Israeli troops shoot children and abduct medical workers in West Bank

TEHRAN — Israeli forces and settler militias are executing an aggressive campaign of violence across the West Bank.

The military and settlers operate as a unified front to displace Palestinians through terror, home sieges, and lethal raids. Tel Aviv weaponizes the distraction of its broader U.S.-backed war to permanently alter the demographic reality on the ground.

Branding detainees and lethal raids

The degradation of Palestinians has taken visceral forms. During a sweep through over 100 buildings in Qabatiya, soldiers detained dozens of residents and beat them.

Troops then used permanent markers to write identification numbers directly on the foreheads and arms of Palestinian men.

Footage showed journalist Mahmoud Zakarneh walking with the number "44" scrawled across his face. The military admitted to the practice.

Stripping individuals of their names and replacing them with numbers mirrors historical atrocities that Zionists have weaponized for decades and exposes the contempt driving the occupation.

Lethal military force routinely accompanies these systemic humiliations.

Inside the Am'ari refugee camp in el-Bireh, soldiers commandeered a cafe and fired live ammunition at Palestinian youths outside.

Medical sources quickly confirmed that the soldiers seriously wounded at least one young child. At dawn in Ramallah, forces raided the at-Tira neighborhood and arrested 54-year-old gynecologist Dr. Dima Muhammad Amin Barakat.

The architecture of siege

Settlers are weaponizing isolation. In Qusra, extremist militias have surrounded three Palestinian families for over ten days.

The attackers deliberately severed water lines, cut the local electricity, and blocked all emergency medical access.

Among the besieged is Loui Ridi, a Palestinian American who recently returned from Ohio.

Ridi watched the unfolding ordeal through security cameras from his home in Ohio for seven sleepless nights before deciding to make the journey, telling reporters upon arrival, "I can't let the settlers steal my house while I was watching."

He raised a United States flag over his roof, hoping for safety. A settler walked onto his land anyway. Israeli soldiers arrived and ordered Ridi back inside his house.

The blockade provoked the ultra-Zionist U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee to publicly label the perpetrators as "terrorists."

The siege continues. This coordinated strangulation repeats across the territory.

In Beit Imrin, a mob surrounded a home and blocked Palestine Red Crescent ambulances. Instead of clearing the mob, soldiers arrested all nine Palestinian occupants.

In Burin, settlers cut utility poles to plunge the Soufan family into darkness. Soldiers in a nearby watchtower simply blockaded the road to trap the family.

Farther north in al-Jarushiya, troops forcibly evicted the Othman family, converting their residential building into a military barracks.

Settlement expansion by bullet

Violence advances territorial expansion. In Sa'ir, an armed settler shot 26-year-old Palestinian nurse Muhammad Mutoor in the back. Mutoor had rushed to treat the wounded after a militia rampage. The bullet severed his spinal cord. Attackers blocked the main roads so ambulances could not reach him. He is now paralyzed.

Extremists have built eight new outposts on Sa'ir's lands since May. Near Ramallah, settlers pitched tents for a sixth outpost surrounding Umm Safa, seizing roughly 4,700 dunams.

The United Nations reports settlers have launched over 1,330 attacks since the start of 2026. This violence has killed 18 Palestinians, wounded 880, and forcibly displaced more than 2,300 people in just months.

** Desecrating the sacred**

The aggression extends into occupied East al-Quds (Jerusalem). Radical extremists have recently stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in massive numbers under police escort.

Between August 15 and 17, Israeli settler incursions into Al-Aqsa continued under heavy police protection. Palestinian sources said more than 1,478 settlers had entered the compound during the preceding week, while 156 settlers were reported to have entered on August 17 alone.

Some performed Talmudic rituals in the eastern area of the compound, as Israeli police tightened restrictions on Palestinian access.

Heavily armed Israeli police actively facilitate these extreme provocations, explicitly breaching the historic status quo that reserves worship at the holy site exclusively for Muslims.

The incursions are deliberate acts designed to erase the Islamic identity of Jerusalem while the military tries to crush Palestinian resistance elsewhere.