Feelings of rage were palpable among a group of young men, some barely out of their teens, on Saturday, April 13. They had just emerged out of a dirt road leading to Duma, the West Bank farming village. Below the road, columns of black smoke rose into the sky after the group had just burned down houses and attacked those living in the large Palestinian village of 2,000 people, which is nestled in the hills.

The group was made up of residents of West Bank settlements in the central region of the occupied territory, between Ramallah and Nablus, where tensions are particularly high. They piled into SUVs and pick-ups built for rough roads. Many of them were wearing balaclavas and tied scarves over their heads to hide their faces. Their convoy of almost 50 vehicles set off to continue their mission. Among the group are the young radical settlers known as "hill kids," skinny and gangly, sunburnt, the long locks of their hair fluttering in the wind.

The tension began with a tragedy affecting one of their own. They spent two days searching for Benjamin Achimeir, a 14-year-old shepherd who went missing on Friday from the Malachei Shalom settler outpost, one of the small groups of makeshift buildings erected to gradually increase the space controlled by settlements on Palestinian land. The young boy had gone out early in the morning with a flock to graze his animals. Around noon, the sheep returned, alone, to the Gal Fram farm.

A search was immediately organized. In these hills, where settlers are like obsessive geographers, weaving their network of outposts, roads and settlements to conquer space, it's rare to get lost. There was cause for concern. The trauma of those taken hostage on October 7 was on everyone's minds.

It only took a few hours for tensions to mount. Settler groups, soon backed up by the army, tried to locate the teenager through his telephone, according to one settler. The last trace of his phone was not far away, near the village of Al-Mughayyir. Even before learning more, an expedition was organized on Friday afternoon to ransack the small town. In the space of a few hours, one person was killed and 25 were injured.

By midday Saturday, some of the most extremist settlers in the area amassed at various points. Palestinian cars were chased away and traffic was cut off. At a crossroads near Turmus Ayya, a Palestinian village close to the large settlement of Shiloh, an older man, a well-known local lawyer, tried to explain his position. "You realize that we're in the middle of people who hate us [Palestinians]. I'm not making this up," he said, asking that his name not be shared.

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