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Israeli forces carried out waves of arrests in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday as the UN's humanitarian agency (OCHA) announced Israeli settler violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem reached the highest levels on record in 2024.

According to the Palestinian Wafa news agency, Israeli forces arrested at least 22 Palestinians in a series of raids in various parts of the occupied West Bank.

Local sources said that eight people were detained in the Hebron area and nine were arrested in towns close to Salfit in the north of the territory. Another five were taken in a raid in a town near Tubas.

There has been a sharp rise in the number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons since 7 October 2023, with the number of detainees almost doubling to 11,000 as of June 2024,  according to data collected by Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem.

Settler violence

This comes as OCHA recorded around 1,400 separate incidents of settler violence—equal to almost four per day—over the past 12 months, which is the highest number since the agency began keeping records almost 20 years ago.

The agency includes all recorded incidents of physical attacks, arson, raids on Palestinian communities and destruction of agriculture in its data.

Data shows 2024 also saw the second-highest number of Palestinian deaths in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

More than 480 Palestinians—91 of them children—were killed over the 12-month period, most of them by Israeli forces, OCHA said.

Settler violence was responsible for 12 percent of the 4,700 Palestinians who were internally displaced in the West Bank this year.

Separately, a local rights group has reported that the Israeli military and illegal settlers conducted almost 3,000 attacks against Palestinian Bedouin communities in the occupied West Bank last year.

The Al-Baidar Organisation for the Defence of Bedouin said on Wednesday that 67 Bedouin communities have been driven from their land by Jewish colonists over the past 12 months.

"These attacks are part of an ethnic cleansing policy pursued by the occupation authorities to empty the Palestinian lands of their legitimate owners and make them live in a permanent state of threat and displacement," the rights group said in a statement.

Hundreds of Israeli settlers storm Al-Aqsa 

Meanwhile, hundreds of Israeli settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa complex in Jerusalem on Wednesday in what was the latest in a series of Israeli provocations at the religious site over the past week.

Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that around 630 Israelis forcibly entered the compound under the protection of the police in violation of an increasingly fragile status quo that prohibits non-Muslims from praying at the site.

This came as an official at the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf revealed that Israeli officials had allowed more than 53,600 Israelis to storm the compound during 2024, the highest number since police began allowing Jews entrance to the site more than 20 years ago.

Over the past week, far-right Israeli ministers performed prayers in the area, triggering international condemnation.

Extremist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the hard-right Likud communications minister Shlomo Karhi both made provocative appearances at Al-Aqsa to mark the Jewish holiday of Hannukah, and prayed for the Israeli military’s success in its brutal war on Gaza.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest site in Islam and for years has been a flashpoint for tensions between Palestinians and Israelis.

Under a decades-old arrangement, only Muslims are permitted to pray at the site but since the formation of Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-right government in 2022 Israel has been undermining the sensitive status quo with increasing regularity.