When Israeli settlers attacked the village of al-Mughayyir on the evening of July 11, 2026, 17-year-old Fadi Hamdallah al-Naasan did what his community has learned to do — he ran toward the sound of screams. Women and girls were calling for help as settlers descended on a family home on the village's eastern perimeter, backed by Israeli occupation forces. Fadi never came back.

He was shot in the thigh — what Palestinian officials described as an explosive bullet fired by Israeli soldiers providing cover for the settler assault. His leg was amputated at Ramallah's Palestine Medical Complex in a desperate effort to save his life. Seven days later, on July 18, Fadi died. He was buried in his home village of al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, with hundreds of mourners in black carrying his body from the hospital to the graveyard.

Fadi was not a fighter. He was a footballer — a member of the Palestinian national youth team and a player for the local Al-Mughayyir Club. He was a good student, his mother Hanan said. Everyone loved him. His father Hamdallah said simply: "He loved football."

Large crowd of Palestinian mourners gathered in the village of al-Mughayyir for the funeral of 17-year-old Fadi al-Naasan on July 18, 2026

The Raid on al-Mughayyir, July 11

The attack on al-Mughayyir was not a spontaneous confrontation. According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA and the village council head, Amin Abu Alia, Israeli settlers arrived from the east side of the village in the evening hours of July 11 and attempted to raid the home of Mohammad Hamed Abu Alia, a local family. Soldiers accompanied the settlers, providing armed protection as the colonists grazed their livestock on Palestinian agricultural land, damaging trees and crops.

This was the second raid on the same home that day. Hours earlier, Israeli forces and settlers had already stormed the property, wounding four Palestinians including a 10-year-old child struck in the head by a stun grenade. Two others were hit by rubber-coated steel bullets, and one person — Fadi — was shot in the thigh with live ammunition. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society reported that soldiers and settlers blocked ambulance crews from reaching the wounded for an extended period. Israeli forces also detained 23-year-old Moamen Abu Alia during the raid.

The Haaretz headline captured the reality of life in al-Mughayyir: "Settler Attacks Are Now Routine at This Palestinian Village." The village council's assessment was blunt. "Ten settlers, 10 soldiers and 20 sheep — the flock is just a pretext," one resident told the Israeli newspaper.

Palestinian men gathered around two bodies on stretchers during an outdoor funeral ceremony in Deir Jarir after a settler-military raid

A Village Under Siege

Al-Mughayyir is a Palestinian village of roughly 2,870 people in the Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, northeast of Ramallah. Villagers say 75% of the village's land has been confiscated for Israeli settlements, military bases, and nature reserves. Since October 7, 2023, seven residents have been shot dead — their portraits now spray-painted on the walls of the town with the dates they were killed.

The village has endured a pattern of repeated settler violence for years. In 2014, the village mosque was torched in a suspected price-tag attack. In June 2026, settlers attacked a home and destroyed a vineyard in al-Mughayyir. On July 25, 2026 — one week after Fadi's funeral — settlers set fire to several vehicles near the village as part of a wave of attacks across the West Bank that saw two mosques burned and "revenge" graffiti scrawled on walls.

As we reported when settlers dragged a child's body behind a golf cart in a pogrom that shocked even the numb, the violence is not random — it is systematic, state-backed, and escalating. The same infrastructure of settlement expansion and military complicity that we documented in our investigation of the 8,000 sheep and goats stolen by settlers in 2026 is at work in al-Mughayyir. The sheep are not the point. The land is the point. The people are the obstacle.

The Partnership Between Settlers and the Army

The killing of Fadi al-Naasan fits a pattern that Palestinians across the West Bank have described with increasing urgency: settlers initiate the attack, the military provides cover, and Palestinians who resist are shot. The Guardian spoke to mourners in the nearby village of Deir Jarir the day after Fadi's death — burying two more Palestinians killed in a near-identical raid — and the testimony was unambiguous.

"It's a partnership between the army and the settlers," said Adel Rashid, whose 26-year-old son Abdul was shot dead by soldiers during a settler raid late on July 19.

Yuli Novak, executive director of the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, was direct: "The killing in Deir Jarir is one example of how Israel promotes ethnic cleansing in the West Bank: settlers invade and steal, while the military and police accompany them and shoot Palestinians who try to protect their homes and property." This is not rhetoric — the paramilitary infrastructure behind the pogroms is organized, armed, and state-backed, as our investigation has shown.

A Guardian analysis found that Israel has not prosecuted a single Israeli citizen for killing a Palestinian civilian in the occupied West Bank since the start of this decade. Total impunity. Zero accountability.

A woman in black bending over the shrouded body of 17-year-old Fadi al-Naasan on a stretcher, grieving at his funeral in al-Mughayyir

The Death Toll in the West Bank

The numbers tell the story of a territory being consumed by violence. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA):

• 87 Palestinians killed in the West Bank in 2026 as of July 24 (including 10 in a single week in mid-July)
• At least 18 killed by settlers in 2026 as of July 20 — already surpassing the 17 killed by settlers in all of 2025
• Over 1,114 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since October 7, 2023
• 55% of Palestinian injuries in the West Bank in 2026 are caused by settler attacks
• Three settler attacks per day on average in 2026, up from one every three days in 2020

Human Rights Watch warned on July 24 that years of "lawlessness and impunity for attacks has turned the West Bank into a powder keg waiting to explode." As UN experts have stated — echoing what Palestinians have said for decades — the settler violence constitutes ethnic cleansing.

The Erasure of Palestinian Football

Fadi al-Naasan's death is not just a story of settler violence. It is a story of the systematic destruction of Palestinian life in all its forms — including play.

The Palestine Football Association confirmed that with Fadi's death, 1,013 members of the Palestinian sports community have been killed since October 7, 2023, including 568 from the football family alone — players, coaches, referees, administrators. Just weeks before Fadi was shot, goalkeeper Salim Khader al-Ashqar was killed in Gaza, bringing the football death toll to 567. Fadi was number 568.

As the New Arab reported in a feature on Palestinian football under occupation, the sport faces "erasure" — not just from airstrikes and bullets, but from the systematic destruction of stadiums, training facilities, and the communities that sustain them. This erasure is not accidental. Israel's final solution — the AI-driven machinery of displacement and elimination we have documented — extends to every facet of Palestinian life, including play. Gaza's sports infrastructure lies in ruins while settler violence in the West Bank attacks the players themselves.

Fadi was 17. He had his whole life ahead of him — on the pitch, in school, in his village. His mother said everyone loved him. His father said he heard the screams and ran.

That is not how the Israeli military described it. They declined to comment when asked by AFP. As the Guardian's investigation noted, Israel has not prosecuted a single citizen for killing a Palestinian civilian in the occupied West Bank since 2020. The message is clear: Palestinian lives, whether on a football pitch or in a raided village, carry no legal consequence for those who take them.

The mourners carried Fadi's body from Ramallah to al-Mughayyir, past the new checkpoint gates that were erected after October 7 to seal off villages like his from the outside world. Seven portraits of the dead already line the walls of his community. Now there are eight.

The settlers will come again. The soldiers will accompany them. And the world will call it a "clash" — the same language of false equivalence that has enabled every phase of the Nakba, from 1948 to the present day.