How settler violence and settlement expansion are impacting life across the West Bank
LONDON: The morning after Israeli settlers descended on Khirbet Al-Tuba, a small shepherding community in the Masafer Yatta area of the occupied West Bank, the silence was broken only by the crunch of ash underfoot.
Three homes had been reduced to blackened shells and several defaced with Hebrew graffiti. The community’s solar panels — the hamlet’s only source of electricity — lay smashed on the ground. Families who had spent the night fleeing flames were left to survey what remained.
“The settlers started throwing stones. We rushed to protect the women, but they got to my wife and daughter and beat them,” resident Radwan Jundiya told AFP news agency. “Then they started spraying something and setting the room on fire. The pictures tell the whole story.”
Palestinian Radwan Abu Jindeya and his daughter stand in their damaged house, which he says was destroyed by Israeli settlers, in Tuba, Masafer Yatta, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on August 6, 2026. (Reuters/Mussa Qawasma)
