Israeli Forces Fire Tear Gas Into West Bank School, Dozens of Students and Teachers Suffocate

Dozens of Palestinian students and teachers were treated for suffocation after Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters toward a school in Al-Mughayyir, a village east of Ramallah, on Monday.

Village council head Amin Abu Aliya told Anadolu Agency that medical teams treated those affected at the scene while Palestinian Civil Defense crews worked to clear tear gas from classrooms. Al-Mughayyir, he said, has faced repeated attacks by Israeli forces and settlers in recent weeks.

"The village has been subjected to repeated attacks by Israeli forces and occupiers in recent weeks," Abu Aliya said.

The school incident was one of several actions reported across the West Bank Monday. In the northern Salfit governorate, local sources said Israeli occupiers blocked roads near the towns of Haris and Kifl Haris, closed the Wadi Qana road connecting Salfit and Qalqilya, and set tires on fire along a main route. Stones were also used to block access to Al-Zaytoonah University of Science and Technology in the Wadi al-Shaer area, disrupting traffic to the campus.

In the northern Jordan Valley, Mutaz Bisharat, an official who monitors settlement activity in Tubas and the Jordan Valley, said occupiers stole roughly 90 goats from the Salhab area. He linked the theft to what he described as a broader rise in attacks on Palestinians and their property.

A documented spike in attacks

The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission reported 1,369 attacks by Israeli occupiers across the West Bank in October, a 111.6 percent jump from 647 in September. Counting both settler and military actions, the commission tallied 3,133 attacks for the month, a 52.8 percent increase, with Israeli forces responsible for 1,764 of them. The commission did not publish its underlying methodology.

Separately, the Palestinian Prisoners Media Office said Israeli forces arrested six Palestinians in overnight raids in Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron. Among them was journalist Samer Khuwaira, rearrested in Nablus after his home was raided. Khuwaira had been held under administrative detention without charge from April 2025 until his release in January 2026, after roughly nine months in custody. Israeli forces also arrested two men during a raid on Kobar village, a man from the Al-Amari refugee camp, a resident of the town of Tell, and a man from Dura, south of Hebron.

Palestinian officials say more than 1,220 people have been killed and some 26,000 arrested in the West Bank since October 2023, figures that have not been independently verified in this report. In June, 14 UN special rapporteurs said the escalation in violence against Palestinian communities, carried out "with state support and complicity," amounted to an existential threat.