Abou Bachar is affable despite the ordeal. He apologizes for his delayed response: he has been dealing with emergencies of unprecedented magnitude for a month. On October 12, this leader of the Wadi Al-Siq community, consisting of about forty Palestinian families settled on a rocky piece of land in the hills in the center of the occupied West Bank, saw about 70 Israelis disembark. He says :
Settlers, some in army uniform, others in civilian clothes, accompanied by soldiers. Police observed the crime scene from a distance, perhaps 200 meters away. They came from three different ways, hit us, shot us and dropped us to the ground… It was a terrible scene.
The Palestinians fled on foot in a hurry, unable to take anything with them. Many ended up with relatives in the neighboring town of Ramoun, the rest in Taybeh, a more distant Christian village near Ramallah. According to Abou Bachar, no authority came to their aid.
Three Palestinians were arrested by the attackers, including two activists who had come to support the community in the face of increasing settler attacks. “From noon to six in the evening they were beaten and tortured. When they were released by the Palestinian police, they were taken to the hospital,” says Abou Bachar. Four Israeli activists were also arrested. In a long, detailed report1, the Haaretz newspaper reports that the three Palestinians were beaten. Her tormentors crushed cigarettes on her skin and urinated on two of them. One of those arrested was threatened with rape. A photo that was widely shared on social networks shows her in her underwear, blindfolded and her hands tied in a humiliating position on the floor. The army, which did not respond to Orient XXI, told Haaretz that it had fired the brigade commander.
The Bedouins of Wadi Al-Siq were forcibly expelled at the birth of Israel: they are refugees. Their ancestors were expelled from the Naqab, the Negev Desert in Arabic, during the Nakba in 1948, when nearly 80% of Palestinians in what is now Israeli territory were expelled from their homes without the right of return. The community was founded in the 1970s in this valley basin towards the hills of Ramallah. In February 2023, pressure increased with the arrival of a small group of settlers who set up a farm a few hundred meters from the hamlet. “They confiscated batteries, solar panels, water tanks… They raised the Palestinian flag,” describes Abou Bachar.
“They drove cars with army license plates.”
Since the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel, the world’s eyes have been on the besieged Gaza Strip, where the Israeli army is staging a response of unprecedented violence. In just over a month, more than 12,500 Gazans have been killed. In the West Bank, an area occupied by Israel since 1967, Palestinians are at the mercy of the army and the settlers – who sometimes become one. “The settlers we knew in civilian clothes began to wear uniforms. They had weapons. They drove the same cars, four-wheel drive vehicles, but with army license plates. They no longer attacked our livelihoods and our crops, but directly attacked houses,” summarizes the leader of the Wadi Al-Siq community.
Settler attacks have actually exploded. At least nine Palestinians, including a minor, have been killed by Israeli settlers since October 7. “In almost half of the cases, the Israeli army accompanies the settlers. However, under international law, the army is supposed to protect the local population in an occupation situation, i.e. the Palestinians, and the existence of settlements is not legal under international law, recalls Allegra Pacheco, the director of the West Bank Protection Consortium, a group of international NGOs that coordinated humanitarian assistance to these Palestinian communities at risk of forced displacement.
At the same time, the army has stepped up its raids in the hope of crushing any Palestinian armed resistance. On November 9, Israeli soldiers carried out the deadliest attack since 2005 on the Jenin refugee camp. Fourteen Palestinians were killed in the 18-hour clashes. When the injured were admitted to the nearby hospital, Doctor Pedro Serrano, doctor in the intensive care unit of Médecins Sans Frontières,2 reported that he had treated patients who “had ruptured liver and spleen, while others had severe vascular lesions.” We also learned that a person was shot in the head right outside the hospital.”
Tulkarem, Bethlehem or even the surrounding area of Ramallah… The military is increasing its invasions in Zone A, which is under Palestinian security control. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, more than 220 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem between October 7 and November 17. This is already more than in the first nine months of the year, when 208 Palestinians were killed. However, the level of violence has been particularly high in the West Bank since spring 2022. The Israeli army carried out a bloody campaign of repression there, initiated by the previous government of so-called “national unity” – long before the far-right coalition came to power today.
Sixteen Palestinian communities were erased from the map
The majority of Israeli military personnel were concentrated in the south and on the border with Lebanon. “We are at war now, the conscripts are not in the West Bank,” notes Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of Breaking the Silence, an NGO of Israeli veterans. The Colony Rapid Response Teams are responsible. They have lots of weapons and lots of uniforms to do whatever they want.” The settlers now keep their colonies themselves. They are using this to accelerate the movement that began since 1967 and the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and East Jerusalem: the conquest from more and more land. More than 1,100 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced by Israeli settler violence since October 7, according to a count released November 10 by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. At the beginning of November, the Israeli NGO B’Tselem3 reported that 16 communities had completely disappeared from the map.
What all of the attacked villages have in common is that they are isolated in Zone C, i.e. under complete Israeli security and administrative control. They are often surrounded by “outposts,” which usually consist of a farm with a few hundred animals and a handful of settlers who harass the Palestinians across the street. As a result of this violence and threats, three hamlets on the mountain ridges surrounding Wadi Al-Siq had already been liberated from their residents before October 7th: Ein Samiya, Al-Baqa and Ras Al-Tin. Since then, the movement has reached unprecedented proportions, towards Nablus, the Jordan Valley or the south of the occupied West Bank. Several states, including France, have condemned this violence. The European Union has therefore denounced the “resurgence of settler terrorism”4. However, no sanctions were imposed against Israel for these violations. Palestinian communities say they are abandoned; Support from NGOs alone is no longer enough.
“I will destroy you like Gaza”
The day after the Hamas attack, Jewish racist police officer Itamar Ben Gvir, who was convicted in 2007 of “supporting a terrorist group,” ordered the distribution of assault rifles to Israeli civilians. According to Haaretz, around 25,000 weapons have already been sold. On October 24, the Times of Israel reported5 that 300 of them were handed over to security groups made up of settlers in the West Bank. Their distribution was carried out under the supervision of the army.
For Palestinian activist Nasser Nawajah, the fact that the settlers are being armed by the Israeli state clearly shows that state’s responsibility for the forced relocations. In the south of the West Bank, Soussya, the hamlet from which Nasser comes, fears for its survival. Not far away, the community of Zanuta was packing up in early November. Soussya is already cut off from the world, with piles of stones and sand blocking the access roads. Local residents claim that a settler dumped them there with a bulldozer a few days after the war began. Gunmen attacked Palestinian families, directly threatening them and giving them 24 hours to evacuate. “Normally the state pursues the same goals, but everything happens at a slower pace: there are appeals in court, international pressure… Now the settlers and the state have understood this: c “It is their dynamic,” Judge Nasser Nawajah, who also Researcher at B’Tselem. This 41-year-old father wonders why the international community didn’t respond more strongly when the European Union financed most of the buildings in the hamlet. “If the world continues to be silent, we are heading for a second Nakba,” he warns.
To support his point, he recounts what a soldier replied to him when he tried to alert him to the threats and attacks on the hamlet by settlers: “Today I will destroy you like Gaza.” “All Palestinians will be destroyed by Israelis as if they were the ones who carried out the Hamas massacres,” the activist notes. The dehumanization manifested in Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s classification of Gazans as “human animals” serves as a basis for justifying violence against Palestinians. Allegra Pacheco notes:
Since the war, settlers have identified the Palestinians as enemies. The idea is: As long as the enemy lives among us, there is danger and therefore we must drive him out. This is reinforced by all the rhetoric in the country. It used to be the story of the settlers, far removed from that of the general public. Today this is no longer the case.
More than 2,000 arrests
The Israeli army wants to bring the West Bank under control in order to avoid at all costs that a third front develops there – alongside Gaza and the border with Lebanon. The soldiers completely dismembered the area, isolated the cities from each other through blockades and closed certain roads. Even some Palestinian neighborhoods in the city of Jerusalem, such as Kafr Aqab, which are part of the municipality but are on the other side of the wall, are isolated. In early November, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, along with two other NGOs, submitted a petition to demand the full reopening of Qalandia, a key checkpoint in the West Bank towards Jerusalem. In a press release6, the organization published the statement of a Palestinian father whose son requires urgent treatment in Jerusalem three times a week. “To be able to arrive at Hadassah Hospital for an appointment via the Qalandia checkpoint at noon today, we have to leave at five in the morning,” he describes. If the situation continues, for his son it will be “a matter of life and death: he could die before he reaches the hospital,” he warns.
Mass arrests represent the last pillar of oppression, a far-reaching tool for controlling the Palestinian population. Since October 7, Israeli forces have arrested more than 2,000 people. The Palestinian NGO Addameer reports cases in which people were “brutally beaten, threatened with death and their families taken hostage” during these arrests. The organization currently lists about 7,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, including 2,000 in administrative detention. Conditions in prisons are harsh, warns the Commission for Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs. This official institution, subordinate to the Palestinian Authority, specifically mentions:
Hour-long power outages in cells, a policy aimed at starving prisoners by confiscating food from canteens and reducing meals to two per day, brutal attacks by special forces with beatings, sound bombs or tear gas, deprivation of medical care and transfers to hospitals.
Visits are forbidden and the cells are overcrowded.
According to Addameer, five Palestinians have died in custody since October 7. Some videos filmed by Israeli soldiers and security forces members have been shared on social media, showing Palestinian prisoners blindfolded and having their hands tied, being beaten, forced to dance with their prison guard, or lined up in rows in humiliating positions. These horrific images are sparking fear in the West Bank – which is likely the aim of those who filmed them. They also revive the popular notion among Palestinians that their prisoners are “hostages” in the hands of Israel.
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