High-ranking United States officials traveled to a Christian Palestinian town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Sunday in the wake of weekend assaults by masked Israeli settlers that targeted European diplomats and journalists.
Riley Barnes, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, joined Brian Burch, US ambassador to the Holy See, alongside a delegation of other diplomats. The group visited the Latin Convent church in Taybeh and planned meetings with members of the local Christian community.
The diplomatic visit followed an incident on Saturday in which Belgian, French, and Polish diplomats, a French mayor, and Palestinian civilians were attacked near Taybeh by masked Israeli settlers. Just a day prior, Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine was hospitalized after being assaulted while covering a Palestinian olive harvest near another West Bank village.
The series of violent events coincided with US President Donald Trump endorsing his ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ahead of the parliamentary election scheduled for October 27. While Trump has expressed opposition to settlement expansion this year, his administration has exerted limited pressure on Netanyahu’s right-wing, pro-settler government regarding the policy. The international community, including United Nations bodies, views settlements as illegal under international law, whereas Israel considers the territory disputed rather than occupied.
Political and military responses to the violence have varied. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and the Israel Defense Forces both attributed the attack on the diplomats to “Israeli rioters.” In contrast, Prime Minister Netanyahu—whose governing coalition faces projections that it will lose its majority—adopted a more circumspect stance. Netanyahu stated that the diplomats had entered a “sensitive area with a history of confrontations without prior coordination with the IDF” and asserted that the facts surrounding the assault on Levine remain “unclear.”
France formally called upon Israeli authorities to arrest the perpetrators of Saturday’s attack and to halt criminal violence across the West Bank. However, by Sunday afternoon, Israeli authorities had not announced any arrests in connection with either of the two recent incidents.
The West Bank currently accommodates approximately 500,000 settlers alongside at least 3 million Palestinians. According to data from the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, settler attacks against Palestinians have surged, recording at least 170 incidents since September 27. Journalists, activists, and foreign observers have increasingly become targets of this violence, while prosecutions of Israeli settlers remain uncommon.
The ongoing volatility was visible on Sunday near the West Bank town of Salfit, where a group of at least 10 masked settlers dressed in black hurled rocks at Palestinians and activists engaged in the olive harvest, forcing the farmers to flee. Israeli border police operating in the area responded by firing tear gas toward the hills.
