


Dusk was settling over Kafr Malik, a quiet Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank. At the Afeef family’s home on the outskirts, a mother was putting her newborn to sleep in a ground-floor bedroom. Another relative was pulling up outside with her four young children in the car.
That calm was shattered soon afterward when scores of Israelis, many masked, descended on the village by foot and in vehicles, according to witnesses and local officials.
The attackers hurled Molotov cocktails and set homes and cars on fire, the witnesses and local officials said. The Israeli military said in a statement that dozens of Israeli civilians had set Palestinian property ablaze.
The violence in Kafr Malik, northeast of Ramallah, last week comes amid a sharp rise in settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, where about half a million Israelis live among three million Palestinians. Settler attacks injured more than 220 Palestinians during the first five months of 2025, the highest rate in years, according to the United Nations. Settlers killed a Palestinian man on June 19, the U.N. says.
