Fear and goading in the West Bank

At midday on Friday October 13th, a scant week after Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on Israel, Basel Adra, a human-rights activist from the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani heard a commotion and grabbed his camera. Children in the playground next to the village school were yelling and pointing across the valley. Two armed settlers and an Israeli soldier had walked down the road and were engaged in an altercation with the family that lived on the edge of the village. The men had come from an outpost of an Israeli settlement that was established on the hill opposite At-Tuwani in the 1980s, in spite of the fact that the area was outside Israel’s internationally recognised boundaries. The settlers snatched at the Palestinian family’s smartphones as they tried to film the encounter. One hit the father of the house on the forehead with his rifle butt.

This kind of incident is common in At-Tuwani, a village of 300 people. The residents of Ma’on, the neighbouring settlement, have harassed the Palestinian villagers for years, most often by threatening farmers in their fields and driving shepherds like Adra’s father from the hills where they grazed their sheep. Adra, in his late 20s, told me he had a photograph of himself at the age of three among the pine trees of the hilltop where now I could see the grain silos and barns of the settler outpost. “I don’t remember it,” he told me, “but the villagers used to go to these woods for walks and picnics.” After the settlers arrived, the Palestinians learned to band together to defend against incursions and protect each other from the beatings and arrests at the hands of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and the police.

As Adra filmed the scene, around 20 men came out of a nearby mosque to see what was happening. He zoomed in and saw his cousin, Zakaria al-Adra, walking up the road towards the settlers and the soldier. A settler wearing a red shirt raised his gun and, at a distance of only a few metres, shot Zakaria in the stomach. The Palestinians behind him ducked and began shouting in outrage. Some went to help Zakaria, who was slumped on the ground. The settler in the red shirt retreated up the hill.

I met Zakaria’s wife, Shawq, a few weeks later. She had recently visited her husband in hospital. “He is awake. He talks a little. But he is exhausted,” she said, sitting beside a lemon tree in the courtyard of her family’s house. We drank coffee as a girl rocked one of their five-month-old twins in a car seat.

“I don’t know if they do this as revenge for the war,” said Shawq, “or if they just want to make trouble here. But there is a lot of violence.”

Adra volunteers for B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organisation that has been tracking abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territories since 1989. Since the war began, he has exhausted himself. Violence by settlers has been increasing over the past decade and has escalated since Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government took office in December 2022. The United Nations recorded 222 acts of settler violence in the month that followed October 7th – more than double the previous month’s total.

There has always been harassment and confrontation, but now the settlers have become emboldened. Israel mobilised over 300,000 reservists in the wake of the Hamas attacks, and many of soldiers serving in the West Bank were pulled out to fight in Gaza and the north of the country. Reservists have been called up in their place, some of them local settlers. One Israeli activist told me that the “level of settler violence is very different now. The fact that many settlers are in military uniform with military weapons makes a difference.”

B’Tselem and other organisations have documented intimidation all over the West Bank in recent days: settlers entering Palestinian villages day and night, revving all-terrain vehicles around houses, beating men, smashing mobile phones, windows and solar panels, bulldozing livestock pens and water reservoirs, slashing plastic water tanks, irrigation hoses and car tyres.

Fifteen entire communities, many comprising a few families in tents and shacks but some much larger, have left their homes as a result. More than 900 people have been displaced. One man was shot and killed while harvesting olives near Nablus, one of eight Palestinians to be killed by settlers since October 7th.

At the end of October settlers and soldiers began harassing the inhabitants of Zanuta, a community of 250 people a short drive from At-Tuwani. Over several days they threw stun grenades at doors, beat people up, smashed cars and solar panels and warned people to leave. “And the result”, said Adra, “is that all the people of Zanuta are gone and now there is no one left there.”

Adra’s father was a barely literate shepherd who never went to school. “He became an activist by living here,” said Adra. When the settlers from Ma’on tried to push him off his pasture, he resisted. Adra first saw his father attacked on his tenth birthday in 2005. Fifteen years later, he was beaten up in the same field. “I thought it would be the last day I would be alive. Soldiers were hitting me, dragging me towards their jeep, trying to wrest my arms behind me but I kept one hand under my stomach, so they couldn’t handcuff me.” A crowd of locals rushed to his aid and distracted the soldiers, before an IDF officer arrived and broke up the confrontation.

From the late 1990s At-Tuwani became a hub of activism for the 20 Palestinian villages in the area. For more than two decades, Israeli and foreign campaigners and lawyers have helped the villagers to resist land appropriation, court cases, arrests and detentions.

Adra’s parents helped build a school in the village, despite intimidation, a demolition order and soldiers confiscating their tools. Adra’s class was the first to complete their whole education there. Adra then studied law at Hebron University, before turning to human-rights work.

Over the years Israeli peace activists have developed a policy of “protective presence”, accompanying villagers as they cultivated their lands and grazed their flocks, and sleeping overnight in villages to deter and monitor abuses by settlers and soldiers. Adra told me that soldiers “act differently” when there are Israelis around. They allow the Israeli activists to film confrontations on their phones and the police always respond when they call for help, which is not the case for Palestinians. Above all, they give the locals the feeling that they are not alone.

There is a meeting place for activists in the basement of Adra’s family home – a large room with a kitchen against one wall, a small dorm with bunk beds and a mural on a wall by the entrance depicting a Palestinian family under olive trees, a big orange sun and bunting of Palestinian flags. There were about a dozen people gathered there when I visited. One of them, a young man with blue eyes, didn’t want me to use his real name because his employers don’t know about his activism – he told me to refer to him as Yuval. He said he had been volunteering as “protective presence” for about two years. “Communicating with the soldiers in their own language can defuse a situation,” he said. “Sometimes, in normal times, some soldiers are even sympathetic. But it’s increasingly hard now because the Israelis have been encouraged to see us as ‘the others’. We are now anarchists, traitors.”

Yuval’s girlfriend arrived; she and other activists had just been stopped by soldiers and held for about half an hour. “The soldiers were very aggressive, some had their faces covered. Some had skull badges on their uniforms. They threw our bags out of the car onto the road. There was a lot of testosterone.” A police officer calmed the situation but told the group not to provoke settlers by approaching them.

The weeks since the attack had been “hell”, said Yuval. For the first time ever, he had been shot at as he filmed the destruction of a Palestinian garden by settlers in a bulldozer. “Everyone is on edge, it’s very unpredictable.”

I sensed the oppressive atmosphere as I walked through At-Tuwani. A Palestinian flag fluttered above the school, which has been shut since Hamas’s attacks. Adra explained that, as a security measure, the army had blocked many roads in the area with checkpoints, gates and berms of bulldozed earth. Driving had become almost impossible and walking, given the tension, was discouraged.

He pointed across the shallow valley to where the lip of the settlement of Ma’on was visible. Below it was a tent where settlers had occupied privately owned Palestinian land. An Israeli flag had been placed in the branches of a tree. Since October 7th the villagers have not dared graze their sheep on the surrounding hills. “We don’t go there,” said Adra. “No way.”

Palestinians with white-and-green licence plates and Israelis with yellow ones share the main road that runs south from Jerusalem to Hebron. The road winds through the bare rocky hills, striped with dusty grapevines and olive trees. It is potholed and rubbly; rubbish is piled in drifts next to broken cars. The Palestinian villages comprise groups of white square houses, often with unfinished flat roofs, sprouting black water tanks and the rusty ears of satellite dishes. The towns are often fenced off from the road; junctions are guarded by Israeli soldiers in concrete conning towers. Signs warn Israelis that entering is illegal and they risk death.

From the road, the Israeli settlements are identifiable by the red roofs of the houses, built in tiers around the summits of hills. I visited one of these, Carmel, to meet Tal Rachmani, a young mother and spokeswoman for the council of Har Hevron that administers 20 settlements in the region. When we arrived, two soldiers and two armed settlers in mufti called ahead to confirm we were invited and pulled back the heavy metal gate to let us in.

Rachmani was born in Carmel – her parents were among the first to settle here, 40 years ago. We sat outside in the main square in the shade of trees. As we were talking, Rachmani received a phone call from a member of Im Tirtzu, a right-wing campaign group. The caller barked loudly and aggressively that she should not be talking to journalists because we were antisemitic. After Rachmani put the phone down, a little taken aback by the vehemence, she explained that there was a concern that publicity about settler violence could cause the government to rein in the IDF in the West Bank, “so the army won’t defend our villages as they need to, they won’t search houses for weapons, they won’t arrest people.”

“We are all heartbroken,” said Rachmani, referring to the massacre of October 7th. Two people from nearby settlements had been killed at the Nova music festival; the husband of a friend, a reservist, had rushed south as soon as he heard about the attacks. His body was found two days later.

Most of the men in Carmel and the nearby settlements, including Rachmani’s husband, had been called up for reserve duty; in the first week of war some mothers had taken their children to stay with their parents. “There were a lot of rumours and fear,” said Rachmani. “Here we are also surrounded by Arab villages.” She claimed that a “lot of terrorists” came from them. When she was growing up, there were incidents of Palestinians throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, and firing shots at cars. She remembered, as a ten-year-old, being in an armoured bus that came under gunfire.

Rachmani said there had been no violence by Palestinians in the area since Hamas’s attacks. “But in the last month we feel the Arabs around us are considering whether they will be a part of this war,” she told me. Tensions were running high. She said there had been “gatherings” of Palestinians at junctions on the main road.

Yochai Damari, the head of the council, told me that “we don’t live a regular life. We are living a life of war.” His four sons were on reserve duty. “I see a lot of Palestinians that support Hamas and ISIS and this makes me scared,” he said. “You need to remember there are families in Hebron who are intermarried with people in Gaza. So while the war in Gaza is ongoing we feel the violence increasing in Hebron.”

I asked about violence by the settlers. “We think it is not true. We don’t see it,” Rachmani said. Damari told me he was surprised by news of Palestinians leaving their villages in the region. “In my opinion, it’s because they are frightened that the army will destroy their houses that are built illegally. It’s their own decision. It is not something that the army or the authorities told them to do.”

The council was trying to encourage the settlers to resume their normal lives. Schools had been closed for the first two weeks of the war but were now open again. Still some mothers were keeping their children at home out of fear for their safety. Rachmani said she used to drive to Beersheba, in the south of the country, to shop for children’s clothes, but hasn’t dared make the journey in the past month. “The kids need new shoes, but even the delivery guy is afraid to come here. In general we are driving a lot less.”

Rachmani told me she and her neighbours were practising drills in case the settlement was attacked. If it was, she planned to lock her doors. Her husband had been trying to convince her to buy a gun. Most women in Carmel don’t ordinarily carry weapons. Now that many of their husbands and sons are with the army, they are beginning to contemplate the possibility. The week before she had gone to a gun range. “It was the first time I fired a gun and it scared me,” she told me. “I am hesitating. It’s really a dilemma for me.”

Adra was supposed to get married on October 20th. His fiancée is from Ramallah and “hates politicians and politics”, he said half-smiling. They both had visas to go on honeymoon to Italy. The war put the plans on hold. A week after I visited At-Tuwani, two armed men in uniform stomped into the schoolyard, then drove off in a white SUV. Adra admitted that no one knew what would happen next.

“We are trying not to give up, but we don’t really have the power to defend and protect the communities,” he said. “We are trying to gather our power, together with the activists, to try to prevent this ethnic cleansing. Sometimes we succeed and a lot of times we fail.” ■

Wendell Steavenson has reported on the Iraq war, the Egyptian revolution and war in Ukraine. You can read her previous dispatches from Israel for 1843 magazine, and the rest of our coverage, here.

PHOTOGRAPHS Marcus Yam, ARIS MESSINIS, THOMAS COEX / GETTY IMAGES