Two years of genocide from a little corner in Palestine
Villagers in Taybeh put out fires started by Israeli settlers outside the al-Khader Church in Taybeh, northeast of Ramallah, 7 July 2025
Qassam Muaddi writes in Mondoweiss on 8 October 2025:
It’s the morning of October 6, 2025. The bus to Ramallah stops on the main street of Taybeh, our small corner in Palestine that has gained an international reputation over the past two years.
A village once known for its Palestinian Christian heritage — and for its locally-made beer and annual Oktoberfest, which attracted as much media attention as it attracted tourists — was back in the news earlier this year for a different reason. U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, was on a visit to our village after a group of settlers attempted an arson attack on one of its historic churches.
The past two years have seen the Palestinian community come under threat in ways it never has before — not because it’s a Christian village, but because it’s Palestinian, despite the insistence of some mainstream media outlets that Taybeh is an exception. But life in Taybeh, as in the rest of Palestine, has transformed in profound ways.
I sit beside the driver. The radio airs the news of the situation in Gaza; a quarter of the population of the strip is suffering from severe starvation, which the highest famine-monitoring authority in the world declared as a famine. Hundreds of thousands of people continue to flee Gaza City as the Israeli army has closed any way in or out, and bombs continue to drop, despite U.S. President Trump’s statement urging the Israeli army to hold fire to prepare the ground for a prisoner exchange.
“How is the olive harvest looking this year?” I ask the driver.