In the birthplace of Christianity, churches and communities are coming under attack from Jewish settlers

The attacks near the church were small and left no casualties but they play into a worsening pattern of deadly settler abuse of Palestinians, the perpetrators of which are rarely prosecuted by Israeli authorities. The Israeli government had previously said that any acts of violence by civilians are unacceptable and that individuals should not take the law into their own hands.

Settler violence targeting Palestinians in the West Bank has spiked to unusually high levels over the past several months: The United Nations has reported more than 700 incidents just in the first half of this year. It reported 216 attacks by Israel settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank for the whole of 2023.

Some have blamed this on an upswell of anti-Palestinian anger in Israel following the Hamas-led terror attacks from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. But they had already been increasing after the most right-wing government in Israeli history took office in late 2022.

“Since the establishment of this government, you have [ministers] saying, ‘Don’t apply the law on settlers,’” Nadav Weiman, executive director of “Breaking the Silence,” an Israeli organization that reports on abuses by Israel’s security services, said in an interview.

“You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see these videos from the West Bank and see full faces” of the settlers, said Weiman, adding that they enjoyed so much impunity that many often no longer wear masks.

Last Friday, settlers beat to death Sayfollah Musallet, a 20-year-old American from Florida who was visiting his mom, brother and sister in the village of Sinjil. A second man identified as Mohammed al-Shalabi, 23, was also killed in the incident, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Musallet’s death sparked an angry reaction from U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — an evangelical Christian and longtime advocate for settlers’ rights to colonize Palestinian land — who in a Wednesday post on X said Israel should “aggressively investigate the murder,” which he called a “criminal and terrorist act.”

The Israel Defense Forces said last Friday that authorities were looking into the matter. Police told NBC News that several people from “both sides” had been detained at the scene on suspicion of involvement in acts of violence, and that a joint investigation had been launched by the Israel Police and IDF Military Police.

Asked for an update Thursday, the IDF said a probe by the Israel Police and the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division was ongoing. The Israel Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, settlers rarely face legal consequences for violence against Palestinians, according to a report last year from the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, which found that more than 93% of investigations between 2005 and 2023 closed without an indictment and only 3% led to a conviction.

In videos taken by eyewitnesses in Taybeh and elsewhere in the West Bank, the settlers appear to be almost exclusively young men in their teens and 20s.

But Palestinian observers say the settler group, known in Israel as “Hilltop Youth,” are just foot soldiers fronting a sophisticated, coordinated effort to settle the West Bank in such a way as to make the formation of a Palestinian state impossible.

Designating Hilltop Youth a “violent extremist group” in October, the U.S. Treasury Department appeared to echo this assessment, saying it engaged “in killings, arson, assaults, and intimidation intended to drive Palestinian communities out of the West Bank.”

The settlers have also taken to grazing their cows and sheep in Palestinian fields. Leaders of the Church of St. George Al Khidr showed NBC News videos of settlers walking their cows into the town center, where they munched on the leaves of commercial olive trees.

Rights groups including Amnesty International and the Israel-based Peace Now, B’Tselem and Kerem Navot say the settlers’ strategy is both to damage Palestinian agriculture and to incite conflicts with residents to create a pretext for violence.

Both goals are intended to push the Palestinians out, the rights groups say.