Zakariyah has suffered immensely since being wounded by an Israeli settler. Yet his attacker roams free, and demolitions continue to devastate our communities in Masafer Yatta.
Shoug and Zakariyah sitting outside their home in At-Tuwani the week that Zakariyah was released from the hospital, January 2024 (Emily Glick)
Shoug Al Adara writes in +972 June 20, 2024
The day before my husband was shot, he told me to wait to come home.
I had traveled to Al-Jawaya, a neighboring village in the Masafer Yatta region of the South Hebron Hills, in the occupied West Bank, where I had grown up and where my parents and siblings still lived. But this was just days after October 7, and my husband Zakariyah was worried that the short trip back to our house in At-Tuwani had become too dangerous.
When I left for Al-Jawaya on Oct. 10, I thought it would be comforting to be with my family in such uncertain times. I assumed it would be a simple visit — Al-Jawaya is across the highway from At-Tuwani, a journey of just a few minutes that I used to take multiple times a day. While Israeli soldiers had closed many roads in Masafer Yatta on October 7, including those we use to reach the city of Yatta, access to the small agricultural road between Al-Jawaya and At-Tuwani was left unimpeded.
My father came to pick me and my children up in his car, passing soldiers stationed at the entrance of our village. Although eager to be with my family, I was terrified to load my children into the car and drive back with him. I cried the entire way, stopping only once I walked over the familiar doorstep of my family home.
I had only planned to stay in Al-Jawaya for a single day. But later that afternoon, settlers and soldiers brought a bulldozer and sealed off the entry road to the village, shooting at any cars that tried to pass. We could hear the gunshots from my family’s home, so I decided to postpone my return trip to At-Tuwani. Zakariyah and I spoke every day that week, trying to figure out how we could reunite our family, but there did not seem to be a safe way to travel between the villages.
Then, on Friday, Oct. 13, I received a panicked call from one of Zakariyah’s sisters: Zakariyah had been shot by a settler.
Between two villages
Growing up in Al-Jawaya, I would see settlements gradually crop up on neighboring hilltops, but interactions with the settlers themselves were few and far between, and always from a distance. My memories of childhood are filled with beauty: dew drops in the morning, bright green fields spotted with red flowers in springtime. The winters were cold and quiet, with a beautiful stillness. It wasn’t like now, when the settlers come into our villages to harass, injure, and torment us.
Since Al-Jawaya is very small, my siblings and I, like many other children from the small villages in Masafer Yatta, attended the school in At-Tuwani. To reach the school, we had to cross the Israeli-built highway that separates the two villages. “Be careful,” my father would warn me. But my mind was always focused on my studies, not the growing violence of the landscape I traversed daily.
During my years at school, I used to go to a shop in At-Tuwani to get a snack or pick things up for my family. The shop owner’s son was a boy named Zakariyah. He was a couple years ahead of me in school. I would see him in the hallways and when I stopped in his family’s store, where Zakariyah helped his father. I was always very shy around him, and later would learn that he too is quite shy. After a while, we got to know each other, and he approached my family to ask for my hand in marriage.
We were married in 2017, and I gave birth to our eldest daughter one year later. Like many Palestinians in the West Bank, Zakariyah used to work construction jobs in Israel, and he built our house in At-Tuwani himself. More recently, he returned to farming the land surrounding our village. We now have four healthy children, including twin babies who were born last summer.
Over the last 10 years, however, Israeli settlements around Masafer Yatta have rapidly expanded: from the roof of my house, I can see them covering the hilltops in nearly every direction. As the settler population has grown, violence in the area has skyrocketed. My family and neighbors face constant harassment from settlers while grazing sheep or harvesting crops, and acts of settler violence have become terrifyingly frequent and increasingly bloody.
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