A Wall Street Journal investigation found that since Oct. 7, Israeli settlers have been rapidly building illegal roads and outposts across the West Bank. This work is sometimes done under armed guard with funding from the Israeli government.
Chapters:
0:00 WSJ’s findings: a surge in illegal construction
1:24 How roads become borders
2:35 Farkha: a new road threatens the village
4:41 Wadi al Seeq: a Bedouin village violently expelled
6:53 Government support for illegal farming outposts
8:35 Alonei Shilo: An illegal road 10 years in the making
9:29 Will Gaza be settled next?
WSJ video investigations use visual evidence to reveal the truth behind the most important stories of the day.
Since October 7, Israel has killed at least 31,043 people in Gaza, wounding 76,666. The death toll is widely understood to be a massive underestimate, as thousands remain under the rubble or on streets, with family members unable to rescue or retrieve them. The state’s targeted destruction of entire Palestinian neighborhoods has killed 13,536 children, 8,900 women, and 8,607 men. Israeli attacks on hospitals, ambulances, and emergency responders have claimed the lives of 364 medical workers and 48 emergency personnel. To suppress Palestinians from narrating the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israel has killed 132 journalists as well as many of their family members. Israel’s prolonged aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority of whom are refugees from other parts of Palestine, is one of the deadliest in history.
Israel’s indigenous displacement and erasure is not contained to the Gaza Strip but also extends across the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the lands occupied since 1948. Since October 7, Israeli forces have increased violent incursions into Palestinian refugee camps across the West Bank, in particular, raiding communities, destroying essential infrastructure, carrying out mass arrest campaigns, and killing and injuring many Palestinians.
On March 2, Israeli forces fatally shot a 13-year-old Mohammad Khaled Zaid and injured another at the entrance to Al Jalazone refugee camp in Ramallah. Israeli troops left Mohammad to bleed for an hour before allowing emergency responders to reach him. That same day, 16-year-old Mohammad al-Deek was killed by Israeli forces during an incursion into Kafr Ni’ma village, Ramallah.
On March 4, Israeli forces killed a 16-year-old resident of Qalandiya refugee camp, Mustafa Abu Shalbak, and injured two others in the Al Amari refugee camp in Ramallah. The same day, Israeli forces murdered a 10-year-old Amr Muhammad Najjar in Burin, south of Nablus. He was shot in the head while with his father. It was reported that another Palestinian approached Amr after he was wounded and was also shot in the chest by Israeli forces.
Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces have killed 412 Palestinians, including 106 children, across the West Bank alone. They have inflicted injuries on 4,623 Palestinians in the West Bank during this time, with 710 being children.
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The Israeli authorities demolished 18 structures in the Jericho area on February 29, citing a lack of Israel-issued building permits. This action displaced seven people, including three children. The demolitions mainly affected residential buildings, external kitchens, bathrooms, agricultural structures, and solar panels. Since October 7, 2023, 599 individuals, including 285 children, have faced displacement in Area C and East Jerusalem due to such demolitions.
Additionally, on January 24, Israeli authorities punitively sealed a house in Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem, displacing four people. This house was linked to a Palestinian who had injured two soldiers in a shooting incident before being killed by Israeli forces. In total, 23 homes have been punitively demolished, and two sealed off since October 7, displacing 121 Palestinians, including 51 children. Punitive demolitions such as these amount to collective punishment, as demolishing homes impacts entire families.
OCHA has documented 607 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians since October 7, 2023, resulting in murder, injury, property damage, or a combination. The vast majority of these attacks go unprosecuted. By allowing settler citizens, rather than the state, to use violence to displace Palestinians, the Israeli state creates a narrative of “a few bad apples” or “fringe extremists.” In reality, Israeli forces are very often present to protect settlers during violent attacks. Financed by the Israeli state and the US nonprofit system, Israeli settler violence has been the single most significant contributing factor in Palestinian displacement across the West Bank since October 7.
Between October 7, 2023, and January 21, 2024, Israeli state-sanctioned settler violence displaced some 198 Palestinian households, impacting 1,208 individuals, including 586 children.
The affected households come from at least 15 herding and Bedouin communities. A significant portion of these displacements, more than half, occurred on three specific dates: October 12th, 15th, and 28th, impacting seven communities and affecting a total of 1,539 people, including 756 children.
This week, we’re featuring a conversation with Mohammad Hureini (twitter / instagram), a young activist from Masafer Yatta, an area in the hills south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank in Palestine. Mohammad is a member of a non-violent group called Youth of Sumud that struggles to hold on to the sites and lives of Palestinian villages despite displacement by the Israeli military occupation as well as the illegal zionist settlements (like the neighboring Havat Ma’on) and their routine violence and impunity. For the hour, Mohammad speaks about the work of Youth of Sumud, their recent report co-published with The Good Shepherd on increased settler violence entitled Indigenous Erasure: How the zionist movement is using state sanctioned violence to eliminate the Palestinian communities of the West Bank, the South African genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice and other topics. A transcript of this interview will be available soon.
Al-Addameer’s recent publication on prisons and repression of Palestinians since October 7th, 2023: https://addameer.org/media/5262
Organizations Mohammad names doing on the ground support:
– Defund Racism (https://defundracism.org/): follows NGO connections to settler projects recently published a report on Regavim, a pro-settler organization that pulls funding from the US, Canada and elsewhere to displace Palestinians
– Operation Dove /Operazione Colomba from Italy (https://www.operazionecolomba.it/)
– International Solidarity Movement (https://palsolidarity.org/) Community Peacemaker Teams (https://cpt.org/)
The sounds of destruction carried through the valley. It was October 28th, and I was standing on a rocky slope in the West Bank with Bashar Ma’amar, a Palestinian who records the aggressions of Israeli settlers. Ma’amar pointed a camera at a group ransacking a house below us. A couple of days before, the settlers had set fire to it; the house’s owner had gone to the police, but they had not intervened. As we watched, one settler kicked at the front door, and another tried to penetrate the charred walls with a board. Others tore a hole in the roof and slipped inside. On the hillside opposite us, three Israeli soldiers and a man with a rifle stood watching. Eventually, the settlers joined the soldiers to walk back to Eli, their settlement, where mothers pushed strollers down tree-lined blocks of red-roofed houses, people played tennis on courts with views of Palestinian farmland, and men and women carrying M16s and Uzis shopped in strip malls.
“Now is the time for them to implement their objectives,” Ma’amar told me. “All the attention is on Gaza.” Ma’amar is forty-one, tall and lanky. He drove his dilapidated car to Qaryut, his village of three thousand people, with winding alleys and olive groves that stretch in every direction. Qaryut, twenty miles north of Ramallah, is in the fertile central highlands of the West Bank, the twenty-two-hundred-square-mile territory that has been occupied by Israel since 1967. After Israel won the Six-Day War, fought against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, it took territory that included the West Bank, which most Israelis refer to as Judea and Samaria. Today, there are roughly half a million settlers in the West Bank, one for every six Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the territory, controls security—often with Israeli assistance—only in the urban centers. In the remaining eighty-two per cent of the territory, Israel is in charge. In Qaryut, Ma’amar operates a branch of the Red Crescent and administers message groups that monitor the actions of settlers and of the Israel Defense Forces. He is also a volunteer with B’tselem, an Israeli human-rights group.
One day when I visited Ma’amar, he piled up a dozen cameras on his desk—old mini-D.V. camcorders, point-and-shoot 35-mm.s—some broken by settlers. It was a collection built up during nearly twenty years of documenting settler violence and encroachment onto Palestinian land. “My cameras are my weapons,” he said. “I’m probably the person in Qaryut who has filed the most complaints to the police, to the Supreme Court.” There had been some moments of success. He’d helped a man get back half of the hundred and seventy acres that settlers had seized from him. Mostly, though, his cases went nowhere. “The Israeli legal system doesn’t work for the benefit of Palestinians,” he said.
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His obsession with documentation was inherited from his grandfather Ahmed Odeh, who served for some thirty years as mayor of Qaryut. Ma’amar keeps century-old land deeds and tattered administrative maps, which show that the surrounding settlements were built on private land.
When Ma’amar was born, in 1982, his village was next to only one settlement, Shilo, established on land seized from his grandfather. Eli was founded when Ma’amar was five, taking more land from Qaryut. Eli and Shilo, which each has nearly five thousand residents, subsumed three of Qaryut’s five springs. The village had to buy its water from Mekorot, Israel’s national water company.
The first time that Ma’amar witnessed settler violence was in 1996. It was in the wake of the first election to Prime Minister of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was intent on blocking any progress toward a two-state solution. Shilo took even more land from Qaryut, to make a vineyard. The village staged a protest, which Ma’amar filmed. The Army and settlers rushed in, firing shots into the air, and settlers beat people and tried to take cameras from anyone documenting the scene. An Israeli court ruled that the land should be returned to Qaryut, but Ma’amar said that settlers continued to attack people who approached, so the land was effectively lost.
In the years that followed, settlers put up tents, then mobile homes, on hilltops. Settlements are mostly considered illegal under international law, but these outposts were illegal even under Israeli law. Still, the government did little to dissuade the hilltop settlers, who viewed themselves as pioneers. The outposts were quickly connected to larger settlements by water systems, power lines, and paved roads. In time, a corridor of settlement took shape, slicing across the West Bank until the map looked more and more like the one envisioned by many settlers and political leaders, in which Palestinians would live in small and disconnected territories within an expanded Israel. Qaryut sat right in the corridor’s path; there were now eight official settlements and at least eleven smaller outposts in a five-mile radius of the village. “Without international and legal pressure on the Israelis, Qaryut will disappear,” Ma’amar said.
In November, 2022, Netanyahu won reëlection for the sixth time. To form a governing coalition, he allied with leaders of far-right parties, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who advocate for annexing the West Bank. Since then, the situation there has grown dramatically worse. In the first nine months of 2023, Ma’amar filed about seventy police reports of settler violence. In February, while he was driving an ambulance to pick up people injured in an attack, settlers smashed his windows and tried to burn the vehicle. In June, Palestinian gunmen killed four settlers near Eli; the next day, hundreds of settlers descended on Turmus Aya, a nearby village, shooting residents and burning cars and houses, some with people inside. By September, 2023, the United Nations was documenting around three settler-related incidents each day, the highest since it had started tracking the trend, in 2006, and eleven hundred Palestinians in the West Bank had been displaced.
Since October 7th, when Hamas-led fighters broke through the fence on Gaza’s border with Israel and killed some twelve hundred people and took some two hundred and fifty hostages, attacks near Qaryut have become routine. Settlers have burned cars and houses, blockaded roads, damaged electricity networks, seized farmland, severed irrigation lines, attacked people in their fields and olive groves, and killed, all without repercussion. Ma’amar told me that a thousand acres had been cut off from Qaryut. The U.N. has recorded five hundred and seventy-three attacks by settlers in the West Bank since the war began, with Israeli forces accompanying them half the time. At least nine people have been killed by settlers, and three hundred and eighty-two have been killed by Israeli forces. Five Israelis have been killed in the West Bank, at least one of whom was a civilian.
On October 9th, settlers sent a picture on Facebook to people in Qusra, a few miles from Qaryut, of masked men holding axes, clubs, a gas can, and a chainsaw, with text that read, “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.” Two days later, at the edge of the village, settlers lit utility poles on fire and tried to break into a house. For a half hour, a family huddled inside; then young men from the village arrived and threw rocks at the Israelis. Ma’amar drove over in his ambulance. At that point, the settlers started shooting. A man handed Ma’amar a six-year-old girl who had been shot. As the man walked away, he was shot and killed. When Ma’amar sped off, he said, settlers fired on his ambulance. Three Palestinians were killed, one of them the son of a man who had been killed by settlers in 2017. Then the Israeli Army stormed the village and killed a thirteen-year-old boy.
The next day, Hani Odeh, the mayor of Qusra, arranged for a procession to transport the bodies from the hospital to the village. Ma’amar took one of them in his ambulance. The I.D.F. dictated the route, then directed mourners to change course to avoid settlers. But dozens of settlers blocked the road and stoned the procession anyway. “I got out and talked to the Israeli commander, begging him to make the settlers leave,” Odeh said. “He told me to turn around.” The settlers killed a sixty-two-year-old man and his twenty-five-year-old son.
“They can’t just continue to unleash the settlers on us like that,” Odeh told me. “My generation has always tried to reason with our youth, but they can no longer take it, so what am I to do? People like me, who advocated for peace their whole lives—we are not respected anymore. They say what did Abu Mazen”—Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority—“ever do for us? And they’re right. He keeps asking people to protest peacefully. Peacefully? There’s nothing peaceful about the situation we’re in.”
On October 29th, settlers showed up at one of Qaryut’s two remaining springs. They hung an Israeli flag and, with soldiers present, demolished one of the large concrete water basins that villagers had been using for irrigation for generations. Then the Army closed Qaryut’s access road to the spring. The road separated Shilo and Eli, and Ma’amar guessed that the aim of the settlers and the Army was to connect the two settlements.
For the next couple of weeks, settlers came to the spring frequently, accompanied by soldiers. Some wore shirts with the logo of Artzenu (“Our Land”), a subsidiary of a government-funded organization which is dedicated to farming land in the West Bank before “non-Jewish entities” do. (A spokesperson for Artzenu said, “Not everyone who wears the shirt in their free time represents the organization’s values.”) One day, Ma’amar filmed two soldiers in sniper costumes on the hillside above the spring and young settlers burning tires on the access road. One soldier, lying prone with his rifle balanced on a tripod, aimed straight at Ma’amar.
That day, I went down to the spring with Ariel Elmaliach, the mayor of Eli. Around ten young men and boys were working to turn one of the concrete basins into a swimming pool. “Come in another week with shorts and you can enjoy,” Elmaliach told me.
He asked the group why they were doing this work.
“To take more room around the settlement,” a boy of about fifteen said.
“For our homeland,” Nadav Levy, a bearded man in his early twenties, said. He added that he didn’t understand why people in Qaryut were upset about their project: “From my perspective, all of this is our land.”
Ory Shimon, twenty, said he felt that Israel was being unfairly scrutinized: “America came with ships and killed all the Indians and made them slaves. It’s terrible, but now America doesn’t say, ‘We’re sorry, take the land back.’ ”
Elmaliach told me I was not allowed to take pictures, but then reconsidered. “Let’s do a deal,” he said. “If you write in your media that the Jews always take a place and they make it better, I give you permission to take a picture.” He picked up a couple of discarded bottles. “See, this is Arabs,” he said.
The spring, Elmaliach said, belonged to them, not to Qaryut. I showed him a map from the Civil Administration, Israel’s governing body in the West Bank, showing that the spring was well outside settlement boundaries. Eventually, he said, “I will give you a real answer. If you are coming to a new land, and you are now the owner of that land, then you put in that land the rules that you want.”
In February, 2023, Netanyahu appointed Smotrich, the finance minister and the head of the Religious Zionist Party, to a governmental position that granted him sweeping powers over West Bank settlements. In 2005, Smotrich had been arrested as part of a small group in possession of seven hundred litres of fuel. The former deputy head of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security agency, accused him of plotting to blow up cars on a highway to protest Israel’s withdrawal from settlements in Gaza. (Smotrich denied the allegation and wasn’t charged with a crime.) Now Smotrich had the authority to legalize unauthorized outposts, to prevent enforcement against illegal Jewish construction, to thwart Palestinian development projects, and to allocate land to settlers.
Around the time of Smotrich’s appointment, a Palestinian gunman shot and killed two settlers. Smotrich said that the Army should “strike the cities of terror and its instigators without mercy, with tanks and helicopters.” Israel, he added, should act “in a way that conveys that the master of the house has gone crazy.” While the Army stood by, hundreds of settlers rampaged through Hawara, a village south of Nablus, killing one person and injuring about a hundred, and burning some thirty homes and a hundred cars. It was the worst outbreak of settler violence in decades. (The I.D.F. did not respond to a request for comment.)
Smotrich, who lives in a settlement, has become one of the most prominent settler ideologists. In 2017, he published his “Decisive Plan” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first step, he wrote, was to make the “ambition for a Jewish State from the river to the sea . . . an accomplished fact” by “establishing new cities and settlements deep inside the territory and bringing hundreds of thousands of additional settlers to live there.” Once “victory by settlement” was accomplished, Smotrich continued, Palestinians would have two options: stay in Israel, without the right to vote in national elections, or emigrate. “Zionism,” he wrote, “was built based on population exchange e.g. the mass Aliyah of Jews from Arab countries and Europe to the Land of Israel, willingly or not, and the exit of masses of Arabs who lived here, willingly or not, to the surrounding Arab areas. This historic pattern seems to require culmination.”
Plans for expulsion go back to 1937, when Britain proposed the partition of Palestine into two states and the transfer of about two hundred thousand Arabs out of territory slated for the Jewish state. Zionist pioneers attempted to expand their territory by building settlements outside the proposed boundary. David Ben-Gurion, the future Prime Minister of Israel, wrote, in a letter to his sixteen-year-old son about settling the Negev Desert, “We must expel the Arabs and take their place.” In the end, Ben-Gurion agreed to a U.N. partition plan that did not call for the expulsion of Arabs from Gaza and the West Bank, but he immediately began taking tactical steps toward expanding the territory. He and other leaders devised a military strategy called Plan Dalet, which aimed to “gain control of the areas of the Hebrew state” and “the areas of Jewish settlement . . . located outside the borders” through “operations against enemy population centers,” “control of frontline enemy positions,” and the “destruction of villages.” Should resistance be met, “the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.” The Haganah (the predecessor to the I.D.F.), destroyed Palestinian villages and carried out massacres. Three hundred thousand Arabs were expelled or fled before the British withdrew, in May, 1948. Then Israel declared independence, Egypt and Syria invaded the territory, and another four hundred thousand Arabs were driven out. By 1949, about eighty per cent of the Arab population had been removed from the territory claimed by Israel, now larger than what the U.N. partition plan—which was never implemented—had outlined, and hundreds of villages had been erased. Palestinians remember this as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”
Smotrich’s desire to claim all of Palestine for Israel was held by many people in 1948, but his belief that such colonization is a divine commandment was marginal. Zionism was largely a secular movement, and most Orthodox Jews considered it a rebellion against God: if he had exiled the Israelites, then only he could determine when the punishment should end. Smotrich, like a third of West Bank settlers today, follows the teachings of a rabbi named Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who preached that Jews should play an active role in bringing about God’s forgiveness by gaining possession of the entirety of the Biblical Land of Israel. By establishing a state, secular Jews—“good sinners,” he called them—had unwittingly created a stepping stone to the “foundation of the throne of God in the world.” When Israel occupied the West Bank, in 1967, Kook’s devotees believed that it was a miracle.
Government officials disagreed about what to do with the West Bank. Maximalists, like Yigal Allon, a former special-forces commander, had been stopped short of taking the territory before borders were established, in 1949, and wanted to finish the job; other officials worried that incorporating nine hundred thousand Palestinians into Israel would upend the country’s Jewish majority. Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister at the time, said, “We got a lovely dowry. The trouble is that the dowry comes with the wife.” Allon proposed a compromise: annex the least populated regions—a third of the territory—and give the rest back to Jordan. He proposed establishing settlements until the annexation was complete.
The difficulty was finding people to live in them: the younger generation of secular Israelis didn’t have the nostalgia for pioneering that older Zionists did. But Kook’s followers were more eager. As the government deliberated, Kookists announced that they were settling in Hebron. Allon, a one-time socialist, made common cause with the right-wing settlers, immediately guaranteeing them jobs and trying to procure weapons for them. Then he persuaded the Cabinet to grant permission for a settlement.
The Kookists learned an important lesson: if they took direct action and found sympathetic officials, the state would follow. They formed a movement, Gush Emunim, which tried to establish settlements on the densely populated mountain ridge south of Nablus, where Qaryut is situated. Yet the government, which, in accordance with Allon’s plan, had begun building settlements in less populated areas, repeatedly evicted them.
In 1977, the Labor Party, which had held power since the founding of the state, was defeated by the Likud Party. Like Gush Emunim, Likud advocated for complete Israeli sovereignty “between the Sea and the Jordan.” The government started building settlements throughout the West Bank, and put them under the management of Gush Emunim, which it funded. The state encouraged Israelis to move in, offering housing subsidies, lower income tax, and state grants for businesses. By the early nineties, there were some hundred thousand Israelis living in a hundred and twenty settlements in the West Bank.
On October 28, 2023, Bilal Saleh woke early to prepare for the olive harvest in the village of al-Sawiya. He knew it was risky. A couple of days earlier, farmers had returned from their olive groves in the nearby village of Deir Istiya to find flyers on their cars that read, “You wanted war, now wait for the great Nakba. . . . This is your last chance to escape to Jordan in an orderly fashion before we forcibly expel you from our holy lands, which were given to us by God.” Since October 7th, messages in settler chat groups had portrayed olive pickers as undercover Hamas operatives and as Nazis. Elmaliach, the mayor of Eli, which is a mile and a half from al-Sawiya, sent around a sign-up sheet calling for the “full mobilization” of his residents “to stand up to the Arabs who try to harvest around our settlements.”
Saleh, who was forty, kept his opinions to himself and avoided protests. But the land had been in his family for generations. He’d recently left his job at a hotel in Tel Aviv and had been selling herbs on the streets of Ramallah. Without the olive harvest, he’d be stretched thin. He and his friends and relatives chose a Saturday to pick olives, because it was the Jewish Sabbath, a day when the Orthodox settlers were likely to be in synagogue or resting.
Saleh loaded up his family’s donkey and walked with his wife and kids through their village, across from the road where Israelis-only buses took settlers to their jobs, and down to their plot of trees. The settlement of Rehelim looked down on them from less than half a mile away. They put a tarp down under a tree and started picking.
At around 10:30 a.m., Saleh’s friend Sami Kafineh was driving back to al-Sawiya from Nablus. Just before he reached the village, he noticed four men, dressed in white, walking from Rehelim toward the olive grove. He pulled over and shouted that settlers were approaching.
People who were in the grove told me that, as soon as Bilal Saleh realized that the settlers were coming, he hurried his wife and children to safety, leaving their belongings behind. As they walked to the road, Saleh, realizing he’d left his phone behind, turned back. He returned to the plot, picked up his phone, and was shot.
Kafineh was still on the road above. As soon as he heard the rifle crack, he started filming. The four settlers were in a clearing; one had an M16 and was walking along the edge of the terraced grove of olive trees. The settler fired again, and walked away. A video shows Saleh lying in the dirt, his chest and mouth bloody.
Then settlers rewrote the story. In a statement, Yossi Dagan, the head of the settlers’ regional council whose area of authority includes Rehelim, said that a combat soldier on leave had been “attacked by tens of Hamasniks.” The harvest around Israeli settlements had to be stopped, he said, because it was “being used as a platform for terrorism.” Settlers later shared an image from Saleh’s funeral, in which his brother, Hisham, is waving a Hamas flag. Shortly afterward, Israeli police arrested Hisham. Polls show that support for Hamas in the West Bank, where dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority is widespread, has risen from twelve per cent to forty-four per cent in recent months. Seventy-two per cent of Palestinians polled also said that they thought the October 7th attack was “correct.” (Ninety-four per cent of Israelis think that the I.D.F. is using either an appropriate or an insufficient amount of force in Gaza.)
“We don’t have any hope,” Bilal’s cousin Hazem Saleh told me. He pointed toward some new houses in the village. Their owners didn’t intend for them “to be demolished or bombed,” he said. “They are not calling for fighting, or killing, or war. But when they are afraid to go out, when they don’t have the minimum standard of living, when they are pressured, their reaction will be the same as the action.”
Hisham Saleh spent three months in jail, without charges, for waving the Hamas flag. The settler who shot Bilal was arrested, and released a few days later. “We are happy that the court decided from the beginning that that was self-defense,” his lawyer, Nati Rom, told me. The judge had cited the events of October 7th, writing, “The vigilance to which we are commanded by the blood of our brothers and sisters who fell for the sanctity of the land and the defense of the homeland is a real obligation.”
Rom said that, to his knowledge, no other settlers had faced charges since October 7th. Settler violence was “fake news,” he said.
Saleh’s shooter was back in the Army, so I visited one of his neighbors, a forty-six-year-old woman named Reuma Harari. At the gate of Rehelim, soldiers took my passport, then security escorted me to Harari’s house. Her back yard was a suburban idyll: a swing set on an AstroTurf lawn, an oak tree, a small dog; Tel Aviv was only forty minutes away, if the traffic was light. She offered me a seat under an olive tree. “Ironic,” she said, chuckling.
Harari was eager to tell me about the origin of her settlement. “It’s not a victim story,” she said. “It’s just the opposite.” In 1991, settlers were on a bus to Tel Aviv to protest peace talks taking place in Madrid. Palestinians attacked the bus, killing the driver and a settler from Shilo named Rachel Drouk. After Drouk’s funeral, twenty-five women set up a mourning tent on the spot of the killing. After three weeks, they issued their Feminist Manifesto. “We remain at this site demanding to found a settlement, for this is the only Zionist response to this criminal murder,” it read. Under Army protection, the settlers seized land belonging to Saleh’s village, and installed mobile homes on it.
Two years later, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, agreed on the first stage of the Oslo Accords. Israel and the P.L.O. recognized each other, and the Palestinians gained limited autonomy in Gaza and some of the West Bank, under the administration of the newly created Palestinian Authority. But major issues—the future of Jerusalem, the ability of Palestinian refugees to return, the settlements, and the border—were left for a final agreement to be made in five years’ time. That agreement never came to pass, and the hope for a two-state solution has steadily vanished.
Under international pressure, the government mostly stopped building new settlements, but in 1998, ahead of the final status talks for Oslo, Ariel Sharon, then the foreign minister, urged settlers to occupy territory themselves. On the radio, he said they should “run, grab more hills, expand the territory. Everything that’s grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.” In the next nine years, roughly a hundred illegal outposts were created.
In 2001, during the second intifada, a popular Palestinian uprising against the occupation, Harari and her family decided to move from Jerusalem to Rehelim. She had asked herself, “What can I do for this country?” She knew that, wherever settlers go, “the Army will come,” she said. “Zionism for me is dreaming and doing.” Four years later, a government report revealed that the World Zionist Organization and a number of ministries had been secretly diverting millions of dollars to settler outposts with the active collusion of the military and the police. “It seems that the lawbreaking has become institutionalized,” the report said. The government declared that such outposts would be evacuated, but in the twenty-tens Netanyahu retroactively legalized many of them, including Rehelim.
Harari said that Rehelim’s stance toward its Palestinian neighbors had always been “If you live peace and quiet, we will live peace and quiet.”
When I mentioned the various attacks perpetrated by inhabitants of her settlement through the years, Harari responded with examples of settlers killed in other parts of the West Bank, or by discussing October 7th. “My neighbors, if they have the ability, will come and butcher me in my bed,” she said. She likened the Hamas attacks to Auschwitz, but she also said that they brought her a “shred of joy,” because “now we earned back our unity. Now it’s like ’48 again.”
Harari could understand why Palestinians might resent settlers. “Israel is an occupied territory from the river to the sea,” she said. If she were Palestinian, she went on, she “would probably think we are not supposed to be here and we should go.” She sometimes asked herself, “Is it worthwhile? Are the kids suffering? Is it normal?” Then she recovered. “We are not going anywhere,” she said. “ ‘Homeland’ is not a figure of speech.”
Ten miles east of Rehelim, the olive groves and crowded settlements and Palestinian villages give way to the caramel-colored expanse of the Jordan Valley. The valley stretches six miles wide, from the Jordan River to the hills of the central highlands, and fifty miles long, from the Dead Sea to the Israeli city of Beit She’an. Israel has eyed the region for annexation since Allon’s plan of 1967. Sparsely populated, it makes up about a quarter of the West Bank’s landmass. Since 2012, Israel has been building what Dror Etkes, a longtime authority on settlements, called its “biggest and most expensive infrastructure project” in the West Bank, piping water from Jerusalem to settlers’ date plantations throughout the valley. “They are building a project that costs a fortune,” Etkes said. “From their point of view, they are going to be here forever.” Any Jewish family that moves to the Jordan Valley is granted twenty acres of agricultural land.
The residents of the valley’s more than twenty settlements are a mix of Orthodox Jews and the secular descendants of early Labor Party settlers. In the “eco settlement” of Rotem, businesses offer acupuncture, natural cosmetics, and “holistic therapy.” People live in yurts, buildings made from hemp, and converted vehicles. One day, I sat under a thatched roof at a café where barefoot waitresses served vegan meals. Yet, as in other parts of the West Bank, violence is woven into the fabric of life. A family posed for a photograph looking over the valley, the man raising an M16 in the air. A small Palestinian sheepherding community sat on the valley floor. Rotem settlers had recently been showing up in the night, demanding that the Palestinians evacuate.
Many of the sixty-five thousand Palestinians in the Jordan Valley are the descendants of Bedouins who fled what is now Israel in 1948. Israel has long restricted their access to water and demolished their buildings. In the five months before October 7th, hundreds of Palestinians, the residents of three communities, left. Their exodus was prompted by a relatively new type of settler—the Orthodox Jewish shepherd.
In the northern part of the valley, I visited Moshe and Moriah Sharvit, whose sheep farm doubled as a bed-and-breakfast, with offerings including air-conditioned Bedouin-style tents and talks about “Zionism and the importance of settling on farms and the seizure of land.”
Moriah, who is twenty-eight, wore a daisy-print dress and a dark-green head scarf, and had a blond infant strapped to her back. Mountains rose in the west, and on the eastern horizon, beyond Palestinian villages, the Jordan Highlands were outlined faintly. All this, she believed, was given to her by God.
Moriah was born in New Jersey and grew up in West Bank settlements. After she and Moshe married, at nineteen, they wanted a different life. The settlements, with their fences, cameras, and security, were like “ghettos,” Moriah said. She invited me into their mobile home. A couple of M16s sat on a woodstove. Moshe, an olive-skinned man with a short black beard, ate in the kitchen. I recognized him. Israeli anti-occupation activists had documented him dispersing Palestinians’ sheep with his A.T.V., sending his dogs after them, and following with a drone.
Moshe had had a vineyard and an olive grove, Moriah told me, but that didn’t allow for the control of much land, so he turned to sheepherding. “When you have sheep, you go here, you go there, wherever there is food to graze,” she said. “You can protect more land.”
Moriah and Moshe set up the outpost in 2020. “It’s not like we bought the land from someone,” she said. “It doesn’t belong to us.” Yet she described their mission as preventing land theft. She pointed through a window toward some Palestinian farmhouses a half mile away. “All those houses that you see over there are Arabs who came from A land to C land and stole the land,” she said. “If we weren’t here right now, they would be here.”
The Oslo Accords sorted the West Bank into three areas, A, B, and C. Palestinian cities were designated Area A and put under the full control of the Palestinian Authority. The main villages—Area B—were left under Palestinian civilian administration, with Israel in charge of security. Together, Areas A and B make up forty per cent of the West Bank, but they are broken into a hundred and sixty-five islands. The sea they float in—Area C—remains under full Israeli control and includes not only settlements but also most of the West Bank’s agricultural land. The accords said that Area C, now home to half a million settlers and some three hundred thousand Palestinians, was to be “gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction,” but Israel has increasingly treated it as its own.
Israel requires Palestinians to obtain permits for any new construction in Area C, but it has rejected ninety-eight per cent of applications. Unpermitted structures are regularly demolished by the military—yet settlers believe that the government doesn’t do enough. Regavim, an organization co-founded by Bezalel Smotrich, takes aerial photographs of the West Bank twice a year in order to identify unpermitted structures, and it sues the government if it doesn’t demolish them. Naomi Kahn, Regavim’s international director, told me, “Area C should be annexed.” A poll from 2020 showed that half of Israelis supported this idea.
The sheepherding strategy started to take hold around 2018, pioneered by a settler organization called Amana. At a 2021 conference titled “The Battle for State Lands,” Amana’s secretary-general, Ze’ev Hever, a convicted member of the Jewish Underground terrorist organization, explained that traditional settlements had been an inefficient way to seize land. “It took us more than fifty years to get a hundred square kilometres,” he said. Sheep farms, on the other hand, control “more than double the area of built-up settlements.”
Avi Naim, the former director general of the Ministry of Settlement Affairs, said that herding outposts were helping “prevent Palestinian invasions” of Area C: “You take people who believe in that goal as a pioneering mission, and let them spearhead the work to keep control of land reserves.” By Dror Etkes’s count, there are now about ninety herding outposts in the West Bank. He estimated that together they control some hundred and thirty-five square miles, about ten per cent of Area C.
All such outposts are considered illegal under Israeli law, but Moriah said that she and Moshe had received a great deal of assistance from the state. They had “a gazillion meetings,” she said, with the Civil Administration, the Army, the Jordan Valley regional council, and other government bodies. Amana connected them to running water.
“Moriah!” Moshe shouted from the kitchen. He told her to be careful what she said.
Before the 2019 elections, Netanyahu announced a plan to annex twenty-two per cent of the West Bank, most of it in Area C, including the majority of the Jordan Valley. The Sharvits established their outpost inside the area slated for annexation, which has not yet occurred.
“I believe that everything is ours—but there is the law,” Moriah said. “We go by the law and what we’re allowed and what we’re not allowed.” Buildings on their outpost had been under demolition orders for two years, but Moriah said that no one had pressured them to leave: “Israel understands—either we’re here or the land’s gonna be taken away.”
On the living-room wall, a monitor displayed live footage from cameras that surveilled the surrounding area. Their farm acted as “eyes” for the Army, Moriah told me. “We could report on illegal buildings, on illegal hunting. . . . We work together.” On the screen, the angle of one of the cameras changed; Moriah said that it, like cameras at other outposts in the valley, was controlled by a soldier at a command center.
After October 7th, an Army unit stayed at their outpost for a month. Moriah said the Army told them that each herding outpost needed at least three long rifles, so it gave her an M16. “They are giving them out like crazy,” she said. The Army has distributed around seven thousand weapons to settlers since October 7th, on top of the ten thousand that the Ministry of National Security ordered be handed out to Jews across Israel and the West Bank. Like some fifty-five hundred other settlers, Moshe and his brother David were drafted into the Army’s “regional defense” battalions, the ranks of which have increased fivefold since the war began.
Moriah said that their issue wasn’t just with Hamas but with Palestinians in general. They weren’t “regular people,” she said. Violence was in “their DNA.” The October 7th attacks happened because Israelis “were too nice,” she said. “I think we need to do what we need to do to make this stop. I think we need to give an alternative to the Arabs who live here. . . . There’s Jordan, there’s Egypt, there’s Syria.”
Moriah drove me down a dirt road to the land below the outpost, where Palestinians grew wheat and potatoes. She pointed to some houses. “This over here—all on C land,” she said. (According to Civil Administration maps, most of the houses were in Area B.) Shortly after October 7th, she said, a curious thing had happened: “We saw everyone just leaving.” She continued driving down the dirt road. “They left,” she said. “They all left.”
Five days later, I visited David Elhayani, the governor of the Jordan Valley regional council. There are six such elected councils in the West Bank that provide services to settlers. Despite being outside Israel, they fall under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior.
Elhayani thought that Netanyahu had not been decisive enough in annexing territory. “We don’t have leadership anymore in this country,” Elhayani told me. If annexation went for a vote, he said, he was confident that two-thirds of the Knesset would approve it.
In the meantime, he was grateful that settler shepherds like Moshe Sharvit were “taking care of the area.” When I asked why the demolition orders on the Sharvits’ property hadn’t been carried out, he replied, “It’s not my job.”
Elhayani said that, if he could claim territory for Israel, he would do it, “even if it’s not legal.” He added, “The fight of 1948 is the same fight [today] in all of Judea and Samaria”—the fight over land. “You know what homa u’migdal is?” he asked.
It means “wall and tower.” During British rule, the government restricted the establishment of Jewish settlements, but during the 1936-39 Arab revolt more than fifty of them were founded, in order to claim territory for a future state. The British let them stand, given an Ottoman law that said authorities could not demolish a structure once a roof had been constructed. The Zionists “came at night, made a wall, a tower, and said, ‘We are here,’ ” Elhayani said. The herding outposts, he noted, “are the same.”
I told Elhayani that I had gone with some Palestinians to their now empty houses, near the Sharvits’ outpost. An elderly man told me that, a few days after October 7th, Moshe had beaten him, ransacked his home, and told him to leave. Others said he’d threatened to kill them. (Moriah Sharvit said, “Nobody on this farm has committed any offense.”) Twelve families had evacuated.
“They are lying,” Elhayani said.
“I can take you right now,” I said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’ll show you.”
“I don’t want you to show me.”
The next day, the photographer Tanya Habjouqa and I went to Wadi al-Seeq, a recently depopulated community in the hills above the Jordan Valley. The sun slowly sank, lighting up the skeletons of shacks clustered in the shallow valley. Forty-odd families had lived here since the nineties, but the last of them had fled a month before. Inside a school, overturned desks lay on the floor; lessons remained on the whiteboards.
As we drove down a gravel road, a pickup truck blocked our path. A suntanned man with a long ginger-brown beard and sidelocks stepped out. It was Neria Ben-Pazi, a settler shepherd who presided over a handful of outposts and had organized the expulsion of the Palestinian families. I had tried multiple times to interview Ben-Pazi, but he never responded. When settler shepherds appear, their friends are often close behind, so I turned the car around and we left.
Ben-Pazi grew up in Kohav HaShahar, six miles north of Wadi al-Seeq. By 2015, he had founded a rugged outpost called Baladim nearby. Shin Bet considered it a center of terrorism; some of its residents were dedicated to bringing down the state of Israel and replacing it with the Kingdom of Judea. At least two of them have been convicted of arson-related hate crimes, including the firebombing of a Palestinian home, in 2015, which killed an eighteen-month-old baby and his parents. After that attack, Baladim was evacuated by the Army. Ben-Pazi was arrested for establishing the outpost in a military zone, but he was soon released. Then the encampment was reëstablished.
In 2019, after Netanyahu announced his plan to annex part of the West Bank, Ben-Pazi’s relationship with the government changed. Within weeks, he established a new herding outpost outside Rimonim, a secular settlement that likely fell within the area targeted for annexation. A Civil Administration document shows that Ben-Pazi was allocated a hundred-and-thirty-five-acre plot. He was also given funds by the Ministry of Agriculture to pay for people to guard the outpost. Before long, Ben-Pazi and his men had taken over two square miles of Palestinian land. According to a settler publication, senior I.D.F. officers and political figures, including Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, regularly visited his farm.
One of the managers of Rimonim, a tattooed, motorcycle-riding secular man named Oz Shraibom, told me, “Those fanatic religious people are crazy. They come to fight.” Since October 7th, “there are people who think this is the time to make everything happen.” But, he added, “they are keeping the Arabs away. It’s really convenient for me.”
Ben-Pazi had established his Wadi al-Seeq outpost in February, 2023, just after Netanyahu gave Smotrich jurisdiction over the Civil Administration and the West Bank settlers. Almost immediately, young settlers started to graze their livestock on Palestinian fields. Before long, nearly all of Wadi al-Seeq’s wells were in the hands of the settlers, so the Palestinians had to truck in water. Unable to access their farmland safely, they stopped planting. They could no longer graze their animals in most of the surrounding hills, so they had to buy feed. A few families left.
A man I’ll call Suheil, whose home was just a few hundred yards from the outpost, told me that settlers had started to come by his house at night. One appeared in his doorway early one morning, and stared at him and his family as they slept. In August, settlers near the village tried to steal the sheep of two young men. Men from the village ran out to defend them, and a fight ensued. Dozens of police officers and soldiers arrived, confiscating three cars and arresting three Palestinians.
That day, a video circulated on social media showing Suheil pleading with Ben-Pazi. A settler WhatsApp channel reposted the video, calling it the “last gasp” of the Palestinian community and referring cryptically to “the Deir Yassin effect.” (Deir Yassin was the site of the most notorious massacre of Palestinians in 1948; for many people, it represents the use of violence to instigate a broader exodus.) Arabs in Wadi al-Seeq, the WhatsApp channel said, were being “forced to leave their encampments because they cannot hold out against the Jews.”
The families remaining in Wadi al-Seeq asked Israeli activists to stay in the village, hoping that their presence might deter the settlers. The Palestinian Authority’s Wall and Settlements Resistance Commission organized Palestinian volunteers to stay as well. In charge was Mohammed Matar, better known as Abu Hassan, a forty-six-year-old activist turned official with a long history of civil disobedience against the occupation forces.
After October 7th, settlers started to drive through Wadi al-Seeq more often, now dressed in uniform and carrying assault rifles. They set up impromptu checkpoints at the entrance to the village, beat people, stole their phones, and visited families in their houses at night.
Most of the villagers decided that they couldn’t stay. On October 12th, they started piling onto trucks mattresses, sheep troughs, and the tin roofs of their homes. That morning, six pickup trucks of settlers arrived. Abu Hassan, his colleague Mohammed Khaled, five Israeli activists, and a number of villagers stayed behind; they called the Army to ask for help. The settlers tied up Abu Hassan and Khaled and started beating them. At one point, the two men recalled, a Civil Administration officer arrived. After talking to the settlers, he started to leave.
“Where are you going?” Abu Hassan asked.
“These men are Army,” the officer said, pointing to the men who had been beating them.
Three Israeli activists were hiding with a Palestinian family in a partially dismantled shack. They saw Ben-Pazi talking urgently on his phone; then an Army van arrived. Soldiers from the Desert Frontier unit emerged, largely youths recruited from shepherd outposts.
After the activists emerged, a soldier punched one of them in the face; they were zip-tied, and their phones and cameras were taken away. “Why aren’t you in Gaza!” another soldier shouted. “You are under arrest for helping the enemy during war.” The soldiers left them in another shack, guarded by settlers, and drove over to where Abu Hassan and Mohammed Khaled were being held.
While Abu Hassan was lying face down, one of the settlers pulled him up by the hair. “Do you remember me?” he asked. “I’m the shepherd from Biddya, near Salfit. A couple of months ago, you staged a protest there.”
“That wasn’t me,” Abu Hassan said.
He later identified the man as Eden Levi, who was establishing a chain of herding outposts with the aim, he told a settler publication last summer, of “creating an important territorial continuity in the entire region of Western Samaria.” Last February, Arabic media published a photograph of Levi, reporting that residents near his outposts said that he had shot and killed a twenty-seven-year-old Palestinian. (Levi could not be reached for comment.) According to Haaretz, the Israeli police had interviewed no witnesses.
Abu Hassan and Khaled said they were tortured for hours—beaten with poles, burned with cigarettes, sexually assaulted, urinated on, forced to eat sheep dung. Someone took a picture of them, stripped to their underwear, which was posted on Facebook. “Terrorists tried to infiltrate the Ben-Pazi farm near Kochav Hashachar,” the post read. “Our forces seized the terrorists.” They spent two days in the hospital.
Shortly after Wadi al-Seeq was depopulated, a new gravel road to Ben-Pazi’s outpost was laid down. The Israeli police have not interviewed any of the Palestinians or Israeli activists who were there. Eden Levi has since led another raid near his outpost, in which settlers burned cars and shot Palestinians, killing one.
On December 5th, the U.S. State Department announced that it was imposing visa restrictions on “extremist settlers” who have committed acts of violence or have restricted civilians’ access to basic necessities. The I.D.F. issued a restraining order barring Ben-Pazi from the West Bank, with the exception of the Ariel settlement, for three months. In an appeal, his lawyer, Nati Rom, wrote that Ben-Pazi’s “extensive ties with the security forces are the best evidence that there is no place for the order to be issued.”
In apparent defiance of the order, Ben-Pazi hosted senior rabbis and hundreds of worshippers at his Wadi al-Seeq outpost for Hanukkah. Amichai Eliyahu, the minister of heritage, who a month earlier had said that the government should consider dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, spent the night at the outpost. (He later claimed that the comment was “metaphorical.”) Ben-Pazi, Eliyahu tweeted, was “the first line of defense against the enemy.”
On February 1st, President Biden ordered financial sanctions against four Israeli settlers. Abu Hassan said that the political pressure was important, but that sanctions should “include the political and financial institutions that support [the settlers], as well as the police chiefs and Army officers that conspire with them.”
In late December, Moshe Feiglin, the chairman of the far-right Zehut party, visited Ben-Pazi’s farm. “So you are the violent monster that managed to drive away the multitude of Arabs?” he asked. Feiglin looked around, taking in the landscape. “You are sitting here on an area that is three times the municipal area of Tel Aviv.”
“In the end, it’s the connection to the earth,” Ben-Pazi said. “If we want the land, we will get it.” ♦
The past days have been horrific for the residents of Majaz, one of the villages in Masafer Yatta, and inside the area claimed by Israel as firing zone 918.
Israeli soldiers, and settlers dressed as soldiers, invaded the village on the night of February 14.
The soldiers landed a helicopter and entered the village. Later after midnight armed Israeli settlers in uniform also arrived.
They destroyed homes, terrorized the people, slaughtered sheep and goats, destroyed kitchens, food, animal feed and sleeping areas and broke up household furniture.
They also entered and desecrated the mosque. Residents reported that that Israeli soldiers and settlers sang and danced inside the mosque as they destroyed the furniture and carpets. Residents found the Qur’an torn and scattered on the ground after the soldiers left.
Under the cover of the relentless bombardment and atrocity crimes in Gaza, Israeli forces have simultaneously unleashed a new, brutal wave of unlawful violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank — including unlawful killings, unnecessary lethal force against protesters, and the denial of medical assistance to injured people in the West Bank.1
In our new report, Amnesty researchers investigated four cases that resulted in the unlawful killing of 20 Palestinians, including seven children:
In one case, two eyewitnesses told Amnesty that Israeli forces opened fire without warning on a crowd of at least 80 unarmed Palestinians peacefully demonstrating in solidarity with Gaza. A few minutes later, Israeli forces also opened fire in the direction of two journalists even though both were wearing vests clearly marked as Press.
On multiple occasions, Israeli forces hindered or prevented those seriously injured in demonstrations and raids from receiving critical medical assistance. In a recent incident, soldiers carried out a raid masquerading as medical staff. They also shot at people trying to help, including medics tending to the wounded.
Over the past four months, deadly raids have increased in the West Bank, with an unrelenting use of unlawful force that has spread fear in communities. Among those killed during the raid was 15-year-old Taha Mahamid, whom Israeli forces shot dead in front of his house as he came out to check whether Israeli forces had left the area. Evidence verified by Amnesty showed that Taha was unarmed and posed no threat. An eyewitness shared that Israeli forces then shot Taha’s father in the back when he tried to carry his son to safety.
Massacring, targeting, and deliberately killing civilians are war crimes. The research in this investigative report further cements the fact that Israeli forces are committing widespread human rights violations and doing so with impunity.
The international community has a responsibility to take action to prevent war crimes — and Amnesty is doing everything we can to demand action that will save lives and end the suffering.
Thank you for showing up for people in need. Thank you for calling for a ceasefire. We’ll continue to keep you updated on our latest findings and share opportunities for you to take action.
In solidarity,
Elizabeth Rghebi
Advocacy Director, Middle East North Africa
Amnesty International USA
P.S. With increasing attacks and violations across the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Amnesty’s Crisis Evidence Lab is a powerful force for making sure that crimes do not go unchecked.
I stopped posting and updating for a while. I didn’t do this because the situation changed or ended, I stopped because I was desperately tired of giving constant bad news. I wish I could tell you good things.
Thanks for reading Humans of Masafer Yatta! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
But the truth is that things are still so bad here in Masafer Yatta and Umm Al-Khair. The attacks continue, the occupation settlers and soldiers still control everything about our lives — they close the entrance to our village almost every day. They frequently raid the village, confiscating everything they can, and continue to make arrests across Masafer Yatta.
We are hopeful when we hear that there will be an end to this war, but we are still waiting and waiting and waiting. We are not well and we are still suffering. And the worst thing is, we are starting to get used to this situation.
The living and economic situation has become very, very bad. All sources of income have stopped. Farmers cannot work in their fields, shepherds cannot graze their sheep, and there are no salaries for school teachers. Many families are suffering from not being able to access enough food and medicine.
So please, don’t forget us. Always remember us, keep protesting and raising your voices for us, don’t let us feel alone. It’s the worst feeling ever. Be with us, with justice, and with humanity.
Thanks for reading Humans of Masafer Yatta! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Palestinians and Israelis who’ve experienced the settlers’ attacks first-hand see the move as a positive but wholly insufficient step toward accountability.
In partnership with After years of toothless verbal condemnation of Israeli settler violence by successive U.S. governments, the Biden administration took the historic step last week of imposing sanctions against four settlers involved in recent attacks in the occupied West Bank. The executive order includes freezing the settlers’ assets in the United States and banning their entry into the country. Israeli banks have also frozen the accounts of two of the settlers on the list in compliance with the U.S. sanctions.
These attacks are succeeding in their state-sanctioned goal of cleansing vast regions of the West Bank of their Palestinian inhabitants to enable the further expansion of Jewish settlements. And the situation has deteriorated even further under the shadow of war, with settlers forcibly displacing at least 16 entire Palestinian villages since October 7.
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To try to assess the significance of Biden’s decision, +972 Magazine and Local Call spoke with Palestinians and Israelis who have been directly impacted by the violence of the targeted settlers — David Chai Chasdai, Shalom Zicherman, Einan Tanjil, and Yinon Levi — and their comrades in arms. Most welcomed the executive order but wondered whether it would have any effect on the ground; whether it would deter other settlers; whether sanctions would be extended to other settlers involved in the violence; and whether such sanctions would ultimately reach the leadership of the settlement movement, including those sitting in government.
‘These are organized groups that come to kill’
David Chai Chasdai was arrested for leading one of the worst instances of settler violence in recent memory: the pogrom in the Palestinian town of Huwara in February 2023, during which hundreds of settlers set fire to dozens of homes and hundreds of vehicles, wounding over 100 residents in the process. Sameh Aqtash, from the nearby village of Za’atara, was shot and killed during the attack.
Chasdai, who lives in the settlement of Beit El, is a familiar figure in the world of the “hilltop youth” — the generic term given to young Israeli settlers who routinely descend from illegal West Bank outposts to attack Palestinians. In 2014, then a teenager, he was described in the settler news outlet Makor Rishon as “the number one target of the Nationalist Crimes Division in the Judea and Samaria [police] district and one of the names that causes the greatest headaches for members of the Jewish Unit of the Shin Bet.”
In 2015, Chasdai was convicted of intent to unlawfully use hazardous materials after bottles filled with gasoline and other flammable substances were found in his car. Two years later, he was convicted of aggravated assault for attacking a Palestinian taxi driver with tear gas. In 2021, he was convicted of threatening a police officer.
Chasdai was one of only 18 settlers arrested after the Huwara pogrom (only one of whom was charged). He was soon released but then re-arrested and placed into three months of administrative detention — a tool Israel uses almost exclusively against Palestinians to detain whomever it wants without charge or trial. 50 Knesset members signed a call for his release.
“It’s a symbolic measure,” a resident of Huwara from the Awwad family, who asked that his first name not be published for fear of settler reprisal, told +972. “America says, ‘We also watch what’s going on in the [occupied] territories. It helps a little that the Israeli government knows that the Palestinians have good relations with the U.S. and are giving them material about what the settlers are doing.”
Awwad believes that although the sanctions are a good start, they are not nearly enough to deter settler violence. “It’s not just Huwara — it’s everywhere in the West Bank,” he said. “Settlers walking around in military uniforms and with weapons. These are not people who just shoot and run. These are organized groups that come to kill, and America should declare them terrorist organizations. They are part of the right [wing], and the right wing is responsible for them: it gives them orders, gives them lawyers and money, and supports their criminal behavior.”
Awwad also questions the effectiveness of this initial package of sanctions, as these settlers likely do not regularly — if ever — travel to the United States, and they almost certainly do not have American bank accounts. “We need the sanctions to be here,” he says. “The ones who need to act against the settlers are the government and the law enforcement authorities in Israel. Only if this happens will they begin to be afraid.
“The problem is that the government here doesn’t want to act against them,” Awwad continued. “The settlers are part of the government, so the government doesn’t want to deal with them because they’re afraid that the coalition will fall.”
Chasdai himself responded to the freezing of his bank accounts, telling Israel’s public broadcaster Kan that it was a “national disgrace,” all the more so because it took place under a right-wing government. “Throughout the generations we have seen many oppressors who have harmed the people of Israel,” Chasdai said. “We will also get through the persecution of Biden and his collaborators.”
‘It’s convenient to blame the small fish’
Another settler on Biden’s list is Shalom Zicherman, a resident of the Mitzpe Yair outpost. In June 2022, he threw stones through the window of a car belonging to left-wing Israeli activists. I was present at the scene and documented the attack, after which Zicherman was able to return to the outpost, despite the fact that the army’s Judea Area Brigade Commander Col. Yehuda Rosilio saw the attack and did nothing to stop or detain him. The IDF Spokesperson initially described the incident as “friction between settlers and protesters,” but Zicherman was later indicted, and his trial is ongoing.
The U.S. State Department notes that “according to video evidence, [Zicherman] assaulted Israeli activists and their vehicles in the West Bank, blocking them on the street, and attempted to break the windows of passing vehicles with activists inside. Zicherman cornered at least two of the activists and injured both.”
According to the order, Zicherman and another settler “directly or indirectly engaged or attempted to engage in planning, ordering, otherwise directing, or participating in efforts to place civilians in reasonable fear of violence with the purpose or effect of necessitating a change of residence to avoid such violence, affecting the West Bank.”
Yasmin Eran Vardi, a left-wing activist who spends most of her time in the West Bank doing “protect presence” solidarity work — whereby Israeli and international activists put their bodies in between Palestinians on the one hand and settlers and soldiers on the other — was wounded in the attack. “I’m in favor of sanctions being imposed, but these sanctions don’t mean a lot,” she told +972. “It’s clear that these four [settlers] did bad things, but there is a whole policy here that allows them to do whatever they want, under the auspices of the army and the government, all with American funding.”
Like Awwad, Eran Vardi wondered whether these sanctions would effectively deter other settlers, or whether they would even deter the four who were themselves sanctioned. “The question is whether anything will change, even a little,” she said.
Eran Vardi wants to see more significant sanctions, but she has no expectation that the U.S. will impose them. “These sanctions demonstrate Biden’s full cooperation with Israel’s needs,” she said. “It’s convenient to blame the small fish, especially because [the settlers] hurt Israeli citizens. Biden could stop funding the killing in Gaza if he wanted to.”
‘Why focus specifically on those who harmed Israelis?’
Einan Tanjil, a third settler named in Biden’s executive order, was documented in November 2021 attacking Palestinian farmers and Israeli activists who came to harvest olives in the village of Surif. The order states that Tanjil “was involved in assaulting Palestinian farmers and Israeli activists by attacking them with stones and clubs, resulting in wounds that required medical treatment.”
+972 and Local Call reported at the time that masked settlers descended from nearby outposts and, using stones and clubs, wounded at least three Israeli activists who subsequently needed medical treatment, including the veteran activist Rabbi Arik Asherman. Tanjil was charged with assault and causing bodily harm.
Netta Ben Porat, an Israeli human rights activist, was wounded during the incident. “There were eight of us Israelis,” she recounted. “Einan and his friend attacked us with clubs, and another activist stood between me and them, and then he beat me.
“He was only charged with assault, not even aggravated assault or politically-driven assault [which would carry a more severe punishment],” Ben Porat continued. “They omitted that he attacked more people. The indictment does not clarify why he attacked us. He claimed self-defense, even though I was standing to the side and filming while he hit me.”
To Ben Porat, the sanctions appear “ridiculous.” “Out of all [the settlers], the one the U.S. imposes sanctions on is a 19-year-old who attacked Israelis once or twice? It’s irrelevant,” she said. “They could have tried a little harder — what about the military security coordinator who was armed and who brought the settlers [to where we were] and watched from above [as they attacked us]? Or the farmers responsible for expelling entire communities? If the problem is settler violence and its impact on Palestinians, then why focus specifically on those who harmed Israelis?
“Maybe this is a harbinger of things to come,” she continued. “I hope this is a first step, that sanctions will be imposed on [Bezalel] Smotrich and [prominent settler leader] Yossi Dagan.”
‘We hope this will help us return to our lands’
The final settler targeted by the sanctions is Yinon Levi, who helped found the Meitarim Farm outpost. According to Kerem Navot, an NGO that tracks the dispossession of Palestinian land, Levi owns an earthworks company that has been hired by state authorities to carry out demolition orders in Palestinian villages in the West Bank.
Last November, violence emanating from Meitarim Farm led to the expulsion of the Palestinian community of Khirbet Zanuta — 27 families, totalling around 250 people — from their homes near the Meitar checkpoint in the southern West Bank. At the beginning of the war, Levi’s company also blocked roads leading to the entrance of the Palestinian village of Susiya — an apparent attempt to intimidate the village residents.
A petition filed on behalf of the Palestinians expelled from Zanuta states that Levi headed a group of settlers who, accompanied by two soldiers, came to the village on Oct. 12, beat village residents, threatened to kill them, smashed solar panels, and destroyed a car. According to the petition, Levi drove a bulldozer and “began extensive and massive demolitions of buildings, infrastructure, olive trees, and other agricultural crops belonging to the villagers.”
Levi differs slightly from the other three settlers on the American list in that he is not merely a hilltop youth activist, but rather the leader of a settler farm. In recent years, dozens of such farms have been established in the West Bank, and they are at the heart of the effort to expel Palestinians from their land. Although most of them were not established legally, they receive government support and protection from the military.
“I didn’t believe this would happen,” Fayez al-Tal, the leader of Khirbet Zanuta, told +972 in response to the announcement of sanctions against Levi. “We read the decision and were overjoyed. Yinon Levi is in charge of the outpost: he is one of the people who came at the beginning of the war and threatened us. We hope this will help us in our lawsuit requesting to return to our lands, and we hope that the court will see that the Americans are imposing sanctions. But Israel is not doing anything.”
According to al-Tal, it is important to remember the broader context of settler violence: “The settlers don’t do it alone. They serve the government, and the police do nothing when they attack us. They know that no law applies to them. They are not afraid of anything. The Americans can’t say a word about Gaza, because Hamas is there — but there is no Hamas here, so they can ask why there are violent attacks by settlers.”
Like other interviewees, al-Tal hopes that the order will later be extended to other settlers, including Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, and that “the U.S. Consulate and Embassy will pressure the Civil Administration or the police to prevent the attacks and bring us back to our land.”
+972 and Local Call contacted Chasdai’s lawyer, but he did not respond. We also contacted Levi, but he didn’t respond. Levi told other media outlets that the accusations leveled against him are “false.” Tanjil’s lawyer referred us to the Honenu legal organization, which said that it does not represent him on the issue of U.S. sanctions. Zicherman could not be reached for comment.
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.
Oren Ziv is a photojournalist, reporter for Local Call, and a founding member of the Activestills photography collective.
Our team has been devastated by the horrific events of this latest war – the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel and the massive retaliatory Israeli attacks on Gaza. Our hearts are with all the people and communities facing violence.
We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The bloodshed unleashed by these events has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to engulf the entire region. Hamas’ murderous assault in southern Israel has devastated and shocked the country to its core. Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Gaza is wreaking destruction on the already besieged strip and killing a ballooning number of civilians. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed by the army, are seizing the opportunity to escalate their attacks on Palestinians.
This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the past 13 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and militarism, the entrenched occupation, and an increasingly normalized siege on Gaza.
We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the fight of their lives.
Can we count on your support? +972 Magazine is the leading media voice of this movement, a desperately needed platform where Palestinian and Israeli journalists and activists can report on and analyze what is happening, guided by humanism, equality, and justice. Join us.
The Occupation of the American Mind and My Neighborhood
Central Library, 201 W. Mifflin Street, Room 302
5:30 pm social time
6:00 pm screenings
Discussion following the films.
Free popcorn. RSVP if you can to warabolition@gmail.com
Trailers: Occupation of the American Mind and My Neighborhood.
If you can’t make the event, you can watch the films for free online.
Co-sponsored by Madison Veterans for Peace – Chapter 25,Madison for a World BEYOND War, Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, and Jewish Voice for Peace – Madison.
In the village of At-Tuwani in the West Bank, residents say Jewish settlers have become far more aggressive since Hamas’ October 7 terror attacks in their long campaign to drive Palestinians from this land. NBC News’ Richard Engel visited the area and reports on the high tensions among the two groups.
Masafer Yatta, the most rural and desolate area in the West Bank, is home to about 1,000 Palestinians. The community are mostly herders who raise goats and sheep, and have steadfastly refused to leave their homes despite the mounting difficulties posed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers on the one hand and radical Israeli settlers on the other.
But after weeks of intense settler violence in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October – and despite the decades-long fight to remain in their homes – these communities are now being forced off their land. Some have described it as “a new Nakba.”
The Guardian’s Bethan McKernan travelled to Masafer Yatta and heard from Palestinian families how armed settlers – some in reservist uniforms, others covering their faces – have begun breaking into their homes at night, beating up adults, destroying and stealing belongings, and terrifying children. These West Bank settlements are illegal under international law.
CNN’s Nima Elbagir reports from Hebron in the West Bank, which remains under Israeli occupation in the shadow of the war against Hamas in Gaza. Elbagir and her team witnessed how settlers and the Israeli military are working together and creating a culture of fear amongst Palestinian families, despite calls from President Biden for Israel to sanction “settler extremists.”
Since the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, extremist settlers in the West Bank have been emboldened, displacing more than 1,000 Palestinians, according to the United Nations.
“Since 7th of October, the soldier came and sit down under this tree. And they put the Israeli flag here. And right now, if we try to cross 10 meters, the soldier will start to run, chasing us to go back here. And if we say, ‘This is my land,’ they start to shoot live.”
Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in southern Israel, violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has intensified. Extremist Israeli settlers have been emboldened in what Palestinians say is an increased effort to seize their land with support from the Israeli Army.
On Oct. 13, Sami Hourani’s cousin Zacharia al-Adara was shot and wounded by an Israeli settler in the Palestinian village of at-Tuwani. It happened just a hundred meters from Hourani’s home.
“The settler was holding a gun and he was clearly with civilian dress coming towards my village, he was attacking a house. The settler started to walk towards Zacharia and just shot him. Zacharia is since the 13th of October in the I.C.U. in the hospital. And the most scary part now is that if this will be the new reality that they want to do after the war.”
Since Oct. 7, the U.N. has recorded more than 280 attacks by settlers in the occupied West Bank, opening fire on Palestinian villagers, destroying their farmland and setting fire to their businesses and homes. Observers say the attacks are part of the campaign for settlement expansion.
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“The closed house is here in front of us. Here is the village of Tuba, and that up there, there is the settlement of Ma’on.”
Across the West Bank, there are more than 700,000 Israelis living in settlements that most of the world considers illegal. The Israeli Army says that it takes the violence very seriously and that it’s taken action to apprehend those responsible. However, human rights groups say arrests are rare, and soldiers have been seen accompanying settlers during some attacks, including the man who shot al-Adara on Oct. 13.
Zvi Sukkot is a member of Israel’s Parliament representing the far-right religious Zionist party. He’s become a prominent voice in the movement to expand Israeli settlements. Sukkot first started making headlines more than a decade ago as a member of the hilltop youth, young Israelis who would squat areas of the West Bank with the hope of claiming the land for eventual new settlements.
In 2012, Israel’s Security Agency accused him of leading covert and violent activity against Palestinians, and he was temporarily banned from entering the West Bank. But after Oct. 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed him to lead a committee handling security issues in the territory.
Reporter: “What changed for you after the Hamas attacks of October 7?”
Reporter: “Do you condemn the acts of violence being committed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians?”
But for Palestinians that claim to the land means displacement. In the past seven weeks alone, the U.N. says more than 1,000 villagers have been forced to leave their homes due to settler violence across the West Bank.
Dalal al-Awad and her family are farmers from a village called Tuba. They’ve survived multiple attacks by settlers who told them to leave. For now, the family has little choice but to pack up and move to the hills every night, sleeping outside, away from their home.
The following statement was written and approved by the general membership of the TAA on November 15th, 2023.
A Call for Palestinian liberation
WHEREAS The Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA; AFT [American Federation of Teachers] Local 3220) recognizes that the Zionist Israeli state is a reactionary tool of Western imperialism, funded for their own cynical aims. Israel can accurately be described as an apartheid state, as documented by many human rights experts and organizations, including UN officials, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International agree with this description.
WHEREAS Israel’s response to Hamas’ attack has been indiscriminate and disproportionate violence toward Palestinians. As of November 13, 2023, Israel has murdered over 11,000 Palestinians, nearly half being children. Upon his recent resignation, the Director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Craig Mokhiber, stated that Israel’s actions are “a textbook case of genocide.”
WHEREAS Israel’s bombing campaign has been carried out without regard for the lives of hostages, further exposing the cynicism of justifications based on the October 7 attack. Similarly, American liberal and progressive politicians continue to cry crocodile tears for the victims of Hamas and remain silent on the victims of Netanyahu.
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WHEREAS Israel’s genocidal attacks are exacerbating the inhumane living conditions and mass unemployment in Gaza. The civilians of Palestine deserve fundamental human rights, including, but not limited to, security, freedom from foreign occupation, access to housing, clean water, healthcare, and employment.
WHEREAS The October 9 press release from AFT National, titled, “US Education Leaders Condemn Hamas Attack, Stand with Israeli People,” and the resolution recently adopted by [American Federation of Teachers]–Wisconsin (AFT–W) inadequately condemn Israel’s colonialist regime and fail to acknowledge colonialism as the root cause of the current conflict. These statements fail to use the terms, “colonialism,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocide” to characterize Israel and its actions, which is out of step with several human rights experts/organizations and undermines the severity of Israel’s oppression. Furthermore, these statements fail to call on the US government to halt the sale and funding of arms for Israeli forces. Unless we address the core of this conflict and end our support for the Israeli offensive, the US will remain complicit in the occupation and genocide in Palestine. Given the status quo of US support for Israel’s oppression of Palestine, the shortcomings of AFT’s statements make them pro-Israel and anti-Palestine by default. Therefore, be it;
RESOLVED The TAA considers Israeli and Western imperialism ultimately responsible for the recent violence.
RESOLVED The TAA condemns Israel’s settler colonialism, apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in Palestine. We condemn Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, which has been a death sentence for thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians and has displaced over a million more. This collective lethal punishment breaks international law and constitutes war crimes.
RESOLVED We call for the collective liberation of the Palestinian people from Israeli oppression.
RESOLVED We stand in solidarity with the following people:
The people of Palestine, who have suffered at the hands of US, British, and Israeli imperialism for over 100 years;
Palestinian trade unions who have called on the international working class to take action in the face of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the mass killing of the Palestinian people;
Israeli workers and unions who break with their ruling class to stand unconditionally on the side of the oppressed;
The many Jewish workers around the world who condemn Zionism and stand steadfast with Palestinians;
Victims of oppression on the basis of religion or ethnicity around the world including victims of rising islamophobia and antisemitism.
RESOLVED We demand the US government and the Biden administration use all available diplomatic means to end the genocide of Palestinians, including but not limited to ending all funding and arms sales to the Israeli government. We must immediately end our moral and material support for Israel’s human rights abuses and war crimes.
RESOLVED We condemn the US veto of a ceasefire resolution brought forward by Brazil to the UN Security Council to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. We are appalled that the US was the only country to veto the resolution. Although a ceasefire doesn’t go nearly far enough, this is the bare minimum that we expect from the UN.
RESOLVED We call on workers in the US to organize to halt any production and shipment of weapons to Israel. Organized action and the building of mass movements by the international working class will be necessary to end the occupation. We should take inspiration from the two Intifadas, as well as the American workers who have already physically obstructed the shipment of arms to Israel from ports in the Northwest.
RESOLVED We demand that the University of Wisconsin system direct the State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB) to divest the ~$512 million (as of 2021) that the UW system has invested in BlackRock, the massive US-based asset manager that owns large portions of weapon manufacturers and military contractors such as Boeing ($5.42 billion), Lockheed Martin ($5.13 billion), Northrop Grumman ($3.06 billion), and General Dynamics ($2.47 billion). These US companies manufacture the weapons, jets, and surveillance systems that the Israeli government uses to kill Palestinians.
RESOLVED We demand that AFT retract its endorsement of genocide enabler Joe Biden for US president in 2024 given his administration’s complicity in war crimes. He is a particularly ruthless cheerleader of Israeli war crimes, even among the American ruling class. The same should be done for all endorsements of anti-Palestine politicians.
RESOLVED The TAA action commits to the following actions:
Mobilize our membership to participate in rallies, protests, and marches in support of Palestine, including but not limited to: hosting events, amplifying Palestinian voices (including by supporting SJP events and by supporting the demands of the BDS movement in a reiteration of the TAA’s existing position), and to contact representatives in support of a ceasefire in Gaza and for collective liberation for the Palestinian people.
Continue to recognize that an injury to one is an injury to all, and that the American working class will never be free while Palestine is in chains;
Refuse to support politicians and parties that oppose Palestinian liberation;
Call on the labor movement as a whole to mobilize its resources to fight American imperialism on all fronts.
Protect and support all workers and organizations (such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Madison for Palestine) who face retaliation due to their support for Palestinian liberation.