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Al-Funduqumiya, West Bank — On March 21, a Palestinian vehicle collided with an ATV near the village of Beit Imrin in the West Bank, killing the ATV driver.

Had it not been for the fact that the driver of the ATV was 18-year-old Yehuda Sherman of the illegal Israeli outpost of Shuva Yisrael Farms, the incident would likely have been handled as an ordinary traffic accident.

Instead, the day after the collision, Israeli settlers from a cluster of nearby outposts in the Homesh corridor — many of which do not even have names due to their recent establishment — launched a “price tag” attack on nearby Palestinian communities, including al-Funduqumiya, setting fire to vehicles and homes and injuring at least 10 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

“Price tag” attacks — incidents in which settlers target Palestinians in retaliation for violence by Palestinians against Israeli settlers or in response to efforts to interfere with settlement expansion — have been a feature of the Israeli settler movement since Israel’s 2005 disengagement from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the 2006 destruction of the illegal settlement at Amona.

At that point, the settler movement — now led by an umbrella organization called the Yesha Council but originally under the leadership of the right-wing Gush Emunim movement — began adopting retaliatory attacks as a distinct policy to advance their goal of settling the entirety of the West Bank.

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According to documentation assembled by the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq for Truthout, a group of at least 200 masked settlers entered al-Funduqumiya on the night of March 22. They, who hid inside their homes, fearing they would be killed.

These attacks in response to Sherman’s death form part of a broader wave of violence across the West Bank, according to the human rights organization B’Tselem. Israeli police are investigating and have not classified the incident as a homicide, but settlers have treated it as an intentional assault.

At Sherman’s funeral on March 22, in Elon Moreh, his father described his son’s death as a communal sacrifice and called on the Israeli government to dismantle the Oslo Accords, which established a framework for a two-state solution, and to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

What distinguishes this attack from others in the recent wave is not its violence or the number of Palestinians injured, but where many of the settlers involved live. The Homesh corridor, near the Palestinian city of Nablus, is........

© Truthout