Did Israeli settlers kill 870 Palestinians since October 7?

“Since October 7th alone, the past 2 and a half years, there have been over 1,800 incidents of settler violence and over 870 Palestinians killed by settlers, including 177 children.”

The count is not disputed between the sides. It is kept by UN OCHA, published weekly, broken down by perpetrator, and used by every human rights organisation working on the West Bank. Its situation update of 9 October 2025 states that since 7 October 2023, 999 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem: 967 by Israeli forces, 20 by Israeli settlers, and 12 where it was not established which. Through 2026 the settler share rose sharply, and OCHA counted 76 Palestinians killed in the West Bank by late July 2026, at least 13 of them by settlers. Add the two together and settler-attributed killings across the whole period since October 7 number in the low dozens, against a total of roughly eleven hundred.

The narrator did not find 870 anywhere. He took the number that measures something else.

Where the number came from

The claim in this phrasing entered wide circulation through Channel 5’s “Occupied Palestine,” published in August 2026, where Andrew Callaghan states it in voiceover, with no source named on screen, over drone footage of the south Hebron hills. Ninety seconds earlier he had asked an interviewee how many Palestinians settlers had killed since October 7 and been told “thousand in the West Bank,” which he acknowledged in the film as “of course being a round number” before narrating 870 as a fact.

The path from one number to the other is visible. OCHA publishes a headline sentence in the shape “X Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers,” and then, in the next sentence, splits it. Read the first sentence, skip the second, and you get a settler death toll in the high hundreds. Every organisation that reports the split honestly, including B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, reports the same low figure for settlers, because they are all working from the same case files.

What the same source says about the attacks

The other half of the sentence undercounts. OCHA documented, in the same period to October 2025, 3,112 settler attacks against Palestinians: 311 that caused casualties, 2,474 that caused damage to property, and 327 that caused both. Callaghan says 1,800.

So the film inflates the killings by a factor of about forty and deflates the thing OCHA actually records at scale by nearly half. That combination is the tell. Numbers taken from a source come out at the source’s values. Numbers assembled to match footage come out proportionate to the footage.

The violence is real, it is rising, and it is still not 870

None of this makes settler violence a fiction, and the page would be worthless if it pretended otherwise.

The trend is genuinely bad and getting worse. OCHA recorded more settler-related incidents in the first half of 2026 than in any comparable period since it began keeping the series in 2005, running at about 6.6 incidents a day, and called the level an all-time high in July 2026. March and July 2026 were the deadliest months for Palestinians in settler attacks in twenty years. Human Rights Watch reported in July 2026 that attacks had risen sharply since December 2022 and that attackers frequently operate without meaningful legal consequence. Israeli enforcement in Area C has failed at this for two decades: investigations are opened and closed, and Israelis have said so from inside the system, including former commanders of the Judea and Samaria police district.

That is a real charge, it is documented, and it is the charge worth arguing about. It survives the correction. What does not survive is the picture the 870 figure paints, of a militia campaign that has killed the population of a village every year while nobody counted. Somebody counted. The counters are the UN.

The 967 have names too, and they are not settlers

The number the film moved is not an abstraction. Of the 999 deaths to October 2025, 967 were caused by Israeli forces, the overwhelming majority during military and police operations in the northern West Bank against armed factions, in Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams, where the Jenin Battalion and its Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades components had built a standing armed presence. Those operations are arguable on their own terms and many of the deaths in them were of people taking no part in fighting. But they are the acts of a state army in a counter-insurgency, and reassigning all of them to civilians in hilltop outposts is not a stronger version of the accusation. It is a different accusation about different people.

The same OCHA update carries the figure the film never mentions in 41 minutes: in that period Palestinians killed 41 Israelis in the West Bank, 22 of them members of the Israeli forces, and attacks by Palestinians from the West Bank killed a further 17 Israelis inside Israel.

A factor of forty is what the correction costs

Inflation like this is not a gift to the cause that uses it. The 870 is checkable in about four minutes against the first source a curious viewer will reach, and it is the number that lands in comment sections, so the moment it fails, everything it was carrying fails with it: the 3,112 attacks, the record year, the enforcement gap, the families in Masafer Yatta who are being pushed off land they have farmed for generations. A real grievance was attached to a fake number by someone who did not check, and the fake number is what the argument will now be about.

And nobody who repeated it will correct it. The film is still up, the figure is still in the voiceover, and the next documentary will lift it from this one, because a number that has been said on camera by a man with three million subscribers does not need a source any more. That is how the 870 will still be in circulation in five years, long after anyone who looked it up stopped believing a word of the rest.