Four men strike a pose, each holding a drone and smiling at the camera. This photo was posted on X on September 3, 2026 by Israeli settler Elisha Yered, a member of the Frontline Hills Administration, a settler organisation in the occupied West Bank whose aim is to establish and strengthen illegal settlements. In the caption, he claims to have distributed the drones to four settlements in the West Bank – a territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
He adds: “And above all: a huge thank you to the Jewish people who contributed to the purchase of this security equipment and who have enabled us to support our activists.” In this September 3, 2026 tweet, Israeli settler Elisha Yered says his Front Hills Administration group had delivered drones to four illegal settlements in the West Bank that day. To display this content from X (Twitter), you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. Elisha Yered is also a member of 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 a 19-year-old Palestinian, Qusai Jammal Mi’tan, in August 2023 in the Palestinian village of Burqa. He has been under European sanctions since April 2024. On June 19, 2026, in Taybeh, a village north-east of Ramallah, an activist filmed his colleague sitting on the ground while a drone flew overhead.
The drone moves closer to the camera, then flies away. According to him, this surveillance is a recurring occurrence: settlers send drones to identify the presence of activists so that they can report them to the Israeli army. To display this content from , you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. **'They started sending drones over us at night, during the day, in the morning – at any time'** The use of drones by the Frontline Hills group is symptomatic of a policy of increasingly widespread use of these devices by various actors in the occupied West Bank.
The drones are sent to fly over Palestinian homes and crops. This harassment is all too familiar to Abdel (an alias), a Bedouin cattle farmer who lives near Jericho, northwest of the Dead Sea. He says he and his family were forced to leave their village of Shalal al-Auja in January 2026 following numerous attacks by settlers.
He attests that the same settlers followed them to their new home and are prolonging their suffering. He and his wife sent us several videos of drones flying overhead, usually late in the evening. He says intimidation attempts occur almost daily: > _"I was displaced from Shalal al-Auja; my family and I settled 10 kilometres away.
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