Around 12:30am in the night between February 10 and 11, a group of Israeli settlers attacked the home of the Daraghmeh family in Khirbet Samra, Northern Jordan Valley.
Members of the family, who were awake to watch over their property, saw one settler close to one of the sheep pens, most likely planning to steal the animals. When they ran towards the settler to stop him, he called for his two accomplices who were hiding nearby, and they started violently beating the Palestinians who were protecting their livestock. Outnumbered, before running away, the settlers used pepper spray on Ayman, Mahyoub, and Fawzi Daraghmeh. Ayman’s sons Mohammad and Ahmad were also pepper-sprayed, as well as a European activist who was there in solidarity with the Palestinian family.
The injured Palestinians were taken into medical care and treated for their burning eyes and faces, caused by the pepper spray. They are now back at their homes, which are being violently targeted by settler colonial violence.
The Daraghmehs are the only family left in Khirbet Samra, fiercely resisting constant harassment and attacks from zionist settlers and occupation forces: settlers invade their land day and night, trying to steal their sheep and threatening them with dogs and ATVs when they go shepherding. Grazing sheep is at the foundation of these communities’ livelihood, and it has been made almost impossible by daily settler violence, as well as by the army turning most Palestinian fields into “firing zones” or “closed military zones.”
The family also reports that the day before this latest attack, on February 10, one of the settlers invaded their property while resident Diab Daraghmeh was installing an outdoor toilet for his home. The settler called the occupation forces, who zealously intervened and forced Diab to return the outhouse he had purchased for 3,000 shekels, claiming it was “illegal.” Even equipping their homes with the most basic sanitary utilities is not allowed for Palestinians under occupation.
Khirbet Samra has been almost emptied of its Palestinian residents: over the past year, the families of Yasser Abu Aram, ‘Abd Abu Milhem, and Salman Abu Khalid have been forcibly displaced because of settler violence. The Daraghmehs have been living in Khirbet Samra for almost a century: the patriarch ‘Abd Daraghmeh was born right there, among the hills of Samra, in 1938.