WEST BANK — The European Union agreed Monday on a new set of sanctions targeting violent Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and Hamas officials, following a wave of settler actions across Palestinian villages in early May 2026. Israel uprooted 3,000 Palestinian-planted trees in the territory during the same period.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the sanctions were "without any basis." The EU sanctions target violent settlers in the West Bank as well as Hamas officials.

In Jalud, settlers used bulldozers to uproot hundreds of olive trees overnight. Settlers also hiked through the villages of Abwein and Jilijliya, near Ramallah, occupying the Ein Sala spring and denying residents access. In Deir Istiya, they established a new outpost on land belonging to an Islamic religious endowment and extended a water pipeline from the Revava settlement through Palestinian olive groves.

An illegal outpost was erected on May 11 in Rammun, east of Ramallah. In Sinjil, settlers installed surveillance cameras on Palestinian-owned land and blocked agricultural roads. In Khirbet Abu Falah, also east of Ramallah, settlers staged a predawn raid, torching a car and spray-painting "revenge" on a house wall.

On May 9, settlers occupied a donor-funded football pitch in Umm al-Khair in Masafer Yatta and chanted religious verses while children watched in silence. In al-Asa'asa, south of Jenin, settlers forced a Palestinian family to exhume and rebury 80-year-old Hussein Asasa, who had died of natural causes and been buried with permits coordinated with Israeli security forces.

According to the United Nations, more than 760 settler attacks have been documented in the West Bank in 2026, averaging six per day. At least 44 Palestinians have been killed in the territory so far this year, including 13 by settlers, the U.N. said. Some 2,000 Palestinians, nearly 900 of them children, have been displaced in 2026 by settler violence and access restrictions. "It embodies the dehumanisation of Palestinians that we are witnessing unfold across the entire occupied Palestinian territory," United Nations Human Rights Office head Ajith Sunghay said.

The Israeli Knesset Ministerial Committee backed a bill to repeal the 1993 Oslo Accords, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu requested that parliament postpone discussions of the legislation. "We are building the Land of Israel and destroying the idea of a Palestinian state," Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said.