Home raids and violence: In Hebron, ‘voluntary’ transfer of Palestinians is underway
The Abu Haya family’s house after the soldiers’ departure
Gideon Levy reports in Haaretz on 11 July 2015:
The market square is empty, as the iconic song about another Old City – the one in Jerusalem – goes. Hebron’s main marketplace has been almost completely deserted for years. Anyone who wants to understand why, need only gaze upward: Hanging from the metal grilles Palestinians installed above the stalls to protect them from the settlers, are bags of garbage and excrement that the latter throw at visitors.
The homes of the settlers in Hebron’s Jewish Quarter loom above the dead market and abut it. On the other side of the checkpoint, in that quarter, not one Palestinian store or stall remains. Further along, the still-open part of the market was also half dead this week. There’s produce in abundance, and colorful booths are open, but few customers are around.
The Palestinians have no money, in a city that once was the economic hub of the West Bank until the war in the Gaza Strip erupted. Want to know why? Look at its main entry gate. It was padlocked this week. A city of a quarter of a million inhabitants is shuttered. Can anyone find anything comparable to this on the planet?
Israeli soldiers supervise the main entrance into Hebron. Sometimes they open the gate there, sometimes they don’t. You can never know when it will be unlocked. This past Monday when we visited they didn’t open it. There are alternative routes, some of them winding and hilly, but it’s impossible to live like this. That’s exactly why the gate are shut: because it’s impossible to live like this. There’s no reason other than the Israel Defense Forces’ need to abuse the inhabitants, which they are doing even more violently since October 7, in order to drive them to despair – and perhaps even down the road. Permanently.
Indeed, perhaps a small number will choose to leave, finally, and thus fulfill the dream of some of their Jewish neighbors. For its part, the IDF is cooperating eagerly with these satanic plans, working hand in hand with the settlers on the path to the much-desired population transfer. Under the cover of the war in the Strip, here too abuse has gone into high gear, and is almost unrestrained.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Area H2, which is under Israeli control and includes the Jewish settlement in the city, and in the ancient neighborhoods that surround it. Here the transfer isn’t creeping, it’s galloping. The only Palestinians still in evidence here are those who don’t have the means to leave this hellish life, under the terror of the settlers and the army, in one of centers of apartheid in the West Bank. Here are ancient stone buildings, adorned with arches, in a neighborhood that could be a cultural treasure, a heritage site, but stands abandoned, half ruined, with the settlers’ garbage lying about and their ultranationalist hate graffiti.
After parking – there’s plenty of space now in the desolate market – we enter a narrow, dark stairwell. Through the barred window heaps of refuse are visible; behind them the settlers’ institutions: Beit Hadassah, the Yona Menachem Rennart religious study center and the Joseph Safra Fund building. The settlers’ homes are in touching distance. Just stretch out your arm.
This is Shalalah Street, which is partly under Palestinian control. The old stone building we entered was renovated in recent years by the Palestinians’ Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, and it’s impossible not to admire its beauty, despite the depressing conditions surrounding it. Located a few dozen meters from the checkpoint leading into the Jewish Quarter, this is a narrow structure with three floors that house five families. The expanded Abu Haya family – parents, children and grandchildren, including 15 youngsters and toddlers – remains here because of the low rent.
Passing throngs of little ones, we ascend to the third floor, to the apartment of Mahmoud Abu Haya and his wife, Naramin al-Hadad. Mahmoud is 46, Naramin is 42, and they have five children, some of whom already have families of their own. Naramin was 15 when she got married, she relates with a smile.
The father of the household, who once worked in construction in Ashkelon, has been unemployed since the war broke out on October 7, 2023. Naramin cooks food at home and sells it to local residents. This is the family’s only source of income at the moment. Until the war, she was also a volunteer in the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. With a video camera from the NGO, as part of its Camera Project, she documented what was happening in the area. But Naramin no longer dares to take part in the project. It’s far too dangerous to be in possession of a camera here. The last time she used it, the only one during the war, was about five months ago when she documented a fire that settlers started on the roof above the market. About a month and a half ago, soldiers came to the apartment, showed Naramin a photo of her 7-year-old son Nasim – and then left with him. They released him, petrified, about half an hour later.
Nocturnal raids on Palestinian homes have become far more frequent in the last 21 months. From once a month, on average, the army now descends upon their homes at least once a week, Naramin says – almost always in the dead of night.
No Israeli knows a reality in which for years, at any given moment, he or she wakes up in shock at the sight and noise of dozens of armed, masked soldiers invading your home, sometimes with dogs, then pushing all the dazed occupants, including the terrified children, into one room. In some cases the invaders carry out beatings and violent searches of the premises, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake; in all cases they curse and humiliate.
In the past, these incursions seemed to have some sort of purpose: the arrest of a suspect, a search for combat materiel. But since the war started the impression is that the only reason for the raids is to sow fear and panic, and to embitter the lives of Palestinians. They apparently have no other purpose.
The last such incident involving the Abu Haya family took place a week ago. In the early hours of last Thursday, Naramin’s son Maher, 24, who’s married to 18-year-old Aisha and is the father of two small children, left home, but returned after he saw soldiers approach the front door.
The security cameras the family installed at the entrance show Maher standing innocently on the street and the soldiers suddenly appearing. They ordered him to take them in and guide them through the building. Maher took them to the other entrance, which leads to the apartment of his brother, Maharan, 23, who is married and the father of a 6-week-old baby, the aim being not to awaken all the other, many children in the building.
But Maher was ordered to wake up everyone and to mass all the occupants of each floor in one room. The troops said nothing about the reason for the operation. Maharan had just tried to lull his little daughter to sleep when soldiers burst in. Maher knocked on the door of his parents’ apartment and woke them up. His uncle, Hamed, 35, was pulled put of bed; even though it was explained to the soldiers that he was recovering from back surgery, he was grabbed by the throat and hauled out of his apartment.
The three families on the third floor were concentrated in the small living room in which we were hosted this week. Naramin recalls that she was worried about what was happening on the lower floors. They heard Maher shouting, as if he was being beaten.
A soldier tore down the curtain at the entrance to Naramin’s living room and then his buddies smashed the glass items in the cabinet. For no reason. The children started to cry. Naramin wanted to open a window, because it was stifling inside, but a soldier, younger than most of her sons, blocked her.
The next day, B’Tselem field researcher Manal al-Ja’bri took testimony from Maharan’s wife. She related that her baby cried and that she wanted to breastfeed her, but the soldiers wouldn’t let her. Requests for water were also turned down. After about an hour, the troops ordered Naramin and the others in her household to move to a different apartment in the building. The floor there was spattered with broken glass and she was afraid for her barefoot children. Afterward she heard sounds of dishes breaking in her own home. The soldiers also threw the fan to the floor and broke it.
Ja’bri says she has already documented some 10 similar cases of destruction-for-its-own-sake in the same area, populated by economically disadvantaged Palestinians.
What was the purpose of last week’s raid? Here’s what the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit replied this week: “On July 2, 2025, the IDF operated in the city of Hebron, which is [under the supervision of the] the Judea Brigade, in the wake of intelligence information. The activity took place without exceptional events, and the allegations of property destruction are not known.”
At about 2 A.M. quiet descended on the building. Naramin dared to look outside to see if the soldiers had gone; they had left without informing the occupants. Who cared? The Palestinians could remain where they were until morning. Maher was bruised but wouldn’t tell his mother what the soldiers had done to him. The family’s three cars had been broken into; the keys were found in the dumpster.
As we were served coffee, the family discovered that the glass covering the table was also cracked. Are they thinking of leaving? Naramrin jumps up as though bitten by a snake, and utters a short, definitive “No.”
Last week, four families left the adjacent Tel Rumeida neighborhood. They couldn’t take it any longer. All told, Ja’bri, the researcher, estimates that at least 10 families have left the neighborhood since the start of the war. Last week, locals said, there was apparently no security problems to investigate, and in Tel Rumeida – where the Palestinians are not allowed to bring in any sort of vehicle, not even an ambulance – a commercial vehicle was permitted to enter in order to remove the property of the families that left. Some ends apparently justify all means.
We then went up to the roof, to see the view. Ancient stone buildings planted on the slope. But the roof was suffocated on all sides by settlers’ buildings.
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