For nearly three weeks after Israel and Iran began exchanging airstrikes, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank largely watched from the sidelines as sirens sounded nearby and interceptions flashed overhead. On Wednesday night, however, the war reached a Beit Awa beauty salon, where a missile struck only steps from the business and killed four women, according to the Associated Press.
The AP report said the women and more than a dozen of their friends and daughters were inside the salon when the strike occurred, with shrapnel tearing through walls lined with shelves and items used for manicures, pedicures and eyebrow services. Afterward, mourners gathered near the trailer where the salon offered the services, and photographs described hundreds of coffee cups and acrylic nails scattered on the floor.
The co-owner of the salon, Hadeel Masalmeh, returned with bandages covering shrapnel wounds on her face and body, the AP said. Masalmeh described trying to leave a hospital to say goodbye to Sahera, her business partner and sister-in-law, who was killed in the strike along with three other women from the extended Masalmeh family in Beit Awa.
The women killed were described as Sahera, Maes, Aseel and Amal, with the AP report saying Amal was six months pregnant and at the salon with her three-year-old daughter. The Palestinian Health Ministry, the AP said, reported that the strike injured more than a dozen women and children, and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said some patients were undergoing surgery or amputations.
Palestinians’ accounts after the strike also focused on what they say they lack compared with many parts of Israel: shelters built into everyday life. In Israel, the AP said, civilians’ routines have revolved around running to shelters after alerts, including multiple times a day, while Palestinians in the West Bank often continue daily routines even when sirens sound or interceptions boom overhead.
The AP said that on the night of the salon strike, sirens came from the nearby settlement of Negohot, about 2 miles (3 kilometers) away, but few people reacted until a customer spotted red flares in the sky. Hadeel Masalmeh then moved everyone inside, while later mourners, the AP added, gathered for funerals at the family home next to the salon as alerts beeped on Israeli SIM card phones.
After the attack, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society blamed an Israeli gate near Negohot for delaying ambulances, saying the gate’s closure forced vehicles onto longer, rugged routes and affected what it called the “golden hour” for life-saving interventions. The report also said the Red Crescent had warned before the salon strike that gates were increasingly preventing it from reaching emergencies quickly, and that Qusai Jabr, manager of the group’s disaster risk management department, told the AP that in the first week of the war alone, delays affected response calls including for women in labor, seniors suffering strokes and victims of settler attacks.
The AP report said Israeli authorities have not imposed the kind of full lockdown seen during last year’s 12-day war with Iran, but that more gates have made travel difficult. Jabr said there were about 800 gates during last year’s war and roughly 1,100 now, both manned and unmanned.
The AP added that the nature of the Wednesday strike was unclear, with Israel’s military saying it was a direct hit by an Iranian missile rather than intercepted debris and describing it as a cluster munition that disperses smaller bomblets midair. The Palestinian Authority’s Interior Ministry, the AP said, called it a fallen interceptor, referring to Israel’s air defenses, while Iran’s government had not commented.
Even with competing explanations for what struck the salon, the AP said residents described the episode as another trauma layered onto an already dangerous environment. Beit Awa sits overlooking a barrier separating Palestinian towns from Israel, and the AP report said the town has struggled economically since Israel revoked tens of thousands of Palestinian work permits after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack and the ensuing Gaza war.
Around the Hebron Hills, the AP said, rights groups and residents point to long-running settler violence that they say has intensified during the war atmosphere. The AP report cited the Israeli rights group Yesh Din saying it documented more than 100 incidents across West Bank communities throughout the Iran war, and it also said the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported 18 Palestinians killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank since the start of 2026, including a 27-year-old man killed by a settler in nearby Masafer Yatta less than two weeks earlier.
After the strike, funerals in Beit Awa reflected the sense of being caught amid two fronts. Mahmoud Sweity, quoted by the AP, said, “We’re between two fires.”