Palestinian parents fear for children's lives at school as settler attacks grow

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Palestinian parents fear for children's lives at school as settler attacks grow
- Published
On the first day of the new Palestinian school year, the head-teacher of al-Mughayyir boys school arrived at work before dawn, walking past the freshly installed barbed wire fencing and reinforced school gates as the sun began creeping through olive trees around the village, deep inside the occupied West Bank.
"We are scared," Bassam al Assaf told me. "The students are afraid, and their parents are afraid."
Six people, including three pupils at the school, have been killed in al-Mughayyir this year, in a surge of settler-related violence against Palestinians. One of them, 14-year-old Aws al-Naasan, was shot dead by a settler outside the school gates in April.
"I was inside my classroom and two little students came rushing to tell me there were settlers close to the school wall," remembers English teacher Waheed Abu Naem, whose brother Jihad was also killed by an Israeli soldier in the same attack.
Waheed said he was trying to move pupils to safety inside the school gate when the settler fired towards them. Mobile phone footage shows the moment Aws was shot.
"When I turned him onto his back, I saw lots of blood coming from his nose and mouth, and the bullet in his head," said Waheed. "We lost him."
He told me that bullets continued hitting the school building, as students hid behind the walls of their classrooms, or lay on the floor.
The Israeli military said in a statement at the time that stones had been hurled at a car carrying "civilians including a reservist soldier", and that the reservist had got out of the vehicle and fired at suspects.
Israeli media reported the reservist was later suspended from duty and an investigation launched.
Since that day, the casualties have grown alongside parents' fears.
Over the summer, two more pupils were shot dead by Israeli forces during settler attacks and incursions in the village, along with a 19-year-old who had just left the school.
In both cases, Israel's army said its forces responded to instigators of "a violent riot".
With three empty desks in the classrooms, some parents were reluctant to send their children back for the new school year.
The school sits right on the edge of Al-Mughayyir, an isolated village north-east of Ramallah, increasingly surrounded by Jewish settler outposts, and regularly blocked by Israeli forces who frequently operate an ad-hoc checkpoint at the entrance.
Bassam al-Assaf has installed a long barbed-wire fence around the compound and reinforced the school gates, to try and reassure parents. Ambulance crews are now stationed on the road outside, and several parents have volunteered to wait outside the school all day as an extra layer of protection.
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"I came because it makes the children feel their parents are with them, that they are safe, it gives them a kind of security," said Haroon Bishara, whose boys are in the first and second grades.
"We fear for our children more this year," he told me. "We know the situation is not safe at the school."
But he said that fear was mixed with a determination not to let the threat from settler attacks force them out.
Lined up in the playground for their first assembly, pupils heard the instructions repeated by teachers again and again throughout the day: if soldiers or settlers approach the school, don't shout, don't go near them, don't react.
Just over an hour after classes began, settlers were spotted through the school windows: two men, driving sheep through Palestinian fields a couple of hundred metres from the school, as Israeli soldiers stood close by.
Minutes later, another settler with a flock of sheep appeared.
"They have got closer to the village since April," said Abu Naem. They used to keep their sheep behind this [hill], but now the soldiers bring the settlers up to the village."
We asked the Israeli army for its response to all the allegations in this report, but they were unable to provide one before publication.
All Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law. Many of the small ad-hoc settler outposts that have mushroomed around al-Mughayyir are illegal under Israeli law too.
But one of the ambulance crews stationed outside the school said that, rather than remove illegal settlements, Israeli soldiers had begun supporting and enabling settler incursions into the village.
Hadi al-Naasan, an ambulance driver in the village, said there had been a shift in the behaviour of Israeli forces over the past year. And that the rise in Palestinian deaths and injuries in al-Mughayyir this year reflected that.
"At the beginning of 2025, settler attacks were few, due to the army's interventions," he said. "In 2026, the situation changed completely: the settlers became fully protected by the occupation soldiers. This year, the number of martyrs is higher, the number of injuries is also much higher – and the number of child injuries is higher too."
Hadi, along with other residents of al-Mughayyir, believes that some Israeli settlers are now deliberately targeting children in order to put pressure on the adults in the village to leave their homes.
A UN Commission of Inquiry published in June found that settler attacks "have instrumentalized children, external as part of a broader coercive strategy to drive Palestinians off their land."
And it described "a pattern of settlers intentionally targeting Palestinian children" while they were playing near their homes, walking to and from school, tending to farms or herding livestock, "turning everyday spaces into sites of fear".
Israel dismissed the report as a "libellous sham".
Sheep farmer Sami Abu Rahma firmly believes that some violent settlers are targeting children.
At the end of July, his nine-year-old son Salim was shot and injured as he played with his siblings on the family sheep farm outside al-Mughayyir. The bullet is still lodged in his arm.
Footage from security cameras at the farm shows Salim pointing, and shouting to his parents that settlers are approaching, before running for shelter with his siblings and mother, as two gunshots are heard. Salim is seen grabbing his shoulder.
"In that moment, you stop thinking; you just feel fear," Sami told me. "Fear that, God forbid, [the attacker] was shooting to kill. The first thing in your mind is losing the most precious thing you have."
The man who shot his son, he said, lived in an illegal settler outpost that appeared next to the farm in June – and had previously shot at Salim in the same area a week before.
"You no longer feel you can keep them safe in the street, or even at school," he said. "The settlers don't want us to stay here, [they want us to feel] as if there's no future for us here."
Sami said he was the last sheep farmer left in the area, the others all chased away by settler attacks. The settler who shot his son had told the family repeatedly to leave their land, he said.
"No matter how determined you might be to stay," he added, "what do you do when settlers start shooting your kids?"
The regional settlers council told us that an off-duty soldier was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the shooting.
"We regret any harm to innocent people, Jews or Arabs, and oppose any act of violence that violates the law," it said in a statement, adding that it rejected "the attempt to attribute to the entire settlement community in Judea and Samaria acts that have not yet been determined by an investigation, as well as the baseless claim that lawful sheep grazing or Jewish presence in the area are part of a deliberate plan to harm children or drive residents from their homes."
Al-Mughayyir is part of a pattern unfolding across the occupied West Bank, with more illegal settler outposts encircling Palestinian villages, more protection for settlers from Israeli forces, and attacks moving from farms and grazing land to built-up areas, where women and children are more at risk.
"Children, seeing the army enter, don't grasp the gravity of the situation," said the local ambulance crew, Hadi al-Naasan. "Adults are more aware of how events can unfold."
UN figures suggest that the number of Palestinians injured during settler attacks by Israeli soldiers or settlers has risen sharply this year to an average of three injuries per day, and that the number of injuries inflicted directly by settlers themselves is also higher.
This rise has been accompanied by an expansion of Israeli settlements and settler outposts in the West Bank.
All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law, and Israel's fiercely pro-settlement government is under growing international pressure - including from the UK, which is expected to announce sanctions this week in response to Israeli settlement policies.
The arrest of some violent settlers and a reported plan by Israel's prime minister to dismantle illegal outposts in the West Bank have not so far stopped attacks, nor reassured Palestinians who say outposts previously demolished by Israeli authorities were quickly rebuilt.
With Israeli elections less than two months away, Israel's Finance Ministry pushed forward plans this week to take over land registration in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, described by the Israeli settlement monitor Peace Now as "a clear step towards annexation".
Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has attributed settler violence to a tiny extremist minority, describing them in a recent television interview as "150 juvenile delinquents".
Since the beginning of 2025, the UN has recorded 316 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers, and more than 5,600 injured, to the end of July 2026. It says 20 Israelis were killed over the same period, including one child and eight members of the security forces, and 123 Israelis injured.
Palestinian parents who have stayed in villages like al-Mughayyir through escalating settler violence are now facing a growing fear of losing their children if they stay on their land.
  - Published12 August

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