February, 2026

The ACT Palestine Forum (APF) condemn the escalating Israeli settler violence across the occupied West Bank and the systematic failure to protect Palestinian civilians. These attacks are not isolated incidents but are embedded within an entrenched policy environment that enables violence, land seizure, and forced displacement under conditions of near-total impunity.

As part of a faith-based alliance, the ACT Palestine Forum holds a particular moral and political responsibility towards the Palestinian Christian community in the Holy Land—a community whose presence predates modern political borders and whose continued existence is now under direct threat. We, the APF, closely monitor and document settler attacks throughout the West Bank, with specific concern for violations affecting Christian communities, including the recent attacks in Birzeit and Al-Taybeh (Ramallah Governorate) and Beit Sahour (Bethlehem Governorate), which are not incidental targets, but whose land, safety, and future are increasingly under assault.

In January 2026, Israeli settlers carried out a violent attack on the village of Birzeit, trespassing onto private Palestinian land, damaging property, and brutally assaulting a family when confronted. Four family members were injured, including a woman who sustained a severe head wound and was hospitalized in intensive care. When residents, including her son, attempted to protect the victims, Israeli forces intervened not to stop the settlers, but to disperse Palestinians with tear gas and arrested three of them, while allowing the settler perpetrators to leave without consequence.

At the same time, settler violence is being reinforced through official political endorsement of settlement expansion. Beit Sahour is a historic Palestinian Christian city; its people form an indigenous Christian community whose continued existence in the Holy Land is increasingly endangered by land confiscation, movement restrictions, and systematic intimidation. Settlers recently inaugurated and expanded a new settlement outpost, reportedly in the presence and with the support of Israel’s Minister of Finance. The targeting of Beit Sahour’s eastern lands is not merely a local land issue, it is a direct threat to the survival of a community.

For Palestinian Christians, this reality carries especially grave consequences. The combination of physical violence, land seizure, economic strangulation, and the absence of legal protection accelerates forced displacement and emigration, steadily eroding the indigenous Christian presence in the land where Christianity was born. This is not voluntary migration; it is displacement produced by sustained political pressure and insecurity.

The attacks in the different locations must be understood as part of an unprecedented and systematic surge in settler violence across the occupied West Bank and all occupied Palestine. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Israeli settlers carried out more than 1,770 attacks in 2025 alone[1], causing widespread injuries to Palestinians, destruction of homes and livelihoods, and terrorizing hundreds of Palestinian communities, including in East Jerusalem, and deepening the fragmentation of Palestinian communities.

This development constitutes a deliberate political act aimed at consolidating control over Palestinian land, isolating cities in the West Bank from their natural surroundings and entrenching a reality of fragmentation and permanent inequality. Palestinian communities simultaneously face near-daily assaults—including physical violence, arson, the destruction of homes and agricultural land, vandalism of olive groves, damage to water infrastructure, and the harassment of families and farmers—carried out with near-total impunity and often under the protection or presence of Israeli forces. Together, these practices form part of a broader strategy to impose irreversible facts on the ground, create a coercive environment that pressures Palestinians into displacement, normalize dispossession, and ultimately undermine any future based on justice, accountability, and respect for Palestinian rights.

The ACT Palestine Forum underscores that these developments demand an urgent and unequivocal political response. Settlement expansion and settler violence are not humanitarian concerns alone; they are deliberate, policy-driven actions with far-reaching political consequences. Diplomatic Missions, who are present on the ground, have directly witnessed attacks on Palestinian communities—including Christian communities such as Al-Taybeh—and some consistently affirm their commitment to the protection of human rights, international law, and the Christian presence in the Holy Land. These commitments must now be matched by action.

We therefore call on the international community, and churches to move beyond expressions of concern and to take principled and concrete steps. These include:

• Clear and public opposition to illegal settlement expansion,
• Meaningful political accountability measures,
• The use of available diplomatic, legal, and economic tools to ensure protection for Palestinian communities and to uphold international law.

Silence or inaction in the face of escalating violence only reinforces impunity and enables further dispossession.

As churches and faith-based organizations, we reaffirm that faith cannot be separated from justice, and that peace cannot be built on violence, dispossession, or selective concern. We will continue to stand with those under attack, to bear witness to where others turn away, and to raise our collective voice until accountability, equality, and dignity are secured for all who call the Holy Land home.

[1] The figures are variable daily and to have the last updates it is on the OCHA official website: https://www.ochaopt.org/ under the name Humanitarian situation update WB.