The Army Revises Its Own Account of the Tell Killings as Two Mosques Burn Near Nablus and Tulkarm

Four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed Friday morning near Havat Gilad and the village of Tell, southwest of Nablus. The IDF named the Israeli dead as Master Sgt. (res.) Benayahu Mellet, 32, of a civil defence squad, and Maj. Yuval Ezra, 27, and said the Palestinian shooter used a weapon snatched from an Israeli security officer before being killed. The initiation is contested, and the army’s own version moved: AP reported that the military “initially described the Israeli civilians involved in the incident as hikers, but later acknowledged some were armed and said both sides had opened fire before troops intervened.” The Times of Israel notes the army says the Israelis did not coordinate before entering an area off-limits to Israelis. Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz ordered a wide-scale operation in Palestinian villages. Arrest counts diverge by publisher: the IDF says over 70 wanted detained overnight with hundreds questioned and 300-plus sites scanned around Jenin; Al Jazeera counted nearly 50 in Tal with roughly 70 homes raided; the Palestinian Prisoners Club says at least 80, and more than 3,600 in the West Bank this year.

Overnight Saturday, Haaretz’s Jack Khoury reported settlers set fire to mosques in Qusra, south of Nablus, and Kafr Sur, southeast of Tulkarm, citing Palestinian accounts and footage from the scene; the Kafr Sur wall carried the slogan “Jewish blood is not abandoned.” The Jerusalem Post reported the Qusra fire separately as a suspected nationalist crime, with “Revenge for Benayahu” — naming one of Friday’s Israeli dead — sprayed at the entrance beside a Star of David. Palestinian reports described cars and farmland burned in Beitillu and property vandalised in Beit Furik. One week earlier, in Al-Tuwani in the South Hebron Hills, village council head Mohammed Rabie told AFP that more than two dozen settlers, some masked, torched the Al-Taqwa mosque along with two houses and a women-run dairy factory; police said an investigation into the cause was ongoing. On Sunday the IDF said it had measured the homes of two Palestinians involved in the Tell shooting ahead of demolition, and published a photograph of soldiers doing so.

Walid Zidan, the mayor of Tell, told the Times of Israel that around 70 villagers were detained and questioned at a field interrogation centre set up inside a house in the village. Hebrew media, via ToI, reported settlers established four illegal outposts near the site of the clash. Funerals for the four Palestinian men killed were held in the early hours of Saturday under heavy army restriction.

Assessment: The citable fact here is not the body count but the correction. An army that revises armed men into the record after first calling them hikers has told you how the initial account was produced and for whom. Watch the asymmetry of state response in the same 72 hours: measured homes and a demolition file for the Palestinian shooters, an open investigation and no reported arrests for three burned mosques. The Post’s own reporting of the “Revenge for Benayahu” graffiti matters because it removes the incidents from partisan dispute — this is not being contested inside the Israeli press, only inside the Israeli enforcement system. Treat every arrest figure as a publisher’s figure.