The two men enter the village. They wield long sticks and wear masks over their faces.

They have come to Al-Mughayyir in the north of the occupied West Bank from a nearby Israeli settlement. Haroon Bshara, a resident of the village, said the men, captured on video, used pepper spray in an assault on a Palestinian farmer last week.

This village of some 4,000 residents has become a flashpoint on the front line of an escalating wave of violence by Israeli settlers who are attacking Palestinian homes across the territory.

Several Israeli outposts have been established around the village in recent years. Settler extremists have taken over most of the local farmland, and launch near-daily raids into the village, locals say.

Last month, 17-year-old Fadi al-Nasaan, and member of the Palestinian national youth football team, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers as he defended a house in the village from settlers. The army alleged he was throwing stones. In April, settlers and army reservists opened fire outside a school, killing a 14-year-old and 32-year-old. The army said it had suspended a reservist over the incident.

Bshara’s life was changed by a raid in April 2024, when settlers stormed his home and set fire to it with his family inside. He said the incident caused his pregnant wife to deliver prematurely, and his son lived for only two days.

The settlers are not hiding their agenda to claim the land and force out Palestinian residents. “We are carrying out a conquest here,” one raider proudly told Israeli media last week. After 150 Palestinian residents fled the village last year after a series of attacks, an unofficial settler spokesperson, Elisha Yered, said the “enemy population…was broken”.

The case of Al-Mughayyir is part of a wider pattern in the occupied West Bank, where violence by residents of settlements – which are illegal under international law – has reached unprecedented levels. Last month, the UN reported that there have been more than 1,300 settler attacks this year against 250 Palestinian communities, resulting in 880 injuries and 18 deaths, the highest figures since records began.

Some recent incidents have drawn opposition from even Israel’s staunchest supporters. A group of settlers surrounded a home in the village of Qusra last week owned by a Palestinian-American, Loui Ridi, and remained there for days, blocking access as the family inside were reported to be running low on food and water.

Land seizures and displacement of Palestinian populations have also sharply escalated, according to watchdogs. Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem, said settlers had taken 100,000 hectares of land from Palestinians over the past three years – about 18 per cent of the West Bank – and 64 communities of around 4,000 residents have been displaced.

As the Israeli army failed to disperse the crowds, the US government intervened. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, branded the settlers “Israeli terrorists”. The White House reportedly pressed Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to issue a condemnation which never came.

Huckabee, an evangelical Christian with a long record of support for settlements, followed up with comments on Thursday that invoked the Bible to condemn the settlers’ actions as a “violation of God’s law” and the eighth commandment “thou shalt not steal”.

The rebuke follows a cooling of relations between the White House and the Israeli leadership following the joint attack on Iran. Donald Trump has declined to endorse Netanyahu’s re-election bid ahead of the vote on 27 October, while Netanyahu has publicly rejected the peace plan for Gaza put forward by the Trump-created Board of Peace.

In December, Trump admitted that the United States and Israel did not agree “100 per cent” on the West Bank, when asked if he was concerned about Israeli settler violence.

The Israeli army now claims to have dismantled settler structures outside Ridi’s home and “deployed additional troops throughout the Qusra area in order to protect residents and maintain security”.

Activists and local media claim the harassment continues. A settler source, who did not wish to be named due to sensitivities, said the Israelis “are going to rebuild the settlement because they are not into giving the enemy territory back because the government wants to please the Americans”.

Analysts say the run-up to the Israeli election is a dangerous time as settlers seek to act before a possible change of government, with Netanyahu unwilling to restrain them.

The prime minister, who is reliant on radical settlers for votes and coalition partners, backed a budget last month with £319m for 34 new settlements, and tenders were issued this week for the E1 (East 1) “doomsday” settlement outside Jerusalem that would cut the West Bank in half and further diminish prospects of a Palestinian state.

Hugh Lovatt, a Middle East analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the election period could see increased violence. “With the polls tight and elections fast approaching, Netanyahu and his coalition have little to lose and much to gain from further unleashing the settler movement,” he said. “This will inevitably lead to more settlement building, more settler violence and more Palestinian dispossession.”

Netanyahu’s government, which includes ultranationalist Bezalel Smotrich as finance minister with responsibility for the West Bank, has allowed 185 new outposts – illegal under even Israeli law – to be established, and either approved or retroactively legalised 103 settlements, since 2022.

B’Tselem spokesperson, Yair Dvir, said settler attacks and land grabs escalated with the arrival of this government, again after the Hamas massacres of 7 October, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed, and yet again since the election was called last month.

“You go to the West Bank and you see the remains of Palestinian communities that used to live there not long ago, now totally erased by the settlers and the army that helped them, and we see how those attacks are expanding into more established villages and towns,” he told The i Paper. “We see big raids, sometimes hundreds of settlers, setting fire to homes, cars, mosques, attacking people and taking over their homes.”

Palestinians and solidarity activists have long complained that they receive no protection from the Israeli army against settlers, and offences against them are not punished. Data from Israeli watchdog Yesh Din showed that 94 per cent of cases of reported settler violence against Palestinians are closed without indictment.

Eid Hathaleen, a resident of the Masafer Yatta village cluster in the southern West Bank that has been plagued by settler violence – a settler killed his cousin Awdah last year – said the raiders often wear military uniforms and are difficult to distinguish from soldiers. “They both have assault rifles, and they stand shoulder to shoulder in the field,” he said.

B’Tselem has documented several cases in the area of soldiers expelling Palestinians from their land by declaring it a closed military zone, or “state land”, and then allowing settlers to take it over. Watchdogs say the creation of settler-only Israel Defence Forces (IDF) units in the West Bank and the distribution of guns by the state to settlers complicate policing.

An IDF spokesperson said troops are instructed to intervene in “violent incidents or incidents directed at Palestinians or their property. In such cases, the soldiers are obligated to act to stop the violation and to detain or arrest the suspects”.

But the surge in violence and displacements, and the lack of accountability to date, have fuelled calls for action against Israel. Israeli lawyers and activists have called for international sanctions against Major General Avi Bluth, IDF commander in the West Bank and a settler, for failing to curb the attacks.

European governments, including the UK, are threatening further sanctions over the issue, having already issued some targeted measures, including against Smotrich. On Wednesday, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband condemned settler violence and plans to advance the E1 settlement and said new sanctions would be announced “in the coming weeks”.

The US has said it will not allow a formal annexation of the West Bank. But key figures in the settler movement have described plans for a more gradual, informal takeover, which Smotrich has said would be “easier to swallow in the international and legal context”.