Shortly after Hamas carried out the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, sparking the now ten-month-long war in the Gaza Strip, another killing was reported in the occupied West Bank.
A 40-year-old Palestinian street vendor and farmer named Bilal Saleh was harvesting olives on his family’s small plot of land, when, according to his family, he was fatally shot in the chest by an Israeli living in one of the Jewish settlements around Al-Sawiya.
And 10 months later, the family says, they are not sure whether Israeli officials are even investigating Saleh’s death. An Israeli soldier was briefly detained after the killing and later released.
“We can’t confirm whether it’s true or not that they arrested the man accused of killing Saleh,” his mother-in-law, Mona Saleh, told NBC News in July as she entered Al-Sawiya, an ancient Palestinian village. “I don’t think they detained him, even if they arrested him. If they took him, it was for his safety.”
By they, Mona Saleh means the Israeli authorities.
The grieving mother-in-law said it is clear to her and other Palestinians in the West Bank that the Israelis are taking advantage of the world’s focus on the war in Gaza to redouble their efforts to “colonize” the Palestinian territory.
“They are taking advantage of the war and the current status quo,” she said.
Her family has also not returned to their farmland since Bilah Saleh’s death, fearing more attacks from settlers.
An Israeli military spokesman declined to comment on Mona Saleh’s allegations, saying it was up to the Israeli police to investigate his death.
“When IDF soldiers encounter unlawful acts involving Israelis, particularly violent acts against Palestinians and their property, they must intervene to stop the violation,” the spokesman said. “If necessary, they must arrest or detain the suspects until the police arrive.”
When asked about the increase in Palestinian civilian casualties in the West Bank since the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel and abducted some 240, the spokesman blamed Hamas for the violence in the West Bank.
According to the Israeli army spokesman, there has been a “significant increase in terrorist attacks” in the West Bank. Since the beginning of the war, there have been more than “2,000 attempted attacks.”
But there have also been more than 1,000 attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank since the Oct. 7 attack sparked the ongoing siege of Gaza, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA).
According to OCHA, these attacks have displaced approximately 1,390 Palestinians, including 660 children.
“They now have a big excuse to do what they were already planning to do,” said Sayel Kanan, the Palestinian mayor of Burqa, a West Bank city almost entirely surrounded by settlements. told NBC News.
During the past 10 months, according to the U.N., 553 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by the Israeli army and settlers. In the same period, 15 Israelis have died. (Israeli officials have accused the UN of undercounting the number of Israelis killed in the West Bank.)
Throughout 2023, the U.N. reported that at least 507 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, including 81 children, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians in the area since 2008.
On Thursday, Dozens of Israeli settlers, some wearing masks, attacked a Palestinian village in the West Bankin which cars were set on fire and at least one person was killed, authorities said.
According to health officials in the enclave, 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began on October 7.
Saleh was a beloved figure in his community and hundreds of mourners took part in his funeral procession through Ramallah, where he sold the olives, figs and prickly pears he grew on his land, as well as the sumac, sage and other herbs he gathered from the hills above which the Israeli settlements towered.
Mona Saleh said that even before her son-in-law was killed, he and other Palestinian farmers faced armed Israeli settlers who harassed and threatened them. She said they stole the farmers’ ladders and destroyed their crops, and the Israeli army did nothing to stop them.
“Every day that passes, our longing for him grows greater,” said Mona Saleh.
Judah HaKohenA New York rabbi who moved to the West Bank 20 years ago and posts videos on YouTube discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict said he condemns violence against Palestinians.
But in his interview, HaKohen said that establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank is part of the settlers’ strategy to “reclaim” the land they consider their ancestral home, Judea.
“The only way to resist is to create as many Jewish communities as possible, so that it becomes impossible to remove us,” said HaKohen, a father of eight who lives in a settlement called Beit-El.
“It is basically a suburb of Jerusalem,” he said.
While the international community does not recognize Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and has condemned the seizure of Palestinian land, HaKohen said Jewish settlers consider this land their own. And they will continue to seize it.
“We see ourselves as part of a proud nation, an ancient nation that was wrongly expelled from this land by the Romans,” he said. “We must take back our land.”
HaKohen said he personally has no problem with Palestinians as neighbors. But Palestinians must also accept that “we are not going anywhere,” he said, adding that he himself has not seen violent settlers against Palestinians.
Last month, the United Nations Supreme Court ruled that Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank was “illegal” and ordered it to end “as soon as possible.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the court’s ruling as “a decision of lies.”
During a tour of Kanan’s dusty desert town of about 4,000, where residents who say their homes have been pelted by settlers have installed metal shields on their windows, Kanan said the number of settler attacks has increased significantly since Oct. 7.
Burqa is almost entirely surrounded by illegal Israeli settlements that Kanan said have sprung up in recent years. The main route out of Burqa, he said, has been blocked for years by a concrete barrier trucked in by settlers, forcing Palestinians to use dirt roads to get to nearby cities like Ramallah.
What should be a seven-minute ride actually takes nearly an hour, Kanan said.
“If you try to get past the barrier, they will kill you,” Kanan said of the colonists.
The Israeli army is facilitating the takeover of Palestinian land in the West Bank by settlers by refusing to control the settlers, the mayor said.
“There are no consequences for this,” Kanan said as he drove through the main intersection in the village, where a sign reading “We (heart) Burqa” stood beneath a torn Palestinian flag.
If the army comes, “they come here to protect the settlers,” Kanan said, repeating an accusation many Palestinians make about the Israeli army.
“They actually make things worse,” Kanan said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com