“I came because it makes the children feel their parents are with them, that they are safe, it gives them a kind of security,” said Haroon Bishara, whose boys are in the first and second grades.
“We fear for our children more this year,” he told me. “We know the situation is not safe at the school.”
But he said that fear was mixed with a determination not to let the threat from settler attacks force them out.
Lined up in the playground for their first assembly, pupils heard the instructions repeated by teachers again and again throughout the day: if soldiers or settlers approach the school, don’t shout, don’t go near them, don’t react.
Just over an hour after classes began, settlers were spotted through the school windows: two men, driving sheep through Palestinian fields a couple of hundred metres from the school, as Israeli soldiers stood close by.
Minutes later, another settler with a flock of sheep appeared.
“They have got closer to the village since April,” said Abu Naem. They used to keep their sheep behind this [hill], but now the soldiers bring the settlers up to the village.”
We asked the Israeli army for its response to all the allegations in this report, but they were unable to provide one before publication.
All Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law. Many of the small ad-hoc settler outposts that have mushroomed around al-Mughayyir are illegal under Israeli law too.
But one of the ambulance crews stationed outside the school said that, rather than remove illegal settlements, Israeli soldiers had begun supporting and enabling settler incursions into the village.
Hadi al-Naasan, an ambulance driver in the village, said there had been a shift in the behaviour of Israeli forces over the past year. And that the rise in Palestinian deaths and injuries in al-Mughayyir this year reflected that.
“At the beginning of 2025, settler attacks were few, due to the army’s interventions,” he said. “In 2026, the situation changed completely: the settlers became fully protected by the occupation soldiers. This year, the number of martyrs is higher, the number of injuries is also much higher – and the number of child injuries is higher too.”
Hadi, along with other residents of al-Mughayyir, believes that some Israeli settlers are now deliberately targeting children in order to put pressure on the adults in the village to leave their homes.
A UN Commission of Inquiry published in June found that settler attacks “have instrumentalized children, external as part of a broader coercive strategy to drive Palestinians off their land.”
And it described “a pattern of settlers intentionally targeting Palestinian children” while they were playing near their homes, walking to and from school, tending to farms or herding livestock, “turning everyday spaces into sites of fear”.
Israel dismissed the report as a “libellous sham”.
Sheep farmer Sami Abu Rahma firmly believes that some violent settlers are targeting children.
At the end of July, his nine-year-old son Salim was shot and injured as he played with his siblings on the family sheep farm outside al-Mughayyir. The bullet is still lodged in his arm.
