Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist, was shot in the chest by an Israeli settler on July 28, 2025, resulting in his death. The shooter was identified as Yinon Levi, a settler who had previously been approved by the European Union, the UK, and the US during the Biden administration.
Hathaleen, a 31-year-old activist and educator from Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron Hills, was a devoted student. He also played a supporting role in the decades-old settlement-aligned soldiers’ relentless attacks in the Oscar-winning film No Other Land.
Hathaleen’s murder is not unique. Since the West Bank’s genocide began in Gaza in October 2023, there have been more than 1, 000 Palestinian deaths there. A sharp rise in Palestinian land seizures and home demolitions come with this upsurge in violence. The Israeli government has accelerated its West Bank takeover plans by using the genocide in Gaza as cover. The Israeli Knesset approved a non-binding motion to annex the entire territory just days before its three-month summer break.
The Knesset’s motion comes one year after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared that Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories must end. It was ruled illegal in July 2024. The deadline for the court’s order was September 2025, which the court set for the Israeli government to end.
Countries like Australia, France, the UK, and Canada all announced sanctions against a small number of settlers and those involved in the settlement process in the months leading up to the ICJ ruling. Yinon Levi, the killer of Hathaleen, was one of those punished. These nations’ travel bans and financial restrictions have, as expected, not had an impact on the ground. Levi, who is operating in full army protection, continued to attack Palestinians from his illegal settler outpost.
These sanctions not only fail to have an impact, but they also allow the Israeli regime to avoid accountability by portraying settler violence as an insult rather than as an extension of state policy by targeting just a select few settlers.
States take measures to demonstrate their support for international law by purposefully distinguishing between “extremist” settlers and the rest of the Israeli regime, avoiding conflict with the regime itself.
Israel’s state policy has always been to expand its territory across all of Historical Palestine and beyond, as demonstrated by the occupation of some of southern Syria and Lebanon over the past two years.
More than 700,000 settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem today, spread across more than 250 settlements and outposts that are run by state-owned security forces, planning agencies, and that violate international law. Hollow measures like the Levi ban have helped to fuel this expansion, where targeting a select few people only serves to protect the regime from the very system they support.
This political theater is completely absurd. While maintaining full diplomatic, economic, and military support for a regime that is by definition a settler regime, one cannot meaningfully sanction settler violence. The settler and the state are mutually exclusive. It is complicity to sanction one while allowing the other to be legitimized is not accountability. The murder of Hathaleen is not unusual, but it is the direct result of a system that is supported, protected, and excused by the same states that claim to oppose it. These actions establish and maintain the status quo while not challenging it. By imposing comprehensive sanctions and real accountability that target the system, not just its murderous foot soldiers, to break this cycle, states must end their support for Israel’s genocidal regime of settlement and occupation completely.
Source: Aljazeera
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