Israeli settlers shoot Palestinians in West Bank villages, steal livestock 

Israeli settlers have attacked two villages in the occupied West Bank, causing casualties among the Palestinian residents, according to local officials.

Hani Odeh, the mayor of Qusra village in Nablus governorate, told the AFP news agency that Israeli settlers shot dead a Palestinian man, 28-year-old Amir Moatasem Odeh, on Saturday. Two other residents were injured.

There was also an assault on the area of Rashayda, east of Bethlehem, on Saturday, with the local mayor describing settler violence as a near-daily reality for residents.

Palestinian news agency Wafa said a group of settlers attacked in the area of Rashayda, near the village of Kisan, “firing live ammunition”.

Musa Abayat, the mayor of Rashayda, told AFP that five Palestinians were injured in the assault, including two with gunshot wounds.

Beyond those shot, three other Palestinians were beaten with sharp objects or struck by stones, with the injured taken to hospital. More than 100 sheep were also seized.

“Daily attacks” by settlers, Abayat said, had become a feature of life in the area.

The Israeli military acknowledged a “violent confrontation” had taken place involving Israeli civilians who discharged their weapons toward Palestinians. One Israeli civilian was wounded, the military told AFP, adding that two Israeli civilians had been detained alongside three Palestinians.

The attack was the latest in a run of violence that had already left its mark on the same village.

A day earlier, settlers burned down a poultry barn belonging to a local Palestinian farmer, completely destroying it, according Wafa.

Elsewhere in the West Bank on Saturday, Wafa reported that Israeli forces shot a 43-year-old Palestinian man, Ahmad Khalil Saleh, at the Beit Iksa checkpoint northwest of Jerusalem. Soldiers also severely beat his 20-year-old son at the same location, according to local sources cited by the agency.

At least five Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the start of March, according to Palestinian authorities and the United Nations, part of a broader surge in violence that has accompanied Israel’s war on Gaza.

Israeli troops or settlers have killed more than 1,045 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023, according to an AFP tally of Palestinian health ministry figures.

That violence has unfolded largely without legal consequence.

Israeli rights group Yesh Din found that more than nine in 10 investigations into ideologically-motivated offences by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank ended without indictment, a pattern the group describes not as negligence, but deliberate policy.

A sweeping UN report found that of more than 1,500 Palestinians killed between 2017 and September 2025, Israeli authorities secured just one conviction.

The UN human rights chief Volker Turk has described conditions in the West Bank as resembling apartheid, condemning what he called the “systematic asphyxiation” of Palestinian rights under two distinct bodies of law, one for settlers, another for Palestinians, across territory home to more than three million people.