Israeli settler attacks fuel the fire as Gaza war rages

QUSRA, West Bank (Reuters) - Mourning his father and brother, Mohammed Wadi says armed Israeli settlers from outposts overlooking his olive-growing West Bank village no longer aim low when they shoot at Palestinian neighbours. "Now, they shoot to kill," he said.

Violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, already at a more than 15-year high this year, surged further after Israel hurtled into a new war in the separate enclave of Gaza in response to Palestinian militant group Hamas unleashing the deadliest day in Israel's history on Oct 7.

Days later, on Oct 12, Wadi's father and brother were shot dead when armed Israeli settlers and soldiers stopped a funeral cortege for three other Palestinians killed by settlers the day before, two Reuters witnesses and three other people present said. It was one of the more than 170 attacks on Palestinians involving settlers recorded by the U.N. since the Hamas rampage.

"Arabs and Jews used to throw stones at each other. Settlers my age now all seem to have automatic weapons," said Wadi, 29, in the olive-growing village of Qusra. And while a decade ago armed settlers would fire their weapons to scare or injure villagers during confrontations, increasingly, shootings were deadly, he said.

Reuters could not definitively establish who shot the Wadis. Palestinian officials who investigated the funeral killings said the gunfire appeared to come from settlers rather than soldiers, a view supported by the three other people present.

Israel's hard-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of at least two senior government ministers living in the settlements, said he had ordered the purchase of 10,000 rifles to arm Israeli civilians, including settlers, after Hamas' attack.

Ben-Gvir's office did not respond to a request for comment about whether guns had already been distributed in the West Bank. He said on Twitter on Oct 11 that 900 assault rifles had been handed out in areas to the north of the West Bank, close to Lebanon, and that thousands more would soon be distributed.

Vigilante-style settler attacks have killed 29 people this year according to the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office, OCHA. At least eight of those were since Oct 7. alone, worrying ordinary Palestinians, Israeli security experts and Western officials.

Washington has condemned settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank while the European Union on Tuesday denounced "settler terrorism" that risked a "dangerous escalation of the conflict."

Daily settler attacks have more than doubled, the UN figures show, since Hamas, which controls the coastal enclave of Gaza to Israel's southwest, killed 1,400 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage. Israel has since bombed and invaded Gaza, martyring nearly 9,000 Palestinians.

While Hamas tightly controls besieged Gaza, the West Bank is a complex patchwork of hillside cities, Israeli settlements and army checkpoints that split Palestinian communities. Hamas cited Israeli actions in the West Bank, core to a would-be Palestinian state, in waging its killing spree.

FUNERAL KILLINGS

After settlers shot dead three Palestinians at an olive grove near Qusra on Oct. 11, Mohammed's brother Ahmed and father Ibrahim saw it as their duty to greet the funeral procession as it brought the bodies back from a nearby hospital, he said.

Wadi's father was shot through the torso, his brother through the neck and chest, after the armed settlers, in the presence of uniformed soldiers, blocked the cortege at a roadside, the five witnesses said. "It was gunfire from settlers," Abdullah Abu Rahma, who works for the Palestinian government's Settlement and Wall Resistance Commission said.

The Israeli military said it tried to disperse clashes between Israelis and Palestinians on the day and that the incident was being investigated. Settlement official Liebman denied settler involvement in the killings, while one local Hebrew-language social media page that backs settler activists said the Israeli military had fired on the Wadis.

"We've had more than our share of brutal terrorist attacks. We're facing an enemy who wants to destroy us," settlement leader Liebman told Reuters, echoing widespread security fears among Israelis following the Hamas incursion. Liebman said "local security teams" were equipped to protect Jewish communities.