Over 100 Palestinians Arrested Across West Bank in a Week Amid Escalating Raids and Settler Attacks

Israeli forces have arrested more than 100 Palestinians across the occupied West Bank over the past seven days, a Palestinian human rights organization reported, highlighting a surge in military incursions, settler assaults, and property demolitions across the occupied territory.

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS), an advocacy organization that monitors arrests and detention conditions in Israeli facilities, announced that children, media workers, and formerly released prisoners were among those swept up in the recent wave of detentions. The group noted that military authorities have significantly heightened their operations throughout towns, villages, and refugee camps.

According to the rights group, the latest operations have been accompanied by widespread violations against Palestinian residents. These practices include on-site field interrogations, harsh physical beatings, direct threats against family members of suspects, and, in several documented instances, extrajudicial killings carried out during military activity.

The organization further detailed that Israeli troops conducted intrusive residential searches, systematically ransacking private properties and vandalizing household belongings. In several cases, military units seized private homes and converted them into temporary outposts or command locations. Entire residential areas were subjected to collective sweeps, with relatives sometimes taken into custody as leverage to force wanted family members to surrender.

Among the prominent individuals detained during the week was Ahmad al-Sayfi, a resident of Birzeit and a former prisoner who had previously been freed as part of a negotiated prisoner exchange agreement. His re-arrest underscores ongoing concerns regarding the targeting of formerly released detainees.

The arrest campaign also saw the detention of journalists Muath Amarneh and Sabri Jibril, alongside several other former prisoners. Rights advocates emphasize that the detention of media workers severely restricts the independent documentation of military conduct and human rights conditions on the ground.

Alongside regular military activity, the PPS documented a series of coordinated attacks carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians and their properties. These incidents included physical assaults, the establishment of makeshift roadblocks to disrupt Palestinian transit, and targeted attacks on civilian vehicles, actions the group stated regularly take place under the direct observation and armed protection of Israeli soldiers.

The recent detentions add to an unprecedented surge in arrests recorded over the past year. According to the PPS, Israeli forces have apprehended more than 25,000 Palestinians from the West Bank, in addition to thousands more seized from the Gaza Strip, since the war began in October 2023.

In one of the most extensive localized operations, Israeli forces carried out a dawn raid on the town of Burqa, located northwest of Nablus, detaining 15 Palestinian residents. According to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, military units maintained a six-hour siege over the town, forcibly entering multiple homes and arresting their occupants before ultimately withdrawing.

The community of Burqa has faced recurrent instability in recent weeks, enduring repeated incursions by both Israeli soldiers and settlers, as well as a series of punitive and administrative home demolitions that have displaced local families and strained community infrastructure.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, troops carried out targeted operations in several municipalities. In Azzun, situated east of Qalqilya, soldiers detained a young Palestinian man identified as Salloum Radwan for multiple hours and subsequently confiscated his commercial truck, according to local news reports.

In the central West Bank, Israeli special forces mounted an undercover operation in the town of Beitunia, near Ramallah. Troops forcibly entered an apartment building, causing severe structural damage and ransacking the interior before taking two Palestinian men into custody and transferring them to a military detention facility.

Demolitions and large-scale sweeps were also reported across the southern districts. In the village of Battir, west of Bethlehem, Israeli forces razed a Palestinian residential structure. Simultaneously, the Israeli military confirmed the arrest of at least 20 Palestinians inside the Arroub refugee camp south of Bethlehem, alleging that the detained individuals had been involved in planning attacks.

Tensions have also intensified in occupied East Jerusalem, where groups of Israeli settlers entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Thursday morning to conduct religious rituals. Local monitors describe these incursions as an increasingly institutionalized daily practice that challenges the established status quo governing the holy site.

The Jerusalem Governorate issued an official warning cautioning that settler groups intend to exploit the upcoming Jewish holiday season to impose structural changes at the site. Authorities warned of efforts to transition from existing temporal access restrictions toward a spatial division of the compound, effectively partitioning the holy esplanade.

The Palestinian presidency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs echoed these warnings, reiterating that the entire compound remains an exclusively Islamic holy site and cautioning against any unilateral alterations. In response to anticipated holiday unrest, Israeli police announced the deployment of reinforced security personnel across occupied East Jerusalem and surrounding West Bank checkpoints.