Illegal Israeli settler attacks targeting Palestinian mosques has swept the occupied West Bank in recent weeks, with the United Nations describing the broader pattern of illegal settler violence as the worst since systematic tracking began two decades ago, even as the international response has so far stopped short of any binding action.
According to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, a Palestinian monitoring body, Israeli settlers and forces carried out 22 separate attacks on Muslim religious sites in May alone. Hebron governorate bore the brunt with 14 incidents, while Nablus, Jenin, Jericho and Ramallah each recorded additional attacks.
The violence has followed a consistent pattern: groups of Israeli settlers, often operating at night, storm village mosques, set fire to entrances or ablution rooms, and leave behind Hebrew graffiti.
In the town of Deir Dibwan near Ramallah, a 92-year-old Palestinian-American man was inside a mosque reading the Quran after evening prayers when settlers allegedly poured an incendiary substance near a window in an attempt to set the building ablaze; he escaped unharmed.
Local officials said the same night’s raid was coordinated across three teams, one targeting the mosque, another nearby homes, and a third setting fire to vehicles and crops.
A separate attack on May 15 struck Jibiya, northwest of Ramallah, where settlers burned a mosque and two vehicles and sprayed racist slogans on nearby homes.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s monitoring unit reported a similar spike around the same time, logging 119 settler attacks and roughly 300 military raids across the occupied West Bank in a single week in mid-May, alongside repeated incursions into occupied East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque.
The pattern continued into June. Overnight on June 16–17, settlers set fire to mosques in Jiljilya and Mazari an-Nubani, two villages north of Ramallah.
In Jiljilya, attackers failed to breach the main prayer hall. They torched a ground-floor ablution room instead. In Mazari an-Nubani, witnesses said Molotov cocktails were thrown at a mosque before the attackers fled as residents extinguished the blaze.
A record year, by the UN’s measure
The mosque attacks form part of a broader surge in illegal settler violence that UN agencies say is unprecedented in their data.
The UN’s humanitarian coordination office, OCHA, which has tracked such incidents since 2006, reported an average of six attacks per day in 2026. It called this the highest level on record, according to a spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General. The total has already surpassed 1,000 incidents this year.
