Israeli army played football in Palestinian home as settlers carried out ethnic cleansing, court hears

Israeli soldiers were filmed playing football inside a Palestinian home that had been seized during a campaign of settler violence that drove residents from their homes in Jalud, the country’s High Court has revealed.

Israel’s High Court of Justice has now ordered the state to allow Palestinian residents of Jalud, a village in the northern occupied West Bank near Nablus, to return to homes from which they were driven out by Jewish settlers.

According to the ruling, the campaign against Jalud’s residents began in April, when settlers pitched a tent on privately owned Palestinian land in Area B, which is under Israeli civil and Palestinian security control. Over the following months, residents were subjected to a campaign of terror intended to drive them out of their homes.

Settlers carried out incursions, set up roadblocks, threw stones, destroyed property, severed a water line, uprooted trees and burned a vehicle. Two of the three petitioners were forced to abandon their homes by 22 June.

Instead of arresting settlers, the Israeli army is said to have encouraged the terrorising of Palestinian residents. The court cited video evidence showing Israeli soldiers playing football inside a Palestinian home that had been seized during the campaign.

Supreme Court President Isaac Amit, sitting with Justices Alex Stein and Yechiel Kasher, wrote: “The emerging picture is extremely bleak. There are plenty of questions, but fewer satisfactory answers.” The court criticised the authorities for failing to seize the vehicles of suspects whose number plates had already been recorded and asked why no investigations had been opened against individuals who had been identified.

The state was ordered to coordinate the residents’ return within 14 days, secure their safe passage and restore the utilities that had been cut off. It has until 22 September to submit a progress report and until 8 October to detail what enforcement measures it intends to take against those responsible.

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The ruling comes against a backdrop of what the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has called the worst period of settler violence in two decades of monitoring. OCHA recorded more than 1,330 settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank between January and late July this year, an average of six a day.

A UN-mandated commission of inquiry has found that Israeli authorities “have repeatedly failed to prevent foreseeable settler attacks and, in some cases, have directly enabled them through army protection and the provision of weapons and funding.”

The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem said: “The government funds and arms the settlers while the Israeli military stands by and, in many cases, actively participates in the attacks.”

In Qusra, also in the northern West Bank, soldiers occupied the home of a besieged family as a “military post” while settlers laid siege to neighbouring houses. The examples are amongst several documented cases in which the army has been accused of facilitating settler attacks rather than preventing them.

Court orders of this kind have failed to hold in the past. In August 2024, the same court ordered the return of Palestinian residents of Khirbet Zanuta, a hamlet in the South Hebron Hills, who had been driven out the previous year by settlers linked to the Meitarim Farm outpost. Within three weeks, renewed attacks and more than 100 documented incidents of harassment forced the families out again, prompting the rights group Haqel to file a contempt of court motion that remains before the justices.

Rights groups say such rulings, however welcome, do little to alter the pattern of ethnic cleansing. OCHA has documented more than 5,900 Palestinians displaced from 117 West Bank communities as a result of settler attacks and related access restrictions between January 2023 and April 2026, a pattern Amnesty International has described as part of Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing in Area C, under full Israeli civil and military control.

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