The United Nations has warned that attacks against Palestinians by illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank reached the highest level in October in nearly 20 years since documentation began, with the violence surging despite a United States-brokered ceasefire taking effect in Gaza that same month.

The surge in settler attacks despite the ceasefire highlights how the West Bank operates on a separate and volatile track from Gaza diplomacy and exposes Washington's limited influence on actors on the ground, say analysts.

In the latest news of such violence, Reuters reported on Monday that two of its employees — a journalist and a security adviser accompanying her — were among those injured in the attack by men who wielded sticks and clubs and hurled large rocks, in an area close to the Palestinian village of Beita.

READ MORE: Israel kills 2 Palestinians in Gaza amid fragile ceasefire

Meanwhile in Gaza, truce violations continued, with Al Jazeera reporting that the Israeli army is carrying out demolition operations east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

"The surge in settler attacks despite a US-brokered ceasefire highlights how the West Bank operates on a separate and volatile track from Gaza diplomacy," Nagapushpa Devendra, a West Asia analyst and research scholar at the University of Erfurt in Germany, said.

She said these incidents indicate that Israel's current governing coalition "lacks either the will or capacity to restrain radical settler groups, many of which act autonomously and feel politically shielded".

Meanwhile, this shows the limits of Washington's power, she said. "It can mediate formal ceasefires, but it cannot easily influence decentralized actors on the ground, especially when Israeli political dynamics discourage robust enforcement," said Devendra, adding that without meaningful accountability mechanisms, West Bank violence "will continue to rise irrespective of ceasefires elsewhere".

In a humanitarian situation update on the West Bank published on Nov 6, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, stated that October 2025 "recorded the highest monthly number of Israeli settler attacks since OCHA began documenting such incidents in 2006".

Abdalfatah Asqool, a former international law lecturer at the University of Palestine in Gaza, noted that "almost every day" there are attacks from illegal Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, which constitutes "another form of the continuous Israeli violations of international law".

Asqool said not only are their attacks illegal, "but even their existence in these territories is illegal as well" and constitutes a "combined violation against the Palestinians".

"Moreover I think these attacks, which recently escalated, are part of the Israeli plan to put pressure on the Palestinians in the West Bank to serve the bigger plan for the forced migration against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank," said Asqool.

Real intervention urged

"There must be a real and urgent intervention, not (just) statements from the international community, specifically US President (Donald) Trump, to stop these serious violations, which threaten Trump's plan for peace and could spark conflict in the region again," he added.

In the latest effort to relieve Gaza's health situation, authorities on Sunday launched a vaccination campaign targeting children under three years old, aiming to prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases after two years of disrupted immunization services caused by the fighting.

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In a statement, Gaza's health authorities said the campaign is being conducted in 150 health centers across the strip.

The authorities said the campaign will last 10 days and will be implemented in three phases, each separated by one month, to reach children who missed routine vaccinations since the outbreak of the conflict in October 2023.

Salim al-Qirm, medical director of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society's al-Saraya Field Hospital in Gaza City, said that approximately 45,000 children in Gaza have not received essential vaccines over the past two years.

Xinhua contributed to this story.

Contact the writers at jan@chinadailyapac.com