Smoke, Scripture, and the Art of Escalation: The West Bank’s Unholy Arson Season

The Charred House of Worship

A mosque in the northern West Bank, Hajjah Hamid Mosque of Salfit, awoke to the unmistakable perfume of accelerant and the dismal poetry of hate graffiti. Israeli settlers allegedly set parts of it alight and scrawled Hebrew slurs on the walls—an unsubtle message left in smoke and spray paint. The Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf called it a “heinous crime and a blatant assault on the feelings of Muslims.”

🦉 Owlyus, ruffling feathers: "When your idea of piety involves a box of matches, you’re doing religion wrong."

The graffiti—ranging from crude insults against the Prophet Mohammed to taunts of the local Israeli Defense Forces commander—suggests that even vandalism has its internal politics. The commander, recently on record condemning settler attacks, apparently remains unscary to the crowd wielding both lighters and Sharpies.

The Ritual of Escalation

The aftermath: blackened prayer halls, shattered glass, and the echo of a question—who benefits from burning bridges (and buildings) in a land already thick with tinder?

Palestinian officials swiftly denounced the arson, pointing an unwavering finger at the Israeli government for complicity, or at minimum, indifference. The IDF, in a demonstration of bureaucratic choreography, dispatched troops to “review the incident and conduct scans,” passing the case to the police. No suspects were identified. If justice is a game of hide-and-seek, the rules here seem especially lax.

🦉 Owlyus squawks: "CSI: West Bank—where the main suspect is always ‘mysterious circumstances.’"

The Olive Harvest: A Season of Smoke

This incident is not an isolated bonfire. UN data reveals a record 264 settler attacks in October alone—an olive harvest transformed from an agricultural tradition into a contact sport. Recent days saw dozens of settlers torching a dairy factory, vehicles, and Bedouin tents, leaving behind a tableau of charred machinery and livestock casualties.

Eyewitness accounts paint a familiar scene: settlers scaling fences like determined contestants on an obstacle course, gasoline pouring onto cars, and Palestinian villagers wielding extinguishers in a Sisyphean contest with the flames. Injuries, hospitalizations, and dead sheep round out the tally of the day.

🦉 Owlyus flaps in: "It’s not a harvest unless someone brings marshmallows, right? Oh, wait—those are just burning tires."

The Blame Game Olympics

The Israeli Police, after a brisk round of arrests, released three out of four suspects faster than you can say “due process.” Meanwhile, the IDF reported that settlers even attacked Israeli soldiers and damaged a military vehicle—proof that in this theater, the script can flip with alarming speed.

The Palestinian foreign ministry brands it all as evidence of “increasing terrorism and crimes of the settlers, carried out with the direct support of the occupation government.” Appeals are made to international and Islamic bodies for accountability, though history suggests these calls too often echo unanswered.

The Absurdity of Sacredness Under Siege

Freedom of conscience—the right to worship in peace, or simply to not have one’s holy sites turned into smoky crime scenes—remains as embattled as the land itself. Here, faith is not just a private matter but a repeated casualty of public violence. The absurdity, as ever, is that those who torch temples and scribble slurs claim to be defending something sacred, while reducing the sacred to cinders.

🦉 Owlyus, with a final hoot: "In the land of holy sites, irony is the only thing burning faster than the olive groves."