TEL AVIV — Dozens of Jewish settlers repulsed an attempt by Israeli security forces to return a Palestinian family to its home in the occupied West Bank before setting fire to its property and car.
The Tubassi family was forced to leave its home in July following a weekslong siege by violent settlers in the West Bank town of Jalud. But after security forces tried to enforce an order by Israel’s High Court of Justice to facilitate the family’s return Monday night, an extended and violent confrontation ensued, Mahmoud Tubassi, 60, said.
“I went through a terrifying experience that I could never have imagined,” he said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “We saw death with our own eyes. Death came very close to us at the hands of the settlers.”
It is the second time that Tubassi and his wife, Aida Ahmed Abdullah, 51, have suffered at the hands of Jewish settlers in just over a month. On Aug. 28, masked settlers attacked and injured them and an NBC News crew that was interviewing them. The crew were injured and Abdullah was beaten unconscious but has since recovered.
Tubassi said their latest ordeal began just before midnight Monday when Abdel Azim Wadi, the mayor of the nearby village of Qusra, which has also faced serious settler violence, told him that Israeli officials would accompany him, his wife and their son Wael Tubassi, 33, to their home in Jalud.
After they were picked up by four Israeli vehicles, they were driven the short distance to their home — two structures that sit in a small walled compound atop a hill, he said.
As the family arrived, settlers started throwing stones at the armed police and military, who responded with tear gas and stun grenades, he said.
“They could shoot rubber bullets, they could fire live bullets in air,” Tubassi said of the Israeli security forces’ response. “They could use force, but they didn’t do anything, unfortunately,” he added.
Describing the violence as “severe,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that “violent rioters began arriving” after the Tubassis entered their home.
“They set fire to the neighboring house and subsequently entered the family’s home, where severe violence began,” the statement said, adding that the rioters “blocked access roads with large rocks, set tires on fire, threw rocks at security forces, and set fire to Palestinian structures and vehicles.”
As a result, “three Border Police officers were injured and a security forces vehicle was damaged,” the IDF statement said.
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The IDF did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment on whether stun grenades and tear gas had been used to try to disperse the rioters.
After the settlers entered the property, Tubassi said, his family was urged by the Israeli security forces to go to the roof, where the settlers followed them. Several of the soldiers and officers formed a physical barrier between the family and the settlers, Tubassi said.
Tubassi said the security officials told them to get back in an armored car and drove them to safety.
The security forces’ failure to return the Tubassis to their home comes as settler violence in the occupied West Bank has become a growing international embarrassment for Israeli leaders, who have struggled to explain how Israel’s formidable military has repeatedly found itself outmatched by hundreds of lightly armed young men.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attacks in a statement Tuesday and called on the rioters to be prosecuted. The “handful of rioters are not representative of the law-abiding settler public in Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the biblical and historical term for the West Bank.
The statement echoed his comments at the United Nations General Assembly last week, in which he rejected “vigilantism” by Jewish settlers in the West Bank but sought to minimize the violence, suggesting the problem only involved “a handful of juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number, who throw stones, who down olive trees, occasionally they light some fires.”
According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), some 6,500 Palestinians have been displaced due to settler attacks in the West Bank since 2023. Between Jan. 1 and July 24, Israeli forces or settlers killed 76 Palestinians, according to the latest data available from OCHA. Three Israelis were killed over the same period, the data shows.
The agency recorded nearly 200 settler attacks that resulted in Palestinian casualties or property damage in August alone.
Israel has regularly accused the U.N. of siding against it. But many governments around the world consider the West Bank to be illegally occupied by Israel.
Monday night’s police and military action in Jalud was an attempt to execute an order by Israel’s High Court of Justice, which had instructed the “relevant authorities” earlier this month to ensure that the Tubassis return to their home within two weeks.
The court also demanded that security forces explain to the Tubassis and another Palestinian family “why they are not working to return the family to their homes and why they are not removing the barriers and obstacles blocking access to the houses.”
It was unclear Tuesday if or when the police and military would try to execute the court’s order again, and the Israel Defense Forces said it had no details about how the issue would be handled in the near term.
“The Israelis didn’t say anything to me” about future plans, Tubassi said in the phone call from his father’s home nearby where the family has been staying. “I don’t know if they will let me go back.”
Whether they will be able to return after last night’s fire remains to be seen as the home has been badly damaged.
“What happened was a nightmare for us,” Tubassi said. “And now we are living through other nightmares, because our loss has become so great. The state of Israel has not stopped these thugs from taking our homes and our land and from killing us.”
