Image: Al-Haq

Settler violence plays an increasingly integral role in entrenching Israel’s settler colonial apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT). The gravity, scale and intensity of settler violence has grown exponentially in recent years as Israel supports, encourages and protects the perpetrators while abandoning Palestinian victims of assault, threats, intimidation, and dispossession and turning a blind eye to Palestinian communities facing routine attacks. Settler violence is not a series of individual or minor incidents, as claimed by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but rather a widespread and systematic practice facilitated by Israel to pursue its Zionist settler colonial goal of Palestinian erasure.

Between January and mid-March 2026, eight Palestinians were killed by Israeli settlers in the OPT, which is as many as in the whole of 2025. Six Palestinians were killed during the first three weeks of March – when the majority of Palestinians were marking the Holy month of Ramadan. In addition, on 19 March 2026, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned that, in 2026, “more than 260 Palestinians [had] been injured by Israeli settlers during settler attacks, reflecting a threefold increase in the monthly average of Palestinians injured by settlers during settler attacks since 2023.” The rapid increase in settler violence, has been condemned in a joint statement issued by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of 20 countries in February 2026, and more recently by the European Union in May 2026.