Acts of harassment and terror are a daily fact of life for residents of Masafer Yatta, a collection of rural hamlets at the southern end of the West Bank. One example is Mohammed Abed’s family in Um Darit, where they are surrounded by a rapidly expanding network of illegal settlements.
After the Israeli escalation in October, they have been driven from their home by armed vigilantes and returned to find it largely destroyed. They have had sheep stolen, a vehicle burnt, a washing machine, water lines, and access panel destroyed, sewage system ruined, windows broken, their house turned upside down, and a Qur’an burned. Male members of the family have been imprisoned and beaten, and repeated incursions and acts of vandalism and terrorism are the norm.
Other acts of violence are more subtle: cars, shepherds, joggers, horseback riders, soldiers and armed settlers regularly traverse the closest roads and hills surrounding the house. As elsewhere, the closest settlements of Avigayil and newly established outposts establish themselves in high places and forbid Palestinians from setting foot in the hills and valleys leading to them (or other arbitrary boundaries). As a result, the majority of the family’s land is stolen, for the exclusive use of the State and the settlers.
Settler shepherd grazing on Abed’s land
For example, this week a young settler on horseback came off the road attempting to parade through Abed’s yard, garden, and flock, startling the sheep. Solidarity activists on premises asked him what he was doing there and asked that he leave. The belligerent youth aggressively and repeatedly pushed his horse, attempting to force his way past the activists. After 5+ attempts, another settler arrived with a long gun, and menaced the family and activists. Abed states he recognizes the armed settler as one of those that wrecked his home. This settler has also been involved with many other acts of harassment against Palestinians and solidarity activists. After the family spoke loudly about calling the police, two of the three settlers left and a third stayed to graze his flock of sheep on the family’s plants. In following days, this shepherd returned daily, apparently preferring to graze his animals on Abed’s land and in the valley between Palestinians villages over the closer lush valley reserved for only settler use.
Settler on horseback in Abed’s yardArmed settler guards settler on horseback in Abed’s land
These daily incursions affirm what Indigenous activists of Turtle Island (so called Americas) have said for years: colonization is a process, not an event. It appears in the everyday disrespect for Palestinians’ safety, life, land and religion, the increasing isolation of Um Darit from other Palestinians’ villages, daily military and settler harassment, the bright flood lights from the settlement shining into the village. These constant assaults and affronts aim to displace and wear down the spirit of Abed’s family and others like them.
And yet they continue, spending time as family, coloring together, raising cabbage and animals, extending amazing generosity to others, harvesting thyme and other herbs, and remaining steadfast in their commitment to resist through existence.
02 April 2024 | International Solidarity Movement | Deir al Balah, Gaza
Following the offloading of a desperately needed 100+ tons of humanitarian aid into a Deir al Balah aid storage warehouse, a seven-person, three-vehicle World Central Kitchen convoy was traveling a deconflicted coastal road when the first Israeli army targeted strike hit one of their vehicles. As the surviving injured desperately scrambled into the two other vehicles in the convoy, occupation forces fired again, and again until each of the three clearly marked aid transports were destroyed and all seven foreign aid workers dead.
A Vehicle in the WCK Convoy attacked by IOF. Photo Source: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images
News began flashing across global media as World Central Kitchen confirmed the occupation forces’ precision attack on their volunteer aid workers of which included foreign nationals of the U.K.,Poland, Australia, a Canadian/American dual-citizen, as well as their Palestinian driver; 26 year old Seif Issam Abu Taha. They had been coordinating all movements on the ground with Israeli occupation forces, including the movement of their convoy from Deir al Balah which was almost immediately pursued and horrifically attacked again and again by the IOF to ensure the destruction in-totality of all life inside the three vehicles.
World Central Kitchen statement confirming the murder of aid volunteers
In a statement on its massacre of the aid workers’ convoy which was unarmed, emblazoned with the World Central Kitchen logo on all sides and on the top of their vehicle and posing no threat who had communicated this movement with the IOF, Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged the “tragic mistake” which killed “innocent people” and stated that “such things happen in war.” The killings of clearly marked humanitarian aid workers has been a routine strategy of the IOF who has, to date, murdered 196 volunteers doing critical aid work on the ground in Gaza as genocide, famine and ethnic cleansing across the strip move unabated across the threshold into its seventh month.
The passports of the murdered WCK aid workers. Photo Source: Associated Press
World Central Kitchen, who had been serving over 10,000 life-sustaining meals in Gaza daily, have now ceased all operations in the area as occupation forces continue the daily murder of unarmed Palestinian civilians, journalists, medical staff and aid workers. A large portion of the humanitarian supplies shipment WCK volunteers were preparing to receive through established maritime aid channels is now headed back to Cyprus from where it shipped and was due to be supplied to Palestinians who are currently, and purposefully, being starved to death by Israeli forces.
A car that was burned by illegal Israeli settlers on the night of March 17.
In the days since a March 12 Knesset hearing that demonized human rights activists in the West Bank, it appears that Israeli authorities have escalated their repression of volunteers in the Masafer Yatta region of the south Hebron Hills (West Bank).
The aforementioned Knesset hearing, held in the “Subcommittee for Judea and Samaria,” was framed by a claim from Subcommittee Chair MK Tzvi Sukkot (Religious Zionism) that aid workers in the West Bank—Palestinian, Israeli, and international alike—were a key enemy in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Sukkot’s words were directly excerpted in Knesset News:
“For the military victory [in Gaza] to arrive, we have to remove everything that interferes with it. We can’t win without fighting against those who are doing everything they can to interfere with our justified war. That is the reason we have convened today, in the middle of the war, to discuss the issue of the anarchists.
“So much unnecessary verbiage has been uttered in the past about ‘settler violence,’ but people have not yet dealt here, in this House, with those who truly create a great deal of severe violence in Judea and Samaria—radical, anarchist left-wing activists who harass the IDF soldiers and heroic settlers. This is a scourge, and we are here to deal with it. I believe that after eradicating this malady, we will be one important step closer to the important victory.”
Remarks from other members of the subcommittee continued to valorize illegal Israeli settlers, and to state broadly that human rights volunteers in the West Bank are “antisemites, for all intents and purposes, and supporters of terrorism.”
Content of the discussions from the first half of the hearings is available to the public; the second half remains classified, but the Knesset suggested that the classified hearings “examined courses of action for expanding the tools for coping with the phenomenon” of activism in the West Bank.
One day following the Subcommittee hearings, on March 13, an Israeli activist was arrested in Masafer Yatta, after being threatened by gunfire from IOF soldiers, beside a Palestinian woman who was picking herbs in an area where they were permitted to do so under Israeli law.
Over the weekend, an international protective presence was detained and questioned by police, who accused them of falsifying their report: they had called the police because a Palestinian-owned car was set on fire in the night, and because the car owners had witnessed two presumed perpetrators escaping into the dark.
On March 20, a group of Israeli human rights volunteers were detained for two hours after reporting illegal settlers who had entered a village near Gwawis in Masafer Yatta. Police arrested one activist and banned them from the area for two weeks; the settlers were left alone.
These arrests follow a pattern that was proposed in the committee hearings: when volunteers call the police to report illegal settler violence, the police claim that their police report was false—and then arrest the volunteer who called the police on accusations of perjury and interfering with police work.
Grounds for this strategy to combat human rights volunteers were provided in the March 12 Knesset hearing by Commander Avishai Mualem of the Judea and Samaria District Police, who reported both that illegal Israeli settler violence has decreased by 50% since October 7, and that 47% of the police reports submitted in the south Hebron Hills (where Masafer Yatta is located) were “false complaints.”
Mualem’s narrative of a decrease in settler violence since October 7 is deeply questionable. The United Nations Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights reported on March 8 (OHCHR) that 603 illegal Israeli settler attacks had been tracked in the West Bank since October 7; in this violence, nine Palestinians were killed and 592 were displaced. The month of October was particularly brutal: the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) tracked an extreme escalation in settler violence in the first month after October 7, reporting that 43% of the almost 2,000 Palestinians displaced by settlers in the West Bank since 2022 were forced out of their homes between October 7 and November 1.
In Masafer Yatta alone, since Commander Mualem issued his report on March 12, various human rights volunteers have witnessed: illegal Israeli settlers raiding the village of Um Al-Khair, intimidating shepherds in Shaab al-Butum, and setting fire to the car of a family living at Um Dhorit. In all instances, the volunteers have called the police; in all instances, police have refused to offer any help to the attacked Masafer Yatta Palestinian residents. And indeed, in some cases, it has ultimately been the volunteer reporting the illegal settler crime who was instead arrested after the police arrived.
It is unclear whether the above interactions from these past days, in which the police were called but willingly chose to not intervene, would be categorized by Commander Mualem alongside the 47% of police reports that he contended were “false complaints.” But UN OHCHR reports that, from November 1, 2022 to October 31, 2023, only 66 out of 190 incidents in which Palestinians filed police complaints on illegal settler violence led to open investigations; of these, only two indictments were filed in response—and as of February 28, 2024, neither of these two open cases had been resolved. Out of the remaining 123 violent incidents in which no report was filed, in 86 cases the harmed Palestinians doubted the police would provide support pursuing the settler who harmed them, and thirteen did not report the violence out of fear that the police would arrest them instead. When called to enforce the law against illegal settler violence in the West Bank, the Israeli police have proven themselves unreliable for Palestinians — and the practice of retaliating against individuals who call for their support is evident.
But now, in the aftermath of the March 12 Knesset hearing, it appears that this risk of retaliation applies to human rights volunteers as well. One human rights volunteer interviewed witnessed this practice on multiple incidents throughout the week: “Historically, international and Israeli volunteers have been able to safely report settler crimes on the behalf of the Palestinians who the settlers attacked,” reported the volunteer, who chose to remain anonymous. “But this week, in the South Hebron Hills alone, I’m personally aware of two separate incidents when someone called in a crime caused by settlers—but it was the volunteer who was taken away by the police.”
When seeking legal enforcement support in the West Bank — where armed settlers disguise themselves as soldiers and seek to make their own laws themselves — both Palestinians and activists are losing one of their last resort options: now, when an nonviolent human rights activist calls the police when Palestinians are under attack, they invoke a high risk that they themselves will be arrested, within a police state that explicitly considers them to be an enemy, aligned with terrorism.
23 March 2024 | International Solidarity Movement | Masafer Yatta
March 21. @ISM
On March 20 and 21, Palestinian shepherds from the village of Umm Fagarah in Masafer Yatta faced violent attacks and incursions onto their grazing lands by illegal Israeli settlers.
On the 20th March an armed settler, from the illegal outpost Jebel Dov, moved up the Sarura Valley where they intimidated Palestinian shepherds pushing them out of the valley. The settler called nearby settler/soldiers who arrived and backed the settler, forcing the shepherds to leave and threatened to detain internationals present. Police arrived at the request of the Palestinians, recorded identification and left, with no justice for the shepherds.
Armed settler approaching a shepherd on March 20. @ISM
At 9am on March 21, shepherds from Umm Fagarah, moved their flocks onto the hills directly to the south of the village. At 10am, two armed settlers ran down the hill from the nearby illegal settlement of Avigayil, located several hundred metres over the hill to the West. The settlers aggressively pushed the shepherds and their flock several hundred metres down the hill forcing them back to their village. At 10.30 two IOF soldiers arrived, also telling the shepherds to go back into the village.
The loss of grazing pasture through land theft and violent settler attacks has greatly affected one of the remaining sources of income for rural Palestinian villages. These attacks have been ongoing for decades, but are rapidly increasing in frequency and violence.
Illegal settlers coming down the hill on March 21. @ISM
Settlers chasing away Palestinian shepherd and his sheep. @ISM
22 March 2024 | International Solidarity Movement | Qalandia checkpoint
Women performing mid-day prayers outside Qalandia checkpoint. @ISM
Palestinians perform Friday mid-day prayer outside of Qalandia checkpoint this morning while held at gunpoint by Israeli occupation soldiers, after being forcefully denied their right to enter Al-Quds to pray at Al-Aqsa.
People trying to enter were again met with an intensified militarisation of Qalandia checkpoint of heavily armed occupation border police, some of them masked, and vehicles.
Israeli occupation forces at the checkpoint. @ISM
While the Occupation Force officially has announced that men above 55 years, women above 50 years and children below 10 years from the West Bank are allowed to enter, today numerous people in the applicable age group were denied entry by Israeli occupation forces (IOF) claiming that “too many” had entered.
Close to 12 noon, IOF completely shut the checkpoint entrance.
In resistance, and under surveillance and held at gun point by IOF border police, denied women gathered in front of the closed gate to perform the midday Friday prayer, joined by a group of men.
One of the women stated: “We will pray here, what else can we do? Allah will understand that this is the closest we can get to Al-Aqsa”.
She had come from Al-Khalil with a permission to enter, but was denied entry at two attempts, and so was her 66 year old father; IOF told both that “too many” had entered.
Another 60-year old man who had been denied was told that now he had to apply online a week prior.
As the women were praying, a masked IOF border police officer shouted to disturb the prayers, while another masked officer made dance moves towards the prayers. During the IOFs surveillance of people trying to enter, a border police officer was observed removing the safe on their gun.
A large amount of Palestinian medics were present wearing fluorescent vest saying: “Don’t shoot me, I’m not a target. I am a health care provider”.
