A settler's drone giveaway, posted online

On September 3, 2026, the Israeli settler Elisha Yered showcased settler drones West Bank-wide on X: a photograph of four men, each holding a drone, smiling at the camera. In the caption, he claimed to have distributed the devices to four settlements.

His stated purposes for the devices:

In the same post he added that the drones also serve to document events and refute what he called blood libel allegations. He thanked "the Jewish people who contributed to the purchase of this security equipment", writing that the contributions had enabled the group to support its activists.

His affiliations and the accusations against him:

• •He is a member of the Frontline Hills Administration, a settler organisation in the occupied West Bank whose aim is to establish and strengthen illegal settlements.
• •He also belongs to the Hilltop Youth, a movement of young settlers who regularly commit acts of violence against Palestinians and their villages in the occupied West Bank.
• •He is accused of being part of a group of armed settlers who killed 19-year-old Palestinian Qusai Jammal Mi'tan in the village of Burqa in August 2023.
• •He has been under European sanctions since April 2024.

From Shalal al-Auja to an outpost 500 metres away

Abdel, the alias of a Bedouin cattle farmer who lives near Jericho, northwest of the Dead Sea, says settlers attacked his village, Shalal al-Auja, so often that his family had to leave it in January 2026. "I was displaced from Shalal al-Auja; my family and I settled 10 kilometres away," he says. The same settlers, he says, followed the family to its new home and are prolonging its suffering.

Two and a half months after they arrived, he says, those settlers put up an outpost about 500 metres from his home. "This outpost has nothing; it simply launches drones to harass people," he says.

Abdel and his wife have sent videos of drones flying overhead, usually late in the evening, and he says the intimidation attempts come almost daily. He describes the harassment like this:

• •Drones were sent over the family at night, during the day, in the morning, at any time.
• •At first it happened every day; recently it has been two or three days a week.
• •A drone goes up every time a car drives onto his property.
• •One is sent after him immediately whenever he goes out to feed the sheep or do anything else.

One day, he says, the settlers came right up to his house - the same men who had driven the family out of Shalal al-Auja. He says they followed him all the way home and attacked him in his new house. "They attacked me right in the heart of my home and beat me up," he says.

Who flies drones over the West Bank

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. Palestinians and activists there report that drones are being flown over the territory more and more often, particularly by the army and by settlers - to whom the government supplies the devices directly. The report describes drones sent over Palestinian homes and crops, used to intimidate, monitor, demolish and make daily life unbearable.

Shai Gortler, a research associate at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town who specialises in surveillance, incarceration and colonisation, counts four entities using drones in the occupied West Bank, for various reasons.

The first three, as he sets them out:

• •The settlers, who use drones to intimidate and gather information.
• •The regional councils, government bodies in the occupied West Bank comprising several illegal settlements, which monitor new construction by Palestinians.
• •NGOs, the most significant being Regavim, which means "clods of earth" in Hebrew.

Gortler describes Regavim as an Israeli NGO subject to European sanctions and co-founded by the Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, whom he calls a "Jewish supremacist". Its drones serve the same purpose as the councils', he says - monitoring the presence of new constructions - after which the organisation calls on the Civil Administration, an Israeli government body in the occupied West Bank, to have them demolished.

The fourth and last group, he says, is the Israeli army, which uses its drones for surveillance and demolition.