Several Palestinians were injured and 63-year-old Ghadeer Fuqaha Masalmeh was killed on Friday, as a wave of Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and their homes has swept across the occupied West Bank. Masalmeh is the third Palestinian to be killed in the West Bank over the past week. 2021 has seen a staggering rise in settler violence, with UN OCHA reporting at least 450 settler attacks against Palestinians and their property as of December 6th.

The Israeli military has changed its rules of engagement to allow its forces to fire on Palestinians who have thrown stones or firebombs even when they no longer pose any danger. The rules will only be applied to Palestinian stonethrowers, though Jewish settlers run riot in the West Bank. The new rule is a sop to Israeli settlers, the IDF’s clientele.

A wave of settler violence spread across the occupied West Bank in the early hours of Friday morning, severely injuring several Palestinians and causing damage to their property, in a series of “revenge” attacks following the killing of an Israeli settler. 

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank town of Beita have been struggling to access their land for the olive harvest due to the Israeli military’s continued occupation of Jabal Sabih. “No matter what, we will not leave this land,” Beita resident Ammar Hamayel tells Mondoweiss. “We grew up here, we learned here what it means to be Palestinian and what the land means to us. I will not leave here until my soul leaves my body.”

The residents of Sheikh Jarrah announced on Tuesday that they were rejecting a proposal by the Israeli Supreme Court that would have made them “protected tenants” in their own homes, paving the way for the future displacement of their families by Israeli settlers. 

There’s noting more disturbing than celebrating the burning alive of a baby. This is precisely what Israeli Jewish settlers were doing yesterday, taunting a survivor of the Dawabshe family arson attack in 2015. “Ali is on the grill!” they shouted, in reference to the 18-month Palestinian baby killed in the attack.

Israeli society broadly has turned its back on the idea of a Palestinian state and supports the colonization of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. There is now one state because that is what Israeli Jews want, but the American media won’t tell us that.