Last week’s encounter in the Palestinian town of Tell, in which 4 Palestinians and 2 Israelis were killed, shatters the foolish lie of wayward youth and spontaneous, isolated incidents. The Palestinians were not terrorists. This is a plan: attack Palestinian areas deeper and deeper inside the West Bank, to force them to leave.
By Dahlia Scheindlin, reposted from Haaretz, July 28, 2026
Of all the Israeli terror attacks and pogroms against West Bank Palestinians, few expose Israel’s de facto strategy as clearly as the events on Friday in the West Bank village of Tell.
Even fewer incidents in which a Palestinian killed Israelis have generated such heated debate about Israel’s responsibility. Usually, it’s easier for Israelis to collectively blame of all Palestinians.
When settlers descended on the Palestinian village, leading to clashes in which four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed, the incident just couldn’t be spun within Israel’s comfortable tale of murderous Palestinian terrorists killing Jews.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, other political leaders and mainstream media reports tried to maintain that framing, and to be sure, many Israelis will leave it at that. But for others, it was hard not to see who brought the weapons, who barged into whose village, who drove a rifle butt into the face of an unarmed Palestinian man seeking to fend them off.
One of the Palestinians, apparently Farouk Ramadan, grabbed the gun and shot Benayahu Mellet, a member of the nearby settlement’s rapid response security team, before being shot dead himself along with three of his cousins. Another soldier was wounded and later died, as a series of revenge attacks by the IDF soldiers and settlers against Palestinian targets broke out over the next few days. It’s not yet clear, but the soldier might have been killed by Israeli fire.
With footage of the incidents racing around mainstream and social media, the story generated a maelstrom of competing interpretations. What follows is my curated list of what I see as the most important takeaways about both the attack and how Israelis are responding.
First, Mickey Gitzin, the acting CEO of the New Israel Fund, wrote: “Let’s be honest, the reason we’re all talking about what happened on Friday is because two Jews were killed. If these guys had … ‘felt threatened’ and killed four Palestinians, it wouldn’t even make the news.”
This is not necessarily representative of how mainstream Israeli Jews saw the events, but it is the terrible truth. The unchecked surge of settler violence is a side issue unless Israeli Jews are harmed. A whole Palestinian family mowed down in March barely broke through most Hebrew-language media. Israelis tend to lock their hearts and their screens to daily attacks on Palestinians by settlers or the army, whether they involve sexual assault, or the 68-to-one ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths in the West Bank this year alone, prior to Friday.
Second, some Israelis trained their anger on the settlers, and not only from the far left. The Middle East expert Elizabeth Tsurkov pointed out that many within the mainstream left, which too often panders politically to the center, treated the incident as the settler-generated provocation it is. Even Yair Golan, the Democrats party leader who pandered perfectly at first, later turned the conversation to where it belongs, sort of – to the government’s encouragement of settler violence.
Third, in this context, some Israelis even questioned the holy grail of “Palestinian terrorists.” I sensed that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s description of a “murderous terrorist attack” didn’t carry the usual punch. Most mainstream outlets did reflexively use the word “terrorists.” But even Avi Issacharoff, one of the most influential journalists in Israel and the creator of “Fauda,” analyzed the events as settler-provoked and completely preventable.
Others noted that it’s harder to apply the usual “terrorist” designation to people who were unarmed, did not plan an attack, and the violence occurred near their very own village. At what point, exactly, did the man who shot Mellet stop being a villager – someone’s father or son, who ran down a hill unarmed to try to beat back the armed settlers and took a rifle butt to his face – turn into a “terrorist”?
This is the time to remind everyone that terrorism refers to attacks on civilians for political aims. Given that the Israelis were armed and initiated the confrontation, not the Palestinians, and IDF soldiers were present during the shooting, it’s not clear why the word applies at all.
Fourth, several prominent figures compared Mellet’s killing to another recent and painful incident. The IDF soldier Gur Kehati was killed in late 2024 in Lebanon. He had been assigned to accompany an older Israeli named Ze’ev Erlich, a self-styled archeological researcher and religious fundamentalist who apparently hoped to find traces of an ancient Jewish presence in Lebanon.
Hezbollah attacks killed both of them, leading to bitter accusations by Kehati’s family that Gur died for Erlich’s ideology, not for Israel. An IDF legal probe basically closed the case just a few weeks ago. Since Friday, many have shared a post attributed to Kehati’s grandfather – imagining a nightmare of yet another grandchild being killed for the wrong reasons, and covered up by the authorities with lies.
But the most important takeaway of all is what’s happening every day in the West Bank, before and after the incident on Friday. You can’t fudge this with “framing” debates, as prominent right-wing pundit Amit Segal tried to do. The Jewish Israelis who attacked Palestinians at Tell were everything: settlers, army, settlement “rapid response security teams,” who are backed by the Defense Ministry. What’s indisputable is that they barged into Areas A and B, those bits of territory nominally (but barely) governed by Palestinians; when the soldiers showed up, as always, they didn’t stop the guys with the guns
This shatters the foolish lie of wayward youth and spontaneous, isolated incidents. This is a plan: attack Palestinian areas deeper and deeper inside the West Bank, to force them to leave. One of the most infamous such settlers, Elisha Yered, boasted openly of this strategy on a podcast that also made the rounds in light of Friday’s attack.
The events let it all hang out: Yered is one link in a chain. Netanyahu is the next link, announcing after the killings that Israel would destroy the home of the Palestinian who shot Mellet and was then killed; crack down on Palestinian towns and weapons; and recognize and establish more outposts as official settlements – which encourage the very people committing these acts. His words are linked in turn to Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who named their long-term vision aloud: to do to the West Bank what Israel has done to Gaza. That was always their plan.
Dahlia Scheindlin is an Israeli reporter for Haaretz.
(2/2) Not Leftist Spin: If a Radical Hilltop Youth Says Settler Violence Is a Feature, Not a Bug, Why Deny It?
Settler activist Elisha Yered bragged of the number and variety of participants in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank: hundreds of settlers are doing ‘everything they can to expel and hurt’ Palestinians, ‘adults with families, combat soldiers who served in the reserves during the war, everyone’
By Itay Rom, reposted from Haaretz, March 05, 2026
The war with Iran has disrupted daily life in Israel, but in the West Bank it’s business as usual. On Monday there was another incident that would have made headlines anywhere else but barely elicited a yawn in Israel: Two Palestinian brothers, fathers of young children, were shot dead by a settler.
What followed was the standard ritual: Leftists called the killings murder, while settlers portrayed them as acts of self-defense in the face of Palestinian violence. Elisha Yered, a prominent “hilltop youth” settler activist and former Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melechspokesman who was a suspect in the August 2023 killing of a Palestinian man (but never indicted), wrote that “Arab terrorists attacked with stones a Jewish bulldozer” operating in the area and that security personnel sent to the scene “apparently fired in self-defense.” But to paraphrase Raymond Carver, what do Yered and company talk about when they talk about self-defense?
جيش الاحتلال يؤمن هجوم مليشيات المستوطنين ويواصل اقتحام قرية قريوت جنوب نابلس. pic.twitter.com/HkrgQalulI
— شبكة قدس الإخبارية (@qudsn) March 2, 2026
In an interview this week with the popular right-wing, Hebrew-language podcast “Al Hamashma’ut,” Yered gave a remarkably honest answer. Since October 7, he explained, a new perspective has emerged in the territories: “People are saying, ‘There’s an enemy here who is waiting for the day it can murder me, and I’m not willing to be Kfar Azza,” referring to one of the Gaza-border kibbutzim that was among the hardest-hit communities in the massacre. “I will do everything I can to expel it, to hurt it.” With a generous interpretation, he concludes that even an unprovoked attack on innocent people is self-defense because “there’s obvious self-defense, and there’s self-defense that, you know, the best defense is [a good] offense.”
When that’s the rationale, it’s easy to understand why, in Yered’s view, the person who shot the two Palestinians in the head was also acting in simple self-defense, even though it was reported that the Israel Defense Forces investigation of the incident determined that he shot them while they were sitting in the yard of their home and that they “were not involved in the friction.” By the way, how was this friction generated?
תיעוד מתנחלים תוקפים באלות פלסטינים ופעילי זכויות אדם ישראלים ליד כפר קוסרה שבאזור שכם
צילום: סעיף 27א’ pic.twitter.com/GKmtnBNo6S— הארץ חדשות (@haaretznewsvid) February 27, 2026
According to the military investigation, it all began when a settler trespassed on Palestinian land. From Yered’s perspective, that is irrelevant. He made it clear that he and his friends are expanding the lands they control without troubling to check who actually owns them, according to the land registry. When the interviewer suggests that such actions “create friction and violence,” Yered replies, “Without question, we are initiating friction, and we’re also proud of that.”
In December, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked in an interview how he was dealing with escalating settler violence, he answered that the matter had been looked into and that it involved “about 70 kids. They’re not from the West Bank. …. They’re actually teens from broken homes.”
Ignore the leftist criticism, which in any case has long since become white noise, and listen to Yered, who shatters Netanyahu’s excuses with demonstrable pleasure: “It’s really not 70 or 700, it’s much more, and it’s people from within Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical names for the West Bank.
Marginal youth? As to that claim, he asserts that it is “one of the most embarrassing things imaginable. I’m sorry I’m shattering their narrative.” As proof, when arrests are made, “that rabbi’s son and the most hard-core families in the settlement are also there.”
After the murder of Benjamin Achimeir, a 14-year-old Israeli boy in April 2024, Yered added, “almost 1,000 people” went into the village of the alleged perpetrator, as well as the adjacent village, “and set those villages on fire. …. Adults with families, combat soldiers who served in the reserves during the war, everyone.”
Yered’s remarks are important both in order to acknowledge the reality and in order to remind us of the evil that the cabinet ministers, led by Netanyahu, have chosen to ignore, at best, to defend and to express support, at worst, and above all – to lie.
Itay Rom is an Israeli reporter for Haaretz.
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