U.S.: End Complicity in Israeli State-Backed Settler Violence

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 8, 2026

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Record-High Settler Violence Devastating Palestinian Communities & Harming U.S. Citizens

Washington, D.C. | U.S. officials should end their support to Israel that enables settler violence in the occupied West Bank if they are sincere about wanting to stop rising violent attacks on Palestinians and protect the U.S. citizens who are increasingly among their victims, said Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) today.

Settler attacks are on pace to set record-highs this year and are increasingly harming Palestinian Americans, including Samid Khdair, a 56-year-old Mississippi businessman beaten by Israeli settlers—who also spit on and stole his passport—as Israeli soldiers looked on. An interview with Khdair, where he gives a full account of the attack, will air this Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

“When there is no consequence after foreign state-backed militias attack an American, it sends the message that this administration values its ties to a repressive allied government over the safety and welfare of its own citizens,” said Omar Shakir, executive director at DAWN. “The United States bankrolls the army that stands by and facilitates these attacks, including by arming the attackers, making the U.S. complicit in all forms of Israeli state-backed violence against Palestinians.”

In a letter sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Pam Bondi, DAWN and ADC called on the FBI to launch investigations into the attacks on Americans, for the State Department to bar the Israeli units facilitating settler violence from receiving U.S. assistance under the Leahy Law, and for the president to reinstate sanctions on those enabling settler violence.

The United Nations has recorded more than 1,600 settler attacks against Palestinians so far this year, putting it on pace to be the highest number on record—for the third year in a row. This amounts to an average of 6.7 settler attacks a day in 2026, which have affected 275 Palestinian communities. Israeli settlers have killed at least 23 Palestinians and wounded more than 1,000 this year alone.

In an interview with DAWN and ADC, Khdair, one of the latest Palestinian American victims of Israeli settler violence, recalled that he was driving with his brother on the afternoon of September 4, 2026, when roughly 20 settlers armed with clubs, stones, and pistols stopped his car at the entrance of their village of al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah. The settlers doused the two men with pepper spray and pelted them with rocks until they managed to flee on foot into an olive grove. From there, Khdair said, he could see Israeli soldiers standing with the settlers beside his car. A second group of settlers, armed with pistols and clubs and speaking Hebrew, found the brothers under an olive tree and one of them took Khdair’s U.S. passport. “One of them looked at it and he spat on it,” he said, “and immediately they started hitting us with the clubs until the clubs were broken. Then they started hitting us with big rocks all over our bodies.” When Palestinian villagers came to help, soldiers fired tear gas at them, he added.

Watch Samid Khdair recount a harrowing September 4 attack by Israeli settlers here. 

A video filmed by Palestinians from a nearby rooftop, verified by DAWN and ADC, appears to show villagers helping the bleeding brothers into a car while Israeli soldiers stand in the olive grove a short distance away pointing their weapons at the group waiting for the ambulance.

Settlers also attacked the ambulance carrying the brothers to a Ramallah hospital, Khdair said, where he received eight stitches to his forehead and six stitches to his leg. An ophthalmologist’s report reviewed by DAWN and ADC noted trauma to Khdair’s right eye, including damage to the eyelid and scarring of the cornea, and reduced vision in that eye that may be permanent. His brother, who has a kidney condition that requires dialysis, struggled to breathe after the attack. Settlers stole his car, phone, U.S. passport, driver’s license, Social Security card, watch, and cash. The Times of Israel and Al Jazeera reported on the attack the next day.

When Mr. Khdair attempted to file a complaint with the Israeli police and identified himself as a U.S. citizen, officers told him, “You are a Palestinian,” and recorded his statement in Hebrew, a language he does not read or understand, through a translator. According to Yesh Din, Palestinians can file complaints only at police stations inside Israeli settlements, must wait at the settlement gate for a police escort, and frequently find no Arabic-speaking investigator when they arrive, obstacles no other American victim of crime abroad is expected to overcome without support from a U.S. embassy or consulate.

Khdair said he emailed the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem to inform them of the attack. An embassy official called him once and told him that all the embassy could do was help him obtain a new travel document. No one has called since.

“An Israeli police officer told a U.S. citizen that his passport did not count because he is Palestinian, and the U.S. Embassy proved him right,” said Jenin Younes, ADC’s President and Legal Director. “Our government is supposed to treat all American citizens equally, but routinely disregards protections for Palestinian Americans, especially those who travel to Palestine and Israel.”

On September 5, the day after the attack, Ambassador Huckabee visited nearby Turmus Ayya and told reporters the embassy “can’t investigate criminal activity” and, without mentioning Mr. Khdair, described the settlers responsible for such attacks as “a tiny little group of marauders.”

Far from a law-enforcement problem with a few bad apples, settler violence is a state-backed project to take over land and dominate and ethnically cleanse Palestinians, DAWN and ADC said. Israeli authorities are “arming, funding, and granting impunity to the violent settlers,” as Human Rights Watch put it in August.

Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks, the Israeli army called up some 5,500 settlers into West Bank “regional defense” reserve battalions. In at least two killings this year, the shooter was identified as an IDF reservist or a settler in military uniform. At the same time, Israel’s National Security Ministry, run by Itamar Ben-Gvir significantly expanded civilian “rapid response squads […] with special policing powers, uniforms, and weapons.” The ministry has reportedly issued more than 165,000 permanent gun licenses since October 2023 and Ben-Gvir himself reportedly in some cases personally oversaw the distribution of rifles to settlers. The Israeli human rights group Yesh Din estimates that, just in the few months after October 2023, roughly 7,000 armed settlers had served in regional defense units, and that some 8,000 U.S.-made firearms have been distributed to settlers. Israel’s policies, it concluded, “have effectively created armed militias in the West Bank.” In effect, Israeli authorities have deputized settlers to attack Palestinian communities under the color of law.

Settler violence, as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented, is “state violence,” part of a “strategy to cement the takeover of Palestinian land.” Between January 2023 and April 2026, settler violence has displaced more than 6,400 Palestinians—nearly half of whom are children—from 130 communities in the West Bank, 48 of which have entirely emptied, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The U.N. Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel also concluded in June 2026 that settler violence “functions as a means of implementing Israeli State policy,” and that there has been a “de facto collapse of the distinction between settlers and soldiers.”

Israeli authorities also ensure impunity for settler violence, as demonstrated in years of data showing almost no enforcement against them. This is by design– the army has authority over Palestinians in the West Bank but has delegated law enforcement jurisdiction over settlers to the Israeli police. Yesh Din’s data show that 93.6 percent of investigations into settler attacks on Palestinians between 2005 and 2025 were closed without an indictment. Defense Minister Israel Katz ended administrative detention for settlers in November 2024; and police investigations into nationalist crimes against Palestinians have fallen by 73 percent since 2023.

“Settlers attacking Palestinians may well be hooligans, as Huckabee called them, but it’s the Israeli government giving the hooligans arms and protection,” said Raed Jarrar at DAWN. “When a state arms a group, deploys it alongside its army and all but guarantees it will never be prosecuted, that group is an extension of the state. Washington cannot fund the army and pretend the militia it recruits is somebody else’s problem.”

Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed nine U.S. citizens since 2022, including three in the past 15 months: Sayfollah Musallet, 20, of Tampa, beaten to death in Sinjil on July 11, 2025, while settlers blocked the ambulance for hours; Khamis Ayyad, 41, of Chicago, who died of smoke inhalation in a settler arson attack in Silwad on July 31, 2025; and Nasrallah Abu Siyam, 19, of Philadelphia, shot and beaten by settlers from the Neve Erez outpost in Mukhmas on February 18 while soldiers stood by, according to witnesses. In not a single case has anyone been held accountable.

Israeli settlers have also driven several Palestinian-Americans from their homes in recent weeks. From August 9-18, 2026, settlers besieged the Qusra home of Loui Ridi, 46, of Toledo, Ohio, trapping some 15 people and cutting off their access to water and electricity, leaving them no option but to rely on the U.N. to deliver food and medicine. The Israeli army collaborated with the settler siege by declaring the area a closed military zone and soldiers were filmed drinking coffee with the settlers. Huckabee called the attackers “Israeli terrorists,” yet a day after Israeli authorities did not arrest the settler attacking Ridi in front of his home.

On September 27, Mustafa Zaatar, a U.S. citizen, watched on his home security cameras as settlers torched three vehicles outside his house in Abu Falah. “I am an American citizen, but I have not felt that it protected me or offered me anything,” he said. In Turmus Ayya, where roughly 80 percent of the 3,000 year-round residents are U.S. citizens, settlers burned the home of an American family in April, 2026. On September 29, when Israeli police tried to enforce a court order to return a displaced Palestinian family to its home in neighboring Jalud, more than 100 settlers, whom CNN identified as the same group that besieged Ridi’s home, torched the family’s house and car and drove the police away.

The International Court of Justice found in July 2024 that “Israel’s systematic failure to prevent or to punish attacks by settlers against the life or bodily integrity of Palestinians” violates its legal obligations as an occupying power. Under the customary rules codified by the International Law Commission, the conduct of soldiers and mobilized reservists is the conduct of the state, even when they exceed their orders, and attacks by armed civilians that soldiers direct, escort or join are attributable to the state that controls the operation. The United States, which funds and arms that state, has its own obligation under Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions to ensure respect for the law.

The U.S., despite wielding significant leverage over Israel, has done virtually nothing for Palestinian American victims. After Musallet’s killing in 2025, Huckabee asked Israel to “aggressively investigate,” and a State Department spokesperson later said, “We wait to see what those investigations will be.” When Abu Siyam was killed, the department said only that it was “aware of the death of an American citizen” and stood “ready to provide consular assistance.” Twelve senators and nine House members wrote in August that the Justice Department “has reportedly not opened investigations into any of the killings since 2025.” On September 29, 2026, the U.S. Senate narrowly failed to pass a resolution, despite the support of all but one of the Senate Democrats, that would have required the State Department to report to Congress on the increasing violence in the West Bank, including the killings of American citizens.

American law is clear: the United States must stop providing arms and other security assistance to Israel. The Leahy Law prohibits assistance to any unit of a foreign security force where there is credible information that it has committed gross violations of human rights. Despite ample evidence to support such applications, the State Department has never applied it to a single Israeli unit. Palestinian families supported by DAWN sued the State Department in December 2024 under the Administrative Procedure Act over its clear unwillingness to apply the Leahy Law to Israel. The Arms Export Control Act requires that U.S. weapons not be transferred “to anyone not an officer, employee, or agent” of the recipient government that uses such weapons for human rights abuses. Federal law makes it a crime to kill or seriously injure a U.S. national abroad in an attack intended to intimidate a civilian population, which is what the U.S. ambassador himself has called these attacks.

“The attacks on Americans are the tip of the iceberg,” said Deyar Jamil at ADC. “For every U.S. citizen beaten on a West Bank road, there are hundreds of Palestinians attacked, outside of the headlines. Instead of protecting its citizens and addressing the wider phenomena, the U.S. is arming, funding and shielding the army facilitating the attacks against them and those around them.”

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About ADC

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) is the largest Arab American civil rights organization in the United States, founded in 1980 by former Senator James Abourezk. ADC takes on powerful institutions and interests that threaten Americans’ constitutional rights and civil liberties. Our impact litigation and legal advocacy challenge government overreach, defend freedom of speech and dissent, and protect the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. ADC also works with national and international media to challenge discrimination, stereotypes, and misinformation, while ensuring Arab American perspectives are represented accurately and meaningfully in public debate.