Stones, a Stalled Car and One Shot Fired on a Binyamin Road

A family from Kfar Tarfon, in the Binyamin region of the West Bank, escaped an ambush on Wednesday when dozens of Palestinian rioters blocked their car and threw stones at it, according to Elisha Yared, a spokesperson for the Yesha Council, the umbrella body representing Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Stones thrown at close range shattered the vehicle's windows and stalled it, the account said.

The father fired a shot in self-defence, scattering the crowd, and another member of the family restarted the car and drove away, according to the spokesperson. The family was unharmed. Security forces reaching the scene dispersed the rioters, and no arrests were reported. The statement added that the episode was not connected to initial reports of a shooting attack near the Or Nachman farm, also in the Binyamin region.

Where Binyamin is

Binyamin is the Hebrew name for the Benjamin area, and the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council is the local authority covering a band of the West Bank immediately north of Jerusalem, taking in dozens of Israeli settlements and outposts. The United Nations humanitarian office refers to the territory as the occupied West Bank; most of the international community regards Israeli settlements there as illegal under international law, and Israel disputes that.

A record autumn for violence, in one direction more than the other

The incident fell in the olive harvest, the most violent stretch of a violent year. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded more than 260 Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in October 2025, the highest monthly total since it began documenting them in 2006 and an average of eight a day. Around 150 of those were harvest-related, injuring about 140 Palestinians and damaging more than 4,200 trees and saplings across 77 villages between 1 October and 3 November.

Attacks in the other direction fell sharply over the same year. Israel Defence Forces and Shin Bet security service data published in January 2026 and reported by the Times of Israel counted 57 Palestinian attacks on Israelis in the West Bank in 2025, down from 258 in 2024, alongside 1,015 stone-throwing and firebomb incidents, down from 1,230. Twenty people were killed in such attacks in 2025 against 35 the previous year. The same data recorded 867 settler attacks on Palestinians in 2025, up 27% on 2024. Stone-throwing dominates the raw counts: the Institute for National Security Studies logged 6,828 attacks across Israel and the West Bank in 2024 once stones and Molotov cocktails are included, double the 2023 figure, while significant attacks in the West Bank and Jerusalem fell 44%.

What is still unclear

The account rests on a single source, the spokesperson for a settler umbrella body, and neither the police nor the military confirmed its details in the statement. It named nobody in the family, gave no ages, no time of day and no location more precise than Kfar Tarfon. It did not say where the shot went or whether anyone was hit by it, and it carried no Palestinian account of the episode. No arrests had been reported when it was issued.