A family flees and a mother mourns after Israeli settlers attack a Palestinian village

JIT, West Bank — They came into the village just past sundown, dozens of Israeli settlers wearing masks, dressed in dark clothes and armed with rocks, Kalashnikovs and M16s, witnesses said.

A local resident, Muawiya al-Sidee, said his 13-year-old daughter was one of the first to spot them as she and her younger siblings were playing Thursday in their front garden in the village of Jit, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“‘Baba, settlers are coming!’” the girl screamed.

Al-Sidee and his wife, who was breastfeeding their 2-year-old daughter at the time, piled their five children into their car and drove off just as the settlers reached their front door.

Seconds later, he said, the Israelis from the nearby Eli settlement smashed the windows of his family’s home and threw in three Molotov cocktails, burning rooms where, moments earlier, the family had gathered.

As the family fled, a call went out over mosque loudspeakers in the village of some 3,000 people, imploring young men to come out and defend against the rampaging settlers.

When al-Sidee returned hours later, after the settlers had withdrawn, he found the sofas in his house were charred husks and the overhead lamps had melted.

Elsewhere in the village, Rasheed al-Seda, 23, awoke when the call for defenders sounded from the mosques. He joined a group determined to defend the village, armed with nothing but stones.

It would cost him his life, his mother and the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.

The Israeli military confirmed the attack on the village.

“Dozens of Israeli civilians, some of them masked, entered the town of Jit and set fire to vehicles and structures in the area, hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails,” a military statement said, adding that the military had opened an investigation and was looking into reports of a fatality.

More than 2.7 million Palestinians reside in ancestral cities, towns and farming villages in the West Bank, where, for generations, many have lived off the land. But that existence is increasingly under threat as more Israelis move to the territory — they now number nearly 500,000 — to live in settlements considered illegal under international law.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel and the start of the war in the Gaza Strip, attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians across the West Bank have become common. There have been about 1,250 such attacks in this time, according to the United Nations — 25 in the past week alone.

More than 589 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or Jewish settlers in the West Bank since Oct. 7, according to Palestinian health officials. Eighteen Israelis have been killed in the territory in the same time period, according to the United Nations.

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On Thursday night, al-Seda became one of the latest Palestinian casualties.

He had just joined the other men who were running in the direction of the rampaging settlers when, according to residents and Palestinian health officials, he was shot in the chest by a settler.

Multiple residents said the Israeli army was preventing ambulances and fire trucks from entering the village. The Israeli military denied the accusations.

Other men carried al-Seda to a car — his blood staining the pavement. Residents said he was driven to the entrance of the village, where he was transferred to an ambulance that had been blocked from entering. From there he was taken to a hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.

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In total, four houses and six vehicles were burned, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group.

The military said that its forces, along with Israel Border Police, had been dispatched to the site and dispersed the rampage by firing shots into the air and “removing the Israeli civilians from the town” within about 30 minutes from the time it began.

But rights groups and Palestinians have said in the past that the Israeli military often does nothing to stop such attacks. And Jit residents said that the military had not arrived at the scene until more than an hour after the settler rampage had begun.

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, whose coalition government includes West Bank settlers in top positions, said the leader “takes seriously the riots that took place this evening in the village of Jit, which included injury to life and property by Israelis who entered the village.”

But far-right members of Netanyahu’s government, including Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, have made inflammatory statements about Palestinians before and have advanced policies to expand Israel’s hold on the West Bank.

In October, Ben-Gvir, who oversees the police, promised to provide thousands of guns to Israelis, including to settlers. He posted photographs that showed him handing out assault rifles to civilians.

Jit residents said Netanyahu’s government bore some responsibility for the attack.

“Ben-Gvir gave them these weapons to attack us,” said Oomyma al-Sidee, a relative of Muawiya al-Sidee. She said she was holed up in her home with her six sons and other relatives as settlers tried to break through the metal front door.

“This is terrorism,” she said.

From the roof of their home, her sons threw rocks at the settlers, trying to push them away from the home and two vehicles parked out front. Some of the settlers smashed the vehicles’ windows and set them on fire with Molotov cocktails, she said.

Despite the danger, she said, her husband ran outside with a hose to try to put out the fire, worried that the vehicles would explode and ignite their home.

“We escaped death,” she said.

This was not the first time that the family had been targeted, she said. In October, Israelis from the same settlement kidnapped her husband for an hour, beat him with guns and threatened to shoot him.

Since then, al-Sidee said, she has kept their IDs, important documents and gold jewelry in a lunchbox that she carries with her every time she leaves her house.

On Thursday night, after the attack, she and her family slept at a relative’s house.

“Tonight, I don’t know where we will sleep. They might come back,” al-Sidee said Friday, expressing a widespread fear throughout the village.

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She had just returned from the wake for al-Seda, who had been a student in an Arabic class she teaches.

Throughout the village, mourning posters had gone up for al-Seda. At his family’s home, a banner hung outside as villagers streamed in to attend the wake. Recitations from the Quran played in the background as women came in, offering their condolences and sipping bitter coffee.

In one corner, his mother, Iman al-Seda, sat reciting prayers and lamenting the loss of her son.

“My love, my life,” she said, weeping and wiping her bloodshot eyes with a crumpled tissue.

Rasheed al-Seda, who had worked in computers, was a sociable person who brought life to their home, his mother said. He would always kiss on her cheeks and hands, a common sign of respect for elders in Arab culture.

“What am I going to do?” she said. “I wish he hadn’t gone to help.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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