‘They wanted to burn me alive’: 92-year-old man describes West Bank attack | Human Rights

After the Maghrib prayer, Yasser Saqer Rashid sat in a corner of the al-Marah mosque in the West Bank that was occupied by people and started reading the Quran. But shortly after, there was a commotion outside the mosque.

Israeli residents entered the courtyard of a mosque in the town of Deir Dibwan near Ramallah, which is home to the Palestinian Authority.

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Rashid said that a visitor poured a flammable substance through the window of the mosque to start the fire. “They wanted to burn me alive,” a 92-year-old Palestinian American told Al Jazeera.

He said: “I was surprised by someone who was carrying a petrol bomb, pointing at my face and clothes near the window.

Although the full extent of the damage to the al-Marah mosque is not yet known, footage has been taken of masked people entering the mosque’s inner rooms, before coming out and torching six local cars.

In the neighboring town of Burqa, another mosque, al-Noor, was hit by arson attacks shortly after, amid escalating violence against Israeli residents in the occupied West Bank. The assailants lit tires and other flammable materials on the doors in an attempt to set the house on fire.

Settler attack has occurred it exploded since Israel’s ongoing civil war in Gaza, in which more than 73,000 people have been killed. On Tuesday, the Palestinian group Hamas accused illegal Israeli settlers of setting fire to a mosque in the village of Jiljilya near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

In most cases, refugees are accompanied by Israeli soldiers. At least 13 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank so far this year, according to United Nations data.

Right-wing Israeli ministers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have supported the diaspora and called for the cleansing of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories.

“We are settled here and we will not leave,” said Adel Maatan, the burqa mosque’s muezzin, who was reciting the Quran during the attack. “This is our land given to our fathers, and we will live in it until the day of judgment.”

Directing the place of worship

The recent burning of mosques is not an isolated incident but part of a campaign to target Palestinian religious sites, observers say. According to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, Israeli soldiers and settlers carried out 22 attacks on Muslim religious sites in May 2026 alone. Most of these occurred in Hebron district, which had 14, followed by Nablus, Jenin, Jericho and Ramallah.

In the east of Ramallah, many mosques and houses have been targeted by residents who used incendiary weapons and set fire to the attacks that were carried out to drive Palestinian families out of their land.

Despite being a US citizen, Rashid found that his passport did not provide protection from violence. He issued a direct appeal to Washington, seeking protection for Palestinian Americans who are at risk of escalating violence in the West Bank.

Mansour Mansour, the mayor of Deir Dibwan, said that the attackers had carefully divided the positions. While one group was looking for a mosque and an old man, another attacked nearby houses, and a third group burned six cars and agricultural crops before leaving.

The dream house turned into a prison

In the north, in the village of Beit Imrin near Nablus, Sadeq Faqih’s dream house has been turned into a fortress. Faqih, a 41-year-old textile and furniture merchant, built his house in 2020 “in a beautiful high-rise with good ventilation”.

However, the recent establishment of a nearby Israeli military base has turned his dream into “hell” amid threats of attack.

On the night of April 21, 2026, a group of settlers broke into his premises, breaking the glass doors and trying to enter the main building before the locals stormed in and forced them to flee.

Faqih noted that the Israeli army arrived 20 minutes later and reviewed the footage, which revealed the faces of the two terrorists who had been exposed and fled to the security area. Despite filing a police complaint and giving evidence, Faqih was shocked to learn that the case was closed by “unknown assailants”.

Settlers who commit crimes against Palestinians are often not punished because Israeli authorities rarely punish them. Court of Israel he freed the stranger accused of murdering a 31-year-old Palestinian Awdah Hathaleen in 2025.

Forced to protect his family, Faqih surrounded his house with heavy barbed wire and strong window guards.

“It became a real prison,” he said, adding that despite “horror”, “we will not leave any of our homes.”

More than 117 villages and towns in the West Bank have been completely or partially evacuated due to the insurgency, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Faqih’s wife, Abeer, was 36 weeks pregnant when armed men arrived at their yard.

“I didn’t know what to do or what would happen to us,” Abeer recalled. “They broke the glass and wanted to get in. Out of fear, I started running, down the stairs, and I slipped”.

Her water broke in the panic, prompting doctors to induce an early delivery. Baby Saleh was born a few hours after the attack on April 22.

Today, the child remains in the intensive care unit of Hclinic Specialty Hospital in Ramallah, battling complications from his premature birth. He suffers from Pseudomonas bacterial infections and lung problems that are exacerbated by ventilators.

“Every time he tries to remove the breathing tube, his chest hurts,” Abeer told Al Jazeera.

Systematic increase in violence

The tragedies that the Rashid and Faqih families have faced show the level of violence in the community they live in, they say.

In the month of May this year, the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission recorded 1,659 actions by Israeli soldiers and settlers against Palestinians and their property. Of these, 551 were committed by the residents themselves, the violence concentrated in the districts of Hebron, Ramallah and Al-Bireh and Nablus.

The economic and housing systems of the Palestinian people are targets. In the month of May this year, the authorities recorded 436 protests against Palestinian property, including 215 incidents of vandalism and vandalism. Agricultural areas were also heavily affected, with 124 separate attacks causing 7,222 trees to be burned, uprooted or damaged, including 3,317 olive trees. In one such attack on May 8, residents burned a Palestinian home in the village of Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya, south of Nablus.

Religious places have also become places for arson campaigns. On May 15, residents attacked the village of Jibiya, northwest of Ramallah, burning the local mosque and two cars while painting racist paint on the walls of residential buildings. Human rights groups recognize that these village-dwellers’ violence operates in line with government policies; in the same month, Israeli authorities destroyed 70, resulting in the destruction of 155 Palestinian homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

According to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, settlers have established at least 165 new settlements since the Gaza war began in October 2023, with 89 of those built in 2025 alone.

The number of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has increased from 250,000 in the 1990s to more than 750,000 now. The settlement is the biggest obstacle to the realization of an independent and independent Palestinian state as part of the so-called two-state solution.

Last week, Amnesty International he said The displacement of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank is part of the Israeli government’s deliberate process of ethnic cleansing rather than a “nonsensical” minority or distant government ministers.

Tuesday, Israel to be caught planning and construction forces covering the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank which was seized by the Palestinian Authority.