Barbed Wire and Empty Desks: A West Bank School Opens Under the Shadow of Settler Violence
Before dawn on the first day of the new school year, Bassam al Assaf walked through the reinforced gate of the boys’ school in al-Mughayyir, a village deep in the occupied West Bank. A long strip of freshly installed barbed wire now separates the playground from the fields beyond. Ambulance crews park on the road outside, and parents have begun taking turns at the gate.
“We are scared,” the head teacher said. “The students are afraid, and their parents are afraid.”
Six people from al-Mughayyir have been killed this year, three of them pupils at the school. The violence that once seemed to stay on the hilltops around the village has reached its classroom doors.
In April, Aws al-Naasan, a 14-year-old student, was shot dead by a settler just outside the school gates. Waheed Abu Naem, an English teacher whose brother Jihad was also killed by an Israeli soldier in the same attack, was inside when it happened. He said two younger pupils ran in to warn him that settlers were close to the school wall. As he tried to move students to safety inside the gate, the settler fired toward them. Mobile phone footage shows the moment Aws was struck.
“When I turned him onto his back, I saw lots of blood coming from his nose and mouth, and the bullet in his head,” Abu Naem said. “We lost him.” During the attack, he said, bullets kept hitting the school building while students hid behind classroom walls or lay on the floor.
The Israeli military said at the time that stones had been thrown at a car carrying civilians, including a reservist soldier, and that the reservist got out and fired at suspects. Israeli media reported he was later suspended from duty and an investigation was opened.
By the time the new term began, the casualty list had grown. Over the summer, two more pupils were shot dead by Israeli forces during settler attacks and army incursions in the village, along with a 19-year-old who had recently left the school. In both cases, the Israeli army said its forces had responded to those who started “a violent riot.”
The school sits on the edge of al-Mughayyir, an isolated Palestinian village northeast of Ramallah that is increasingly surrounded by Jewish settler outposts and regularly blocked by an ad-hoc Israeli checkpoint at the entrance. With three desks now empty in the classrooms, some parents were reluctant to send their children back.
The head teacher responded the only way he could, reinforcing the gates and wrapping the compound in a long barbed-wire fence. Ambulance crews have also been stationed on the road outside, and several fathers have volunteered to stand guard until the final bell.
Haroon Bishara, whose sons are in first and second grade, was among the parents outside on the first morning. He said he came to give the children a sense of safety.
“We fear for our children more this year,” he said. “We know the situation is not safe at the school.” But he added that fear was mixed with determination not to let the threat drive them off their land.
At the first assembly, the instructions were repeated over and over: if soldiers or settlers approach the school, do not shout, do not go near them, do not react. Just over an hour after classes began, that warning became real again. Teachers spotted two settlers driving sheep through Palestinian fields a few hundred metres from the school, with Israeli soldiers standing nearby. Minutes later, another settler appeared with a flock.
“They have got closer to the village since April,” Abu Naem said. “They used to keep their sheep behind this hill, but now the soldiers bring the settlers up to the village.”
The Israeli military did not answer the specific allegations raised in this report before publication.
All Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, and many of the small outposts around al-Mughayyir are illegal under Israeli law as well. Residents say the Israeli army has shifted from intervening against settler incursions to protecting them.
“At the beginning of 2025, settler attacks were few, due to the army’s interventions,” said Hadi al-Naasan, an ambulance driver in the village. “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.”
A UN Commission of Inquiry report published in June found that settler attacks “have instrumentalized children as part of a broader coercive strategy to drive Palestinians off their land.” It described “a pattern of settlers intentionally targeting Palestinian children” in everyday places, “turning everyday spaces into sites of fear.” Israel dismissed the report as “a libelous sham.”
For Sami Abu Rahma, a sheep farmer, the danger is not abstract. At the end of July, his nine-year-old son Salim was shot and wounded while playing with siblings on the family farm outside al-Mughayyir. The bullet is still lodged in his arm. Security-camera footage shows Salim shouting that settlers were approaching, then running for shelter with his family as two shots ring out. The boy grabs his shoulder.
“In that moment, you stop thinking; you just feel fear,” Sami said. “Fear that, God forbid, he was shooting to kill. The first thing in your mind is losing the most precious thing you have.”
Sami said the man who shot his son lives in an illegal settler outpost that appeared next to the farm in June, and had fired at Salim in the same area a week before. He said he is now the last sheep farmer left in the area, and that the settler had repeatedly told his family to leave their land.
“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 said an off-duty soldier had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the shooting. It said it regretted any harm to innocent people, Jews or Arabs, and opposed any act of violence that violates the law. It also rejected what it called baseless claims that lawful sheep grazing or Jewish presence in the area is part of a deliberate plan to harm children or drive residents from their homes.
The experience of al-Mughayyir reflects a wider pattern across the occupied West Bank: more outposts encircling Palestinian villages, more military protection for settlers, and attacks moving from grazing land into built-up areas where women and children are more exposed.
“Children, seeing the army enter, don’t grasp the gravity of the situation,” said Hadi al-Naasan. “Adults are more aware of how events can unfold.”
UN figures show the number of Palestinians injured in settler-related violence involving Israeli forces or settlers has risen sharply this year to an average of three injuries a day. Since the beginning of 2025, the UN says, 316 Palestinians have been killed and more than 5,600 injured. In the same period, 20 Israelis were killed, including one child and eight members of the security forces, and 123 Israelis were injured.
The violence has continued alongside the expansion of settlements and outposts. International pressure on Israel has grown, with the UK expected to announce sanctions this week in response to settlement policies. The arrest of some violent settlers and a reported plan by Israel’s prime minister to dismantle illegal outposts have not stopped the attacks, and Palestinians say outposts that were previously demolished were quickly rebuilt. With Israeli elections less than two months away, Israel’s Finance Ministry has pushed forward plans to take over land registration in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Peace Now described as “a clear step towards annexation.”
Benjamin Netanyahu has attributed settler violence to a tiny extremist minority, calling those involved “150 juvenile delinquents” in a recent television interview.
For the families who returned to al-Mughayyir, the barbed wire and volunteer guards are a fragile form of protection. They say they are staying, but every school day now carries a fear that no fence can fully contain: the fear of losing a child on the way to class, or inside it.