Mahmoud Abbas sent letters on Sunday to Arab and allied heads of state, the European Union, the secretary-general of the Arab League, and the president of the U.N. Security Council, asking for urgent action to stop Israeli military operations and settler violence in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
What is happening, he wrote, has moved past isolated incidents into systematic policy: settlement expansion, escalating settler attacks, the deliberate weakening of the Palestinian Authority, and the displacement of Palestinians from their land. He asked for enforcement of Security Council Resolution 2334, which declared Israeli settlements illegal in 2016, accountability for those carrying out the attacks, and international protection for Palestinians.
The letters follow Friday's killings in Tal, southwest of Nablus, where roughly twenty armed settlers entered a town inside Area A, territory Israelis cannot enter without military coordination. Four Palestinians were killed and eight wounded. A Palestinian man took a settler's weapon and killed two armed Israelis.
The regime's military initially called the settlers hikers, then conceded some were armed. It then launched what it called an extensive counterterrorism operation, imposing curfews, arresting nearly fifty people in Tal while raiding around seventy homes, and storming the emergency department of Nablus Specialized Hospital, where staff say soldiers bound doctors and nurses and took away two brothers, one of them being treated for a gunshot wound. Experts have already warned Israel's response amounts to collective punishment.
Settlers attacked five villages around Nablus, burned two mosques and a home, destroyed a water network, and established two new outposts. Overnight into Sunday they set alight the mosque in Qusra, leaving a Star of David and the words "Revenge for Benayahu" on the entrance wall, naming one of the Israelis killed on Friday, and three of them tried to burn a mosque near Kour, southeast of Tulkarem, where worshippers put the fire out before it reached the main prayer area.
Vehicles were torched in Beitillu and tractors and trucks near Khirbet Abu Falah. The military said troops sent to Qusra found graffiti and signs of arson and were searching for suspects, and no one has been arrested. Last month's indictment of six teenagers for setting a mosque in Deir Dibwan on fire with worshippers inside was the fifty-first this year against settlers accused of extreme violence, in a year when the attacks have been close to daily. Fifty Palestinians were arrested in Tal in the same days that nobody was arrested for the mosques.
Netanyahu said his government would accelerate the legalisation of farm outposts and the creation of new ones. Bezalel Smotrich said the Palestinian villages should be made to look like the Nablus and Tulkarem refugee camps, destroyed in a 2025 operation Human Rights Watch found amounted to war crimes and ethnic cleansing; Itamar Ben-Gvir said they should be treated like Beit Hanoun in Gaza. HRW now warns of mass atrocities. OCHA counted 68 Palestinians killed in the West Bank this year as of 19 July, at least 13 by settlers. The Palestinian health ministry puts the toll higher, at 87, with 21 killed by settlers.
Abbas has sent versions of this letter before, in February over annexation, in June over church property in Jerusalem, and from the General Assembly podium last September. Spain, Qatar, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation all condemned the attacks this weekend, which is the response Abbas specifically warned would change nothing. The resolution he wants enforced is ten years old and the settlements it declared illegal have grown every year since. He is asking the same institutions that have declined to act for a decade to act now, and he knows it, and nor should you expect this round to end any differently.
