Huwara Before the Fire: A Palestinian Town Living Under the Checkpoint
Huwara is a small Palestinian town south of Nablus in the northern West Bank. For years, its main street — the only road connecting dozens of surrounding villages to Nablus — has also been a corridor of daily friction. An Israeli military checkpoint has long sat at the edge of the town, forcing Palestinians to queue, wait, and submit to inspection while Israeli settlers drive through on a parallel bypass road without stopping. Huwara’s shopkeepers, schoolchildren, and families have lived with the particular exhaustion of a town whose central artery doubles as an instrument of control. That reality, grinding and ordinary, became catastrophic on the night of 26 February 2023.
The Night of 26 February 2023: The Huwara Settler Pogrom
On the afternoon of 26 February 2023, two Israeli brothers were shot and killed near Huwara. Within hours, hundreds of Israeli settlers descended on the town and neighbouring Zaatara in what OCHA oPt documented as a coordinated and prolonged rampage. According to OCHA’s situation reports on the incident, settlers burned Palestinian homes, set fire to cars and agricultural land, and attacked residents. At least one Palestinian man, Sameh Aqtash, was killed. More than 100 Palestinians were injured. Hundreds of vehicles were destroyed or damaged. Dozens of residential and commercial structures were set alight or vandalized across Huwara and the surrounding area.
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, documented and published footage showing Israeli soldiers present in the area during the attacks — standing by as structures burned rather than intervening to protect Palestinian civilians. B’Tselem’s documentation described the soldiers’ posture as passive, consistent with a pattern it has recorded across the West Bank in which the military fails to restrain settler violence even when personnel are physically present.
Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights organisation and ICJ-accredited body, described the events as a pogrom — a term with a precise historical charge — and called for international accountability, documenting the destruction as part of a broader pattern of settler violence carried out with impunity under military occupation.
Smotrich’s Statement and the Logic Behind the Words
The violence was still raw when Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Finance Minister and a settler himself, made a statement at a conference in Paris days after the attack. He said that Huwara needed to be “wiped out” — that the Israeli state, rather than settlers acting outside the law, should be the agent of that destruction. The remark drew international condemnation, including from the United States government. Smotrich subsequently described his words as an emotional reaction, but the comment was widely reported and on record.
For Palestinians in Huwara and across the West Bank, the statement carried a particular weight. Smotrich holds ministerial authority over large portions of civilian life in the occupied West Bank through the Israeli Civil Administration. His words were not spoken from the political margins. Yesh Din, which monitors and litigates settler violence cases, has documented across years of data that the overwhelming majority of investigations into ideologically motivated crimes by Israeli settlers against Palestinians are closed without prosecution. The impunity that made the Huwara rampage possible was not incidental — it was structural, and Smotrich’s ministerial role sits inside that structure.
What OCHA’s Data Showed About Settler Violence Trends
The Huwara attack did not emerge in a vacuum. OCHA oPt’s Protection of Civilians reporting for the weeks and months surrounding February 2023 recorded a sustained escalation in settler violence across the West Bank. In 2022, OCHA documented over 700 incidents of settler violence resulting in Palestinian casualties or property damage — among the highest annual totals recorded. The first months of 2023 continued that trajectory.
OCHA’s data consistently showed that incidents in the Nablus governorate, which includes Huwara, were among the most frequently reported in the West Bank. The checkpoint geography of Huwara — which funnels settler traffic through or past a Palestinian residential centre — made the town structurally exposed. The combination of bypass roads for settlers, military checkpoints for Palestinians, and no meaningful law enforcement accountability for settler actors created conditions that human rights organisations had warned about long before February 2023.
Huwara After the Rampage: Burnt Homes and Unanswered Questions
In the days following the attack, Palestinian families in Huwara returned to survey the damage: blackened building facades, gutted interiors, rows of charred vehicles. OCHA’s situation reporting noted that the scale of destruction was among the worst recorded in a single settler-violence incident in recent years. International statements were issued. Inquiries were announced. Prosecutions, consistent with the pattern Yesh Din has documented over years of legal monitoring, remained scarce.
Huwara continued to exist — its checkpoint still in place, its main street still the only road through — carrying the visible scars of one night’s violence inside the longer, slower weight of occupation that had always been its daily condition.
Sources
- OCHA oPt — Protection of Civilians situation reports and weekly data, including February–March 2023 reporting on Huwara
- B’Tselem — Documentation of the 26 February 2023 Huwara attack, including footage of soldier conduct
- Al-Haq — Legal documentation and statement on the Huwara pogrom
- Yesh Din — Data on settler violence impunity and “Failure to Investigate” accountability reporting
