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When a court order is not enough to get a family back into their own home, something has broken in the machinery of law. That is the clearest way to read what happened in the Palestinian village of Jalud, in the occupied West Bank, on the night of Monday 23 September, when more than 100 Israeli settlers overwhelmed a military escort, set two houses ablaze, and forced the al-Tubasi family to flee for the second time in a matter of months.
The incident is not simply a story of mob violence. It is a stress test of Israeli legal and security institutions, one they visibly failed, and it arrives at a moment when settler activity in the West Bank is, by the United Nations’ own accounting, at an all-time high.
A Court Victory That Meant Nothing on the Ground
The al-Tubasi family had done everything right by the standards of formal law. After being driven from their properties in Jalud, south of Nablus, over the summer by sustained settler harassment and the establishment of an illegal outpost nearby, they took their case to Israel’s High Court. Earlier this month the court ruled in their favour, ordering that the family be safely returned home by 20 September and criticising Israeli authorities in unusually direct language for failing to curb settler violence. The ruling called settler conduct “a completely unacceptable phenomenon that stands in contrast to the basic values and moral principles of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
The deadline passed. Then, just after midnight on Monday, Mahmoud al-Tubasi, 60, received a call telling him that coordination had been arranged with the Israeli military for the family to return immediately. He, his wife Aida, 51, and their son Wael, 33, went back under armed escort. What they found inside the first house, inspected by torchlight, was a property that had been methodically destroyed: holes smashed through doors, electrical fittings torn out, tiles ripped up, windows broken, and the toilet filled with what appeared to be human waste.
Within minutes of their arrival, alerts circulating in WhatsApp groups used by settlers to coordinate action had drawn a crowd that the Israel Defense Forces later put at more than 100 people. “As soon as we entered the house, which had already been completely destroyed, settlers started throwing stones at us,” al-Tubasi told the BBC. “The army responded by firing tear gas at them, but there were so many settlers, more than 150, that the army could no longer control them.” Settlers slashed the tyres of the military van carrying the family. Soldiers transferred the family to an armoured vehicle and extracted them. As they drove away, settlers set fire to the family’s car and both of their houses. “My feeling now is that I am happy to have escaped death. I genuinely expected they were going to kill us,” al-Tubasi said.
The IDF confirmed the broad outline of events, saying rioters blocked roads, burned tyres, and threw stones at security forces, leaving three police officers lightly injured and a security vehicle damaged. It acknowledged that “due to the violence, the mission to return the family to their home was not completed.” Three people were arrested.
Systemic Failure, Not Isolated Incident
The Jalud attack fits a pattern that human rights organisations have been documenting for years. According to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, fewer than three percent of police investigations into settler violence over the past two decades have resulted in a conviction. Ziv Stahl, Yesh Din’s executive director, told the BBC that the absence of effective enforcement is not accidental. “The violence is part of a systematic government policy aimed at pushing Palestinians out of the area and expanding Israeli control over land in the West Bank,” she said.
That framing is contested by the Israeli government, but the structural conditions Stahl describes are visible in the data. The UN’s Humanitarian Office, OCHA, has logged 6,199 settler attacks causing casualties or damage since 2023. More than 6,500 Palestinians have been displaced in the West Bank over the same period due to settler attacks and access restrictions. At least 23 Palestinians were killed in the context of settler attacks this year alone, against four Israelis, all members of security forces or civilians, killed in the West Bank in the same period.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned Monday’s attacks on security forces and called for rioters to be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law.” Yet just last week, speaking at the UN General Assembly, he dismissed international concern about settler violence, accusing international media of obsessing over “a handful of juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number, who throw stones, who chop down olive trees, occasionally they light some fires.” The gap between those two statements is itself a measure of the political difficulty. Netanyahu’s governing coalition includes ministers who have said openly that they aim to “bury the idea” of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Settlements and outposts are illegal under international law, a point the Israeli government disputes on biblical and legal grounds.
Why This Matters Beyond the West Bank
For readers in Malaysia and Singapore, the Jalud attack may seem geographically remote, but the questions it raises about the relationship between law, state authority, and political will are universal. Both countries have their own histories of managing communal tension through legal frameworks, and both have watched the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shape Muslim-majority public opinion across Southeast Asia for decades.
More concretely, the episode illustrates a dynamic that international institutions are struggling to address: when a state’s security forces are simultaneously tasked with protecting a civilian population and operating within a political environment that benefits from that population’s displacement, the result is exactly what happened in Jalud. Soldiers form a barrier, extract the family, and decline to act against the perpetrators. The court order goes unfulfilled. The houses burn.
The al-Tubasi family is now displaced for the second time, their properties destroyed, their legal victory hollow. If Israel’s High Court cannot enforce its own rulings against settler violence, the question of what institution can is one that neither the Israeli government nor the international community has yet answered credibly. That gap, more than any single attack, is what makes Jalud significant.
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