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QUSRA, West Bank (AP) — As Israeli warplanes flew over the Gaza Strip following a deadly attack by Hamas militants in southern Israel, Palestinians say another kind of war has gripped the occupied West Bank.
The territory was cordoned off overnight. Cities were attacked, curfews were imposed, teenagers were arrested, detainees were beaten, and Jewish militias raided villages.
With global attention focused on Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there, the violence of war has also erupted in the West Bank. According to the United Nations, attacks via Israeli settlers have increased at an unprecedented rate. The escalation has spread fear, deepened depression and deprived Palestinians of their livelihoods, their homes and, in some cases, their lives.
“Our lives are hell,” Sabri Boum, a 52-year-old farmer who last week reinforced his windows with steel bars to the children of settlers who he said threw stun grenades into the northern village of Qaryout. I’m in a prison. “
In six weeks, settlers have killed nine Palestinians, the Palestinian government said. They destroyed more than 3,000 olive trees in the important harvest season, Palestinian Authority official Ghassan Daghlas said, erasing what for some was a legacy passed down from generation to generation. They have harassed pastoralist communities, forcing more than 900 people to leave 15 villages they had long called home, the UN said.
When asked about the settler attacks, the Israeli army said only that its aim was to de-escalate the confrontation and that troops “must act” if Israeli citizens broke the law. The military responded to requests for comment on explicit incidents.
US President Biden and other administration officials have condemned settler violence while protecting Israel’s crusade in Gaza.
“This has to stop,” Biden said last month. They will be held accountable. “
That didn’t happen, according to the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din. Since Oct. 7, a settler has been arrested — following the death of an olive grower — and was released five days later, the organization said. Two other settlers were taken into custody without charge, he said.
Naomi Kahn of activist advocacy organization Regavim argued that settler attacks are as widespread as human rights teams report, as they are a broad category that includes self-defense, anti-Palestinian graffiti and other non-violent provocations.
“The whole Israeli formula is working not only to eliminate this violence but also to save it,” he said.
Before the Hamas attack, 2023 was already the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank in more than two decades, with 250 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire, most of them military operations.
During the six-week war, Israeli security forces killed another 206 Palestinians, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, as a result of an intensification of army raids subsidized by airstrikes and attacks by Palestinian militants. In the deadliest incursion into the West Bank since the Intifada or Palestinian uprising of the 2000s, Israeli forces killed 14 Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp on November 9, most of them militants.
While settlers have enjoyed the authority of the Israeli government for years, they now have stronger people at the highest levels of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. This month, Netanyahu appointed Zvi Sukkot, a settler temporarily expelled from the West Bank in 2012 for alleged attacks. on Palestinians and Israeli forces, to head the subcommittee on West Bank issues in parliament.
Palestinians who have endured the hardships of Israel’s army rule in its 57th year say the war has hurt them more than ever.
“We are afraid of tomorrow,” Abdelazim Wadi, 50, whose brother and nephew were shot dead by settlers, told health authorities.
Conflict has long been a part of life here, but Palestinians say the war has unleashed a new wave of provocations, disrupting even their grim routine.
THE WEARY SETTLERS
Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in the 1967 Middle East War. The settlers claim the West Bank as their biblical birthright. Most of the foreign network considers the settlements, which are home to 700,000 Israelis, illegal. The West Bank is disputed territory and he says the fate of the settlements deserves to be through negotiations. International law stipulates that the army, as the occupying power, will have to protect Palestinian civilians.
Palestinians say that during nearly six decades of occupation, Israeli foot soldiers have failed to protect them from settler attacks or even join them.
Since the beginning of the war, the line between settlers and infantrymen has become even more blurred.
Israel’s wartime mobilization of more than 300,000 reservists included calling settlers into service and putting many of them in charge of policing their own communities. The army said that in some cases, reservists living in the settlements replaced normal battalions deployed to the West Bank during the war.
Tom Kleiner, a reservist guarding Beit El, a religious settlement near the Palestinian city of Ramallah, said the brutality of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack reinforced his confidence that the Palestinians are determined to “kill us. “
“We don’t kill Arabs for no reason,” he said. “We kill them because they seek to kill us. “
Human rights teams say the uniforms and assault rifles have reinforced settlers’ sense of impunity.
“Imagine if the army that was meant to protect you was now made up of settlers who committed violent acts against you,” said Ori Givati of Breaking the Silence, a whistleblower organization made up of former Israeli soldiers.
Bashar al-Qaryoute, a doctor in the Palestinian village of Qaryout, said citizens of the nearby Shilo agreement, who now wear uniforms, blocked an entire road. He said they destroyed Qaryout’s water pipe, forcing citizens to transport water in trucks at triple the price.
“They were the ones who burned the olive trees and created trouble,” al-Qaryut said. “Now they’re in charge. “
CURFEW
“Shut up!” a soldier shouted at Imad Abu Shamsiyya when he found the young man’s gaze at the open window. Then he pointed his rifle.
For 52 years, Abu Shamsiyya witnessed the crises that hit central Hebron, the only place where Jewish settlers live among local residents, in separate communities.
He thought that life in the barbed rope maze and security couldn’t be worse. Then came the war.
“This terror, this pressure,” he said, “is nothing like before. “
The Israeli military has banned 750 families from Hebron’s Old City — home to some 700 radical Jewish settlers among 34,000 Palestinians under heavy military cover — from leaving for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, citizens said. and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.
Schools have closed. Work stopped. The patients moved in with relatives in the Palestinian-controlled component of the city. Israeli settlers roam around at night, taunting Palestinians trapped inside, according to footage posted via B’Tselem.
Checkpoints instill fear. Soldiers in the afterlife who took a look at Abu Shamsiyya’s identity card are now searching his phone and social media. They searched it,” he said, his mouth open and cursing.
“Hebron is a blatant microcosm of how Israel exerts itself on the Palestinian population,” said Dror Sadot of B’Tselem.
When asked about the curfew, the IDF said it had set up more checkpoints “as part of security operations in the area. ” Attacks by Palestinian militants have increased significantly since the war, he added.
THE SETTLERS’ RAID
Grinding the gears of a bulldozer. The firing of a gun. With just a glance, parents know the rule: children, lock the doors, stay away from the windows.
Palestinians say settlers are wiping out the northern village of Qusra with typhoons almost constantly, covering olive groves with cement and dousing cars and houses with gasoline.
On October 11, settlers roamed dusty streets shooting at families in their homes. Within minutes, three Palestinians were killed.
Israeli forces sent to disperse Palestinian armed settlers and stone-throwers fired into the crowd, killing a fourth villager, Palestine said.
The next day, settlers responded to calls on social media to ambush a funeral procession that the village had coordinated with the army. They blocked roads and shot at mourners who jumped and ran across fields, participants said.
Ibrahim Wadi, a 62-year-old chemist, and his son Ahmed, 26, a lawyer, were killed. The funeral for 4, one for six.
Online messages from settlers rejoicing over the deaths, shared with The Associated Press, hurt Ibrahim’s brother, Abdelazim, as much as the loss.
“He collapses, he stops understanding,” he said.
THE GHOST TOWN
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Israel “wiped out” Palestinians from the town of Hawara after a gunman killed two Israeli brothers in February, prompting a deadly attack by many settlers.
Another far-right lawmaker, Zvika Fogel, said she wanted to see the mall “closed and burned. “
Today, Hawara looks like a ghost town.
The army closed the department store “to maintain law and order” after attacks by Palestinian militants, he said. Abandoned dogs wander among the smashed shop windows. Posters justifying the killing of Palestinians adorn roadblocks with Talmudic justification: “Get up and kill first. “
Since the start of the war, much of the West Bank’s main north-south highway has been closed to Palestinians, anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now said. Trips that used to take 10 to 20 minutes now require several-hour detours on harmful dirt roads.
The restrictions, said Palestinian Mustafa Barghouti, “divided the West Bank into 224 ghettos separated by closed checkpoints. “
The 160,000 Palestinian employees who passed through those checkpoints to work in Israel and Israeli settlements before Oct. 7 lost their coveted entry permits overnight, said the Israel Defense Agency that oversees Palestinian civil affairs. The company allowed 8,000 employees to return to factories and hospitals earlier this month. We don’t know when others will do it.
“My grandfather depends on me and now I have nothing,” said Ahmed, a 27-year-old from Hebron who lost his job as a barista in Haifa, Israel. He refused to give his last call for fear of reprisals.
“Tensions are rising. We expect the West Bank to explode if nothing changes. »
OLIVE HARVEST
Palestinians look forward all year round to the time in autumn when the olives turn from green to black. The two-month harvest is a much-appreciated ritual and an increase in income.
Violence ruined the season. They say soldiers and settlers prevented villagers from reaching orchards and used bulldozers to tear out twisted roots from ancient trees.
Hafeeda al-Khatib, an 80-year-old farmer from Qaryut, said infantrymen fired into the air and dragged her off her land after she was caught picking olives last week. It’s the first year he remembers not having enough oil to produce oil. .
In a letter to Netanyahu this month, Smotrich called for Palestinians to be banned from harvesting olives near Israeli settlements to avoid friction.
Palestinians say settler efforts have had an effect.
“They declared war on me,” said Mahmoud Hassan, a 63-year-old farmer from Khirbet Sara, a network in the north. He said reservist settlers surrounded him. If he ventures a hundred meters into the forest, he said, the sentry infantrymen shout or shoot into the air. Ask permission to leave your house and return.
“There is no more room to communicate with them or negotiate,” he said.
The military said it had “carefully examined” reports of violence against Palestinians and their property. “Disciplinary measures are being implemented accordingly,” he said, explaining.
EVACUATION
Human rights teams say the goal of settler violence is to drive Palestinians off land they claim for a long-term state, making way for the expansion of Jewish settlements.
On October 12, the Bedouin village of Wadi al-Seeq was pushed to its limits due to the ordeal of three Palestinians detained for nine hours. The harrowing accounts were first reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Weeks of vigilante violence had already forced 10 families to flee when masked settlers in army uniforms stormed in that day, throwing a Bedouin resident and two Palestinian activists to the ground and pushing them into pickup trucks, villagers said.
One of the activists, Mohammed Matar, 46, told the AP they were tied up, beaten, blindfolded, stripped naked and burned with cigarettes.
Matar’s reservist settlers urinated on him, penetrated him anally with a stick, and yelled at him to leave and go to Jordan.
Once freed, Matar left. The same applies to the remaining 30 families in Wadi al-Seeq. They led their sheep to the sheepfolds in the hills east of Ramallah and abandoned everything else.
The Israeli military said it had fired the commander while it investigated.
Matar said that in order to move forward, he needed Israel to be held accountable.
“I would settle for the bare minimum,” he said, “the slightest shred of justice. “
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