August 16, 2024
Dozens of masked
and armed Israeli settlers descended upon the Palestinian town of Jit in the
occupied West Bank on Thursday, setting houses aflame and killing at least one
Palestinian in what human rights advocates and the president of Israel have
labeled as a pogrom.
At least 100
Israeli settlers entered the village at night, some outlets reported, burning
homes and cars, shooting at Palestinians and damaging water tankers. Photo and
video from the attack show the fire spread across the town, with dark plumes of
smoke hanging in the air. Settlers threw a firebomb at a house while a family
was inside, Haaretz reported, citing a “security source.” The family survived,
but the house was damaged badly.
One man,
23-year-old Mahmoud Abdel Qader Saddam, was shot and killed by settlers in the
attack, and another Palestinian was critically wounded by gunfire, Palestinian
health officials said. Others were wounded by stones thrown by settlers.
“They were
masked, dressed in black, armed and some had knives,” Jit resident Hassan told
Haaretz. “It seemed planned. They didn’t look like children, they looked like
adults. When I went outside to see what was happening, they attacked me with
teargas. They torched my car and smashed another one, and then they continued
into the village, after attacking more cars nearby. The army arrived about an
hour later, they took their time and let them do whatever they wanted.”
Israeli
officials have supposedly rebuked the attack in statements. But officials did
nothing to stop it as it was ongoing; so far, no arrests have been made from
the attack other than one Israeli who was taken into custody for allegedly
assaulting a police officer. He was released shortly after.
Israeli soldiers
argue with a Palestinian man after an attack by settlers in the village of
Burin, south of Nablus, in which Palestinian vehicles were burned and
destroyed, on June 18, 2024.
Israeli
President Isaac Herzog said that the attack was a “pogrom”; Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the riots by, in effect, saying that they should
have been carried out by Israeli occupation forces and implying that the
Palestinians in the village are terrorists.
Even Finance
Minister Bezalel Smotrich condemned the riot — but only to seemingly advance
his own extremist mindset. He said without evidence that those who carried out
the attack do not represent Israeli settlers at large — despite the fact that
Israeli settlers supported by Smotrich have carried out similar attacks for
many years. “We are building and developing settlements in a legal and official
manner,” Smotrich wrote on social media, in a blatant lie that goes against the
decisions of the International Court of Justice.
Jit is next door
to the illegal Israeli settlement of Kedumim, where Smotrich lives. Smotrich
has been leading Israel’s charge into the West Bank and has been growing its
illegal settlements in the West Bank at a pace not seen in decades in recent
years.
It’s unclear why
this particular attack drew ire from Israeli officials when, according to UN
human rights officials, there have been at least 1,250 attacks by Israeli
settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank since October that have not
prompted similar responses. By not stopping it while it was happening, however
— and by allowing settlers to commit hundreds of attacks on Palestinians in the
West Bank with impunity — Israeli officials are effectively sponsoring such
assaults, human rights groups and advocates said.
“This terrorism
is part of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. It is
sponsored by the government, led by cabinet ministers, and protected by the
Israeli occupation forces. It must be condemned and called for what it is:
State-sponsored terrorism,” said Laith Arafeh, Palestinian ambassador to
Germany.
A spokesperson
for the UN human rights office said that the riot is “not an isolated attack”
and only happened as a result of impunity enjoyed by Israeli officials for
attacks on the West Bank.
The death toll
in the West Bank has soared since October, when Israel began its current
genocidal assault in Gaza. The UN reports that Israeli forces and settlers have
killed over 600 Palestinians, including at least 140 children, in the West Bank
since October, a record death toll in the West Bank this amount of time. Last
year was already the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank prior to
October 7.
Ramzy
Baroud
It
might sound odd that Feiglin saw the element of fear as critical to Israel’s
well-being if not its very survival.
In
actuality, the fear element is directly linked to Israel’s behavior and
fundamental to its political discourse.
Historically,
Israel has carried out massacres with a specific political strategy in mind: to
instill the desired fear to drive Palestinians off their land. Deir Yassin,
Tantara and the over 70 documented massacres during the Palestinian Nakba, or
Catastrophe, are cases in point.
Israel
has also utilized torture, rape and other forms of sexual assault to achieve
similar ends in the past, to exact information or to break down the will of
prisoners.
UN-affiliated
experts said in a report published on August 5 that “these practices are
intended to punish Palestinians for resisting occupation and seek to destroy
them individually and collectively.”
Israel’s
ongoing war in Gaza has manifested all these horrific strategies in ways
unprecedented in the past, both in terms of widespread application and
frequency.
In
a report entitled ‘Welcome to Hell’, published on August 5, the Israeli rights
group, B’tselem, said that Israel’s detention “facilities, in which every
inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering
operate as de-facto torture camps”.
A
few days later, the Palestinian rights group, Addameer, published its own
report, “documented cases of torture, sexual violence, and degrading
treatment”, along with the “systematic abuses and human rights violations
committed against detainees from Gaza.”
If
incidents of rape, sexual assaults and other forms of torture are marked on a
map, they would cover a large geographical area, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and
Israel itself—mostly notably in the notorious Sde Teiman Camp.
Considering
the size and locations of the Israeli army, well-documented evidence of rape
and torture demonstrates that such tactics are not linked to a specific branch
of the military. This means that the Israeli army uses torture as a centralized
strategy.
Such
a strategy has been associated with the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s
national security minister. His aggressive statements, for example, that
Palestinian prisoners should be “shot in the head instead of being given more
food”, are perfectly aligned with his equally violent actions: the starvation
policy of prisoners, the normalization of torture and the defense of rape.
But
Ben-Gvir did not institute these tortuous policies. They have predated him by
decades and were used against generations of Palestinian prisoners, who are
granted few rights compared to those enshrined by international law,
particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.
But
why does Israel torture Palestinians on such a large scale?
Israeli
wars against Palestinians are predicated on two elements: a material and a
psychological one. The former has manifested itself in the ongoing genocide,
the killing and wounding of tens of thousands and the near destruction of Gaza.
The
psychological factor, however, is intended to break the will of the Palestinian
people.
Law
for Palestine, a legal advocacy group published a database of over 500
instances of Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
inciting genocide in Gaza.
Most
of these references seem to be centered on dehumanizing the Palestinians. For
example, the October 11 statement by Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog, that
“there are no innocent civilians in Gaza”, was part of the collective death
sentence that made the extermination of Palestinians morally justifiable in the
eyes of Israelis.
Netanyahu’s
own ominous biblical reference, where he called on Israeli soldiers to seek
revenge from Palestinians, stating “Remember what Amalek has done to you”, was
also a blank check for mass murder.
While
choosing not to see Palestinians as humans, as innocent, as worthy of life and
security, Israel has granted its army carte blanche to do as it saw fit to
those, in the words of Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, “human animals”.
The
mass killing, starvation and widespread rape and torture of Palestinians are a
natural outcome of these shocking dialectics. But the overall purpose of Israel
is not simply to exact revenge, though the latter has been quite important to
Israel’s desire for national recovery.
By
trying to break the will of the Palestinians through torture, humiliation and
rape, Israel wants to restore a different kind of deterrence, which it lost on
October 7.
Failing
to restore military or strategic deterrence, Tel Aviv is invested in
psychological deterrence, as in restoring the element of fear that was breached
on October 7.
Raping
prisoners, leaking videos of the gruesome acts, and carrying out the same
horrific deed, again and again, are all part of the Israeli strategy—that of
restoring fear.
But
Israel will fail, simply because Palestinians have already succeeded in
demolishing Israel’s 76-year matrix of physical domination and mental torture.
The
Israeli war on Gaza has proven to be the most destructive and bloody of all
Israeli wars. Yet, Palestinian resilience continues to grow stronger, because
Palestinians are not passive, but active participants in the shaping of their
own future.
If
popular resistance is indeed the process of the restoration of the self,
Palestinians in Gaza are proving that, despite their unspeakable pain and
agony, they are emerging as a whole, ready to clinch their freedom, no matter
the cost.
Richard
Hardigan
August
15, 2024
Susya,
West Bank – Wadi Raheem is a dry riverbed near the Palestinian village of Susya
in the South Hebron hills in the occupied West Bank. The area has a stark
beauty that is characterised by rolling hills, rocky outcrops and stunning
vistas. Despite the generally poor soil, Palestinians have managed to eke out
an existence here – reportedly since at least the 1830s – by practising
subsistence farming and animal herding.
It
is four o’clock in the afternoon and brutally hot. Khalil al-Harini, who owns
part of the wadi, has asked me and two other activists to accompany him as he
grazes his sheep. Israeli settlers have been harassing him for decades, but the
frequency and severity of the attacks have increased significantly in the
months since October 7, and he is worried.
Al-Harini
is 81 years old, and his face, framed by a plain white keffiyeh, is lined from
exposure to the sun. But he walks energetically among his sheep, waving his
stick at them when they stray too far. He tells me his grandfather’s father was
born on this land, and I can picture the same idyllic scene taking place a
century earlier – an old man tending to his herd silently, with only the
sheep’s rhythmic munching of the dry grass interrupting the quiet.
This
stillness belies a deep concern for his family. His 15-year-old grandson, also
named Khalil, had been threatened the previous day in the wadi.
First,
two teenagers had come roaring down into the valley on all-terrain vehicles,
music blaring and Israeli flags flapping in the wind. When they saw Khalil
tending sheep, they turned up the music even louder, jumped off their vehicles
and began to dance, thrusting their hips. The message was clear: “We can do
whatever we want, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.”
Shortly
afterwards, a settler armed with an M16 rifle showed up. He said that the wadi
was a security zone and he promised that there would be “a big problem” if
Khalil was there the next day.
As
we found out, he meant it.
Under
a veneer of legality
Like
much of the West Bank, al-Harini’s home village of Susya has suffered its share
of injustice meted out by Israel. Since seizing the West Bank in 1967, Israel
has refrained from formally annexing it – with the exception of occupied East
Jerusalem – and has instead focused on expanding its presence.
Israel
has built illegal settlements, effectively incorporating these areas into its
territory, while simultaneously keeping the number of Palestinians in Israel’s
expansion as low as possible. Much of the effort to expel the Palestinians from
their land has occurred in Area C (61 percent of the West Bank), such as in the
Jordan Valley or the South Hebron hills, which are sparsely populated.
The
authorities have seized roughly half of the West Bank for military and state
purposes and also expropriated land for public needs.
And
so it has been with Susya. In the early 1980s, remains of an ancient synagogue
were discovered nearby – this was used as justification to expel all the
villagers, including al-Harini and his family.
“I
lived in old Susya in a cave inside the village,” he tells me. “But then the
Israeli occupation forced us to leave in 1986.”
More
expulsions of the residents of Susya followed in 1991 and 2001. On each
occasion, they were forced to move farther and farther from the original
village, however they made sure to remain on their ancestral agricultural land.
“We
always want to stay on our land,” Nasser Nawajah, a resident of Susya who works
for the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, told me. “We are afraid that if we leave, we’ll
never be allowed to come back.”
Susya
is now a hamlet of a few dilapidated shacks. The residents are afraid to build
more permanent structures because they know there is a real threat that they
will be demolished by the authorities. The entire village has been torn down on
seven separate occasions.
Targeting
Palestinians and their property
There
are currently more than 700,000 settlers living in 150 illegal settlements and
128 outposts (settlements unauthorised by the Israeli government) in the West
Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Many
settlers choose to live in the settlements for the economic advantages granted
by the government, but roughly one-third are considered ideological settlers,
who believe they are doing God’s work by settling the land.
Over
the years, settlers have targeted Palestinians and their properties through
various means: throwing stones, setting fires to homes and businesses, cutting
down olive trees, damaging water infrastructure and stealing or killing
livestock.
Settler
violence has also involved beatings and, in extreme cases, the shooting and
killing of Palestinian civilians. In addition, settlers have often seized (PDF)
private Palestinian land, with next to no assistance from the authorities to
enforce the law and return the land to its rightful owner.
“My
family was subjected to many attacks by settlers, and they were often very
violent with us,” al-Harini says. “I remember there was an attack on me
personally when I was grazing my sheep on my private land. Two masked settlers
came and started hitting my sheep with stones. I tried to stop them, but they
pushed me, and I fell on my neck, which led to a fracture in the third
vertebra.”
A
kidnapping at the wadi
Back
at the wadi, al-Harini’s fears have been realised.
A
white van stops on the dirt road in the valley, a hundred metres (328 feet)
away. Three uniformed men emerge, M16s in hand. They run towards us, screaming,
with guns pointed in our direction. “On the ground! On the ground!”
Khalil,
having seen the settlers approaching, enters the wadi to join us. The uniformed
men quickly pin him to the ground, a gun at his back.
The
settlers continue to threaten us, telling us they’ll shoot if we make one wrong
move. They call us Nazis, Hamas, ISIL (ISIS), anti-Semites. The hatred in their
eyes frightens me.
I
think about my friend Peter, who was beaten unconscious with a metal pipe by a
group of settlers in Hebron a few years earlier. I cannot imagine what it is
like for Khalil, who knows the settlers will act with complete impunity.
Palestinians’ complaints to the authorities about these attacks are typically
ignored. According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, 92 percent of
investigations into settler attacks on Palestinians are closed without
indictment.
I
ask the settlers why they are threatening al-Harini, an old man simply grazing
his sheep on his land.
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The
response: “He may be innocent, but I’m sure that his family wants to kill all
Jews. Everybody hates the Jews. But that’s OK. God is with us.”
Eventually
the settlers tire of the confrontation. They steal our passports, phones and
cameras, and say we will be arrested if we ever return. Khalil is zip-tied and
shoved roughly into the back of the van. They drive off. I shudder to think
what will happen to him.
After
the attack, I walk slowly up the hill to al-Harini’s house, where he is now
with his wife, Hakimeh.
“My
baby. My baby,” she cries softly. “When is he going to come home?”
An
‘unbearable’ situation
Everyone
I spoke with in Susya noted a sharp rise in settler violence after October 7.
“The
attacks increased on the village in general and were more violent than before.
They attacked us at night and during the day,” says al-Harini.
“Settlers
wearing army uniforms would come in the middle of the night and search and
vandalise the houses. They cut the water pipes connected from the water well to
the inside of the house. They prevented us from ploughing our land or even
grazing on it.”
Data
collected by the NGO Armed Conflict and Location Event Data confirm the
villagers’ experiences. The number of violent incidents in the West Bank
involving settlers doubled in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared with the
third quarter, and the number of attacks with firearms increased sevenfold.
“The
situation … is unbearable. The violence has reached levels we’ve never
witnessed before,” Yasmeen el-Hasan, coordinator of the Union of Agricultural
Work Committees, a Ramallah-based grassroots organisation helping Palestinian
farmers, told The New Arab in May.
She
was speaking in mid-April after 1,500 settlers attacked the Palestinian village
of al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, targeting cars, houses and livestock.
During the three-hour raid, which was reportedly in response to the killing of
a settler, one resident was killed and at least 25 others were injured.
The
heightened violence is not random. With the world focused on the continuing
genocide in Gaza, far-right factions of the Israeli government have used the
opportunity to further their goal of annexing the West Bank.
Minister
of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who oversees settlement planning and has promised
to flood the West Bank with a million new settlers, revealed as much to his
colleagues in the Religious Zionism party, when he said that he was
“establish[ing] facts on the ground in order to make Judea and Samaria an
integral part of the state of Israel”.
Much
of the violence is also promoted by Minister of National Security Itamar
Ben-Gvir, whose past includes threatening to kill former Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin, being indicted at least 50 times for incitement to violence or hate
speech and referring to Baruch Goldstein as a hero. Goldstein massacred 29
Muslim worshippers in a Hebron mosque in 1994.
Ben-Gvir
bought at least 10,000 assault rifles for security teams in October and proudly
announced in March that 100,000 new gun licences have been distributed to
Israeli civilians since October 7.
“The
hordes of settlers that swept all over Palestinian villages were emboldened by
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s ideological and material support of settler militias
throughout the West Bank, even more so after 7 October,” said el-Hasan.
The
consequences of the increased violence have been devastating. Israeli soldiers
and settlers have killed more than 600 Palestinians in the West Bank and seized
37,000 acres (15,000 hectares) of land since October 7. To date, 18 Palestinian
communities have been emptied.
‘I
thought they might kill him’
Khalil
returned to the wadi the day after he was taken away by the authorities.
He
says that the settlers had blindfolded him before taking him to a nearby army
base for questioning. “They asked me about the land, and I told them it
belonged to my family,” Khalil recounts. “One of the soldiers said, ‘Look at my
face and know well. If you return again to that land, you will see something
that you do not like.’”
Khalil
was then dumped on the side of the road outside as-Samu, a town about 25km (15
miles) from Wadi Raheem. He walked to a house with a light on and called his
family to pick him up.
With
Khalil back home al-Harini talks about the fear he felt for his grandson. “I
cannot express what was inside me that night,” al-Harini says. “When I saw them
taking Khalil to the car, which was a civilian car belonging to the settlers, I
became really afraid, and I thought they might kill him.
“Yes,
I had that feeling. Because these settlers are very violent.”
“I
felt afraid for him,” says Khalil’s grandmother, Hakimeh. “I started crying. My
heart broke for him. He is still a child, no more than 15 years old. I expected
that I would never see him again, especially in light of the circumstances we
are living in.”
What
would she say to one of the settlers if he were standing in front of her, I
ask.
Hakimeh
answers, “This is my land. I will not leave it, no matter what I have a right
and I am the owner of this land. I will not give up a speck of dirt from my
land. I will die and be buried on it. This land is our land. Nobody will force
us to leave our land and our home.”
With
additional reporting by Hamdan Ballal
Dave
DeCamp
Gaza’s
Health Ministry said Thursday that the number of Palestinians it has recorded
killed by the Israeli onslaught has surpassed 40,000, or about 2% of the
population. The number is considered a conservative estimate since it doesn’t
account for the 10,000 people who are missing and believed to be dead under the
rubble.
The
Health Ministry said a total of 40,005 Palestinians had been killed over ten
months, including 40 that were killed by Israeli forces in the previous 24
hours. They also said a total of 92,401 Palestinians have been wounded.
The
Health Ministry has identified 32,280 bodies by name, which includes 10,627
children, 5,956 women, and 2,770 elderly people. Gaza’s Media Office has
estimated more than 16,000 children have been killed by the Israeli onslaught.
It’s
unclear how many Palestinians have died due to indirect causes of the siege,
such as food shortages, medicine shortages, the destruction of Gaza’s health
facilities, and the spread of disease. Gaza’s Media Office has said at least 35
children have starved to death.
A
letter written by a group of experts recently published in the British medical
journal The Lancet estimated the total number of deaths in Gaza, including
those killed by the Israeli military and indirect causes, could reach 186,000.
The estimate used the death toll from the end of June, which was 37,396.
A
group of American doctors and nurses who volunteered in Gaza wrote a letter to
President Biden last month, and they estimated that the actual death toll has
already exceeded 92,000, or 4.2% of the population. The American medical
professionals also detailed the horrific violence being committed by Israeli
soldiers against children.
“Every
single signatory to this letter treated children in Gaza who suffered violence
that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of
us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head,” the
letter said.
The
US continues to support the genocidal war despite the massive civilian and
child death toll. This week, the Biden administration showed its strong backing
of the slaughter by approving $20 billion in weapons sales for Israel, which
included F-15 fighter jets and tank ammunition.
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