Settler shooting near Hebron paralyses a nurse from Dura's public hospital
Ambulances could not reach the neighbourhood, and the wounded man was driven out in a private car.
A nurse who worked at Dura Governmental Hospital is being transferred to Al-Makassed Hospital in Jerusalem with a severed spinal cord, two days after armed settlers opened fire during an attack on his neighbourhood near Hebron in the occupied West Bank.
Muhammad Mutoor, 26, was shot on Saturday in al-Adisa, a neighbourhood of the town of Sa'ir northeast of Hebron, where he had recently finished building a house and was preparing to marry. A second Palestinian man was shot in the shoulder in the same attack. Residents say Israeli soldiers were present while it went on and did nothing to stop it.
Ambulances were kept out of the area, so Mutoor was carried to nearby Bani Na'im in a private vehicle. His doctors have given his family little hope that he will recover the use of his legs.
The detail that decides the rest of his life is the one about the ambulance. A spinal injury is measured in the minutes before it is stabilised, and a crew held at the edge of a neighbourhood is not a delay in reaching a patient but a change in what treatment can still achieve. The West Bank health service also loses a nurse and gains a long-term patient in the same afternoon.
Al-Adisa sits east of the Route 60 bypass road and is home to around 1,800 Palestinians, with the settlements of Kiryat Arba and Kharsina to its west. Settlers planted trees across roughly 500 dunams of village land in 2012, and eight settlement outposts have gone up on Sa'ir's land since May 2025.
Yousef Tarwa, an activist from Sa'ir who tracks that expansion, said thousands of dunams have been taken. "It has become clear to us that the settler, the soldier and the Israeli policeman are all the same," he said. Khalil Mutoor, the wounded man's uncle, said of the gunmen: "They aimed to kill, and they didn't care about anything."
A second attack the same day, in the al-Ja'bari neighbourhood of Hebron, left 10 Palestinians wounded, two of them by live ammunition.
The UN humanitarian office recorded more than 1,330 settler attacks across 250 Palestinian communities between January and 20 July this year, an average above six a day. It attributes 18 Palestinian deaths and about 880 injuries to settlers so far in 2026, and says attacks and access restrictions have displaced more than 2,300 people. Around 700,000 settlers now live in some 300 settlements and outposts in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.