Are Samaritans descendants of the northern kingdom of Israel?

Genetic evidence indicates it is highly likely, even if people don’t consider Samaritan communities’ self identification as “Samaritan Israelites” to be reliable:
Estimation of genetic distances between the Samaritans and seven Jewish and three non-Jewish populations from Israel, as well as populations from Africa, Pakistan, Turkey, and Europe, revealed that the Samaritans were closely related to Cohanim. This result supports the position of the Samaritans that they are descendants from the tribes of Israel dating to before the Assyrian exile in 722-720 BCE. In concordance with previously published single-nucleotide polymorphism haplotypes, each Samaritan family, with the exception of the Samaritan Cohen lineage, was observed to carry a distinctive Y-chromosome short tandem repeat haplotype that was not more than one mutation removed from the six-marker Cohen modal haplotype.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25079122