Taybeh Municipality Prepares US Civil Lawsuit Over Settler Attacks, Calls for American Passport Holders to Document Damage

The municipality of Taybeh, a Christian village in the occupied West Bank near Ramallah, is asking residents who hold US passports or green cards to start documenting settler attacks and property damage, according to a municipality statement reported by Middle East Eye. The evidence is meant to support a planned civil lawsuit in United States courts.

The municipality said the case would not stop at individual settlers. It would also target what it called "the American institutions that support these assaults," though the statement did not name specific defendants or describe the legal theory behind that broader claim.

The case would target the settlers and "the American institutions that support these assaults."

According to the municipality, the Palestinian-American Olive Branch Funding Group has offered to cover the full cost of the litigation. The group is represented by Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian-American human rights lawyer with decades of experience litigating cases tied to the occupation.

No court filing has yet been made public. The claims about settler attacks and property damage in Taybeh, and the funding commitment from Olive Branch, come from the municipality's own statement, relayed through Middle East Eye. Middle East Eye's report does not include specific dates, names of settlers, or descriptions of individual incidents.

Taybeh is one of the last Christian-majority towns in the West Bank, long known for a Palm Sunday procession and its brewery, one of few in the Middle East. It sits near a cluster of Israeli settlements and outposts in the hills west of Ramallah, an area where settler expansion and attacks on Palestinian property have been documented by rights groups and journalists over the past several years.

What is new here is the mechanism: a US civil suit, funded by a Palestinian-American group and built on evidence gathered specifically because the plaintiffs and witnesses would carry American passports. That detail matters because it opens a path into US courts that does not depend on Israeli or Palestinian jurisdiction, and it puts the question of American institutional support for settler activity directly in front of an American judge, if the case is filed.

Occupation Watch has not seen a complaint, docket number, or list of named defendants. This is a village preparing a case, not yet a case. The municipality's call for documentation, and the funding pledge from Olive Branch and Kuttab, remain the only concrete facts in the record so far. We will follow the filing when it appears.