DEIR DIBWAN, West Bank — Palestinians in this town woke one morning last month to find their mosque vandalized, with a Star of David painted on the exterior alongside Hebrew graffiti accusing it of preaching “incitement.”
“We are at an alarming point,” said Barakat Mahmoud, the mosque’s imam. “We’ve never had direct confrontation with the settlers in this town.”
The incident was one in a recent spate of attacks blamed on Israeli settlers that officials on both sides of the conflict say are spiking. Israel’s security agency, Shin Bet, documented 295 of what it calls “Jewish terror” incidents last year, a 40 percent increase.
Although no Israeli government figures were available for January, the United Nations had recorded at least 30 incidents this year in which Israeli settlers were accused of causing casualties or damaging property, with a total of 14 Palestinians injured and one killed.
The most serious incident took place in January near the rural West Bank village of al-Mughayyir, when a Palestinian was shot dead, allegedly by settlers belonging to a volunteer security team for the nearby Israeli settlements. According to the United Nations, nine other Palestinians suffered gunshot wounds when the settlers opened fire during a confrontation on the outskirts of the village.
Israeli monitoring groups say the surge in settler violence, in part, reflects a lack of Israeli law enforcement and a response to a rash of particularly distressing attacks by Palestinians against Israelis.
While the number of Palestinian attacks in the West Bank dropped last year, their severity appeared to increase. According to Shin Bet figures, six civilians and five soldiers were killed. The agency said there were 1,153 Palestinian “terror” incidents in the West Bank, a figure that includes stone-throwing.
Especially upsetting for many Israelis was the death of a baby boy who was born prematurely after his pregnant Israeli mother was injured in a December drive-by shooting near the settlement of Ofra, one of several such attacks. The recent rape and slaying of a 19-year-old girl from another West Bank settlement as she walked in woods in Jerusalem has shocked many Israelis and prompted calls for revenge from the extreme right.
Such incidents can trigger what are known as “price tag” attacks, a name originally given to vandalism and violence carried out by Jewish extremists against the Palestinian community and sometimes the Israeli security forces in response to violence or punitive action against settlements or settlers. Now, the phrase refers more generally to reprisals against Palestinian communities.
The United Nations and other organizations that track violence by the settlers have expressed alarm about the increase of Israeli attacks in the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. Some 450,000 Israelis live in settlements deemed illegal by most of the international community.
Previous U.S. administrations criticized the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, saying they were an obstacle to peace. But that position has changed during the Trump administration. David M. Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, has said he sees settlements as part of Israel.
A more sympathetic U.S. policy toward settlements may have emboldened the extremist youths who carry out reprisal attacks, according to Lior Amihai, executive director of Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group that tracks abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank.
“Among that settler ideology, there are people that look and say there is no reason why anyone should stop us from meeting our political aspirations,” Amihai said. “There is a right-wing government in Israel and a friend in the White House.”
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