Gaza Genocide26 July, 20262 min read
Israeli Settlers Beat Elderly Palestinian Man in Surif Near Hebron
This article is an automated aggregation of coverage from news outlets. Our editorials offer in-depth analysis curated by the NewsCord team.
Elderly Palestinian man injured in Surif attack by armed settlers; several others injured. Attackers were armed colonists carrying clubs and batons in Khallat Ghneimat.
Surif assault and cattle
Israeli settlers attacked an elderly Palestinian man and several others in the town of Surif, northwest of Hebron, on Sunday evening, with Surif Mayor Hazem Ghneimat saying the attackers carried clubs and assaulted residents in the Khallat Ghneimat area. WAFA reported that the elderly man sustained head injuries from being beaten with clubs, while the same incident left minor injuries to several other Palestinians.
In a separate incident, settlers drove cattle onto farmland planted with fruit trees in the Khallat al-Homs area, south of Yatta, damaging trees and crops belonging to Palestinian farmer Samir Obeid. WAFA said the Hebron Governorate has been witnessing an escalation in colonist attacks against Palestinians and their property, including physical assault and destruction of trees and crops, often under the protection of Israeli forces.
Tuwani mosque arson
In the South Hebron Hills, Palestinian witnesses said a group of settlers attacked a West Bank town overnight, setting a mosque on fire and spraying graffiti around the site in Tuwani. The Times of Israel reported that police said officers searched for perpetrators and a crime forensics team collected evidence from the scene in Tuwani, and that there were no reports of injuries as a result of the apparent settler attack.
Mohammed Rabie, head of the village council, told AFP that more than two dozen settlers, some masked, attacked the Al-Taqwa mosque in the village overnight and set it on fire, and he said the settlers also set fire to two houses and a dairy factory. Rabie said the settlers fled after villagers emerged from their homes, adding that local volunteers managed to extinguish the flames before they spread further, and he said the dairy factory run by women from the Masafer Yatta community suffered extensive damage.
Accountability and broader war
The Palestinian religious affairs ministry condemned the Tuwani attack, describing the arson as "a full-fledged terrorist act" and accusing Israel’s "extremist occupation government" of encouraging settler violence to displace Palestinians from the area and turn the conflict into "a religious war." In the same reporting, the Times of Israel said violence in the West Bank has soared since the Hamas attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war in October 2023.
The Times of Israel also cited that more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces or settlers since the war started, according to the PA health ministry, and it said the IDF recorded 867 incidents of nationalistic crime and settler violence in 2025. Against that backdrop, the WAFA account described Hebron Governorate escalation as including burning of houses and schools, filling in of wells, shooting, grazing livestock on agricultural lands, destruction of trees and crops, and preventing farmers from accessing their lands, often under the protection of Israeli forces.