The military said it opened an investigation.
Who Pays for the Decisions at the Top
The violence is not happening in a vacuum. So far this year, 33 Palestinians have been killed, two thirds during the Iran war in March, and settlers have killed at least eight of them. Those numbers sit beneath the polished language of “security” and “response,” while ordinary people in the West Bank absorb the consequences.
Fathi Hamdan, head of the Deir Jarir Village Council, said Hamadneh was shot by a settler in civilian clothes and that the military only responded to the incident after the shooting. That account places the local village council, not the armed apparatus, as the first witness to the violence. The Israeli military declined to comment on whether the reservist was on duty during the incident or involved in the riot as a civilian.
Palestinians and rights groups say Israeli routinely fails to hold settlers or soldiers accountable for violence. That pattern hangs over the official claim that an investigation has been opened, a familiar gesture from institutions that control the guns and then promise to review how they were used.
Settlements as Policy, Not Accident
The violence comes as Israel’s government approved the establishment of 34 new settlements in the West Bank, according to the settlement monitoring rights group Peace Now. Peace Now said the Security Cabinet approved the new settlements on April 1 but kept the approval under wraps during the war with Iran to avoid straining relations with the U.S.
Some of the approved settlements included neighborhoods of existing settlements that received independent designation, while others were small, unrecognized outposts and farms that received official approval, according to Peace Now. The paperwork of expansion keeps moving even while the war is used as cover.
Peace Now condemned the approvals as a "frenzy" and said they were an election ploy to appeal to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing supporters ahead of Israeli elections due later this year. The election calendar, in other words, becomes another stage for the same hierarchy: land seized, facts managed, and support courted from above while people below live with the fallout.
What They Call Security
Peace Now said, "The establishment of settlements harms security, places an abnormal burden on the IDF, and undermines the possibility of resolving the conflict and achieving any future security and peace," referring to the Israeli military by its acronym. The statement names the burden, but the burden itself is carried by those living under the occupation and the violence it normalizes.
Several right-wing politicians celebrated the spate of new settlement approvals during a ceremony on Friday marking the establishment of new settlement. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, "Israel’s political decisions in Judea and Samaria are completely killing off the idea of separate states and the founding of a terror state in the heart (of Israel)."
The government has established a total of 102 new settlements since 2023, according to Peace Now. That tally gives the lie to any pretense that the system is drifting by accident. It is being built, approved, and celebrated in public, while the dead are counted in the margins.