It looks like a bombed-out scene: 20 Palestinian cars torched by masked settlers in the dead of night
Torched cars in El Bireh, December 2024. Twice a year on average, settlers raid the neighborhood, laying waste and leaving behind slogans of hate scrawled in Hebrew.
Gideon Levy reports in Haaretz on 7 December 2024:
A quiet residential street in the town of El Bireh was transformed overnight into a car cemetery. One after another, one encounters the remains of the vehicles, torched, destroyed, in ashes; some are covered by large plastic sheets, their owner’s phone number attached. It looks like a bombed-out scene. Nineteen cars were completely burned that night in November, a total loss; one was somehow salvaged by its owner, who had it repaired for 11,000 shekels (about $3,000). The most expensive car destroyed was a new Skoda SUV, which had cost 170,000 shekels. Most of the other vehicles were also new. Only two were mashtub – unlicensed, usually stolen cars.
Palestinian insurance does not cover arson by violent settlers, and each family will have to cover its own losses by itself. It is also doubtful whether the Israeli police will arrest the lowlife criminals that swoop in at night from the mountains, from some nearby settlements, armed and masked, and proceed to set cars on fire one by one until they have had their fill of hatred and evil, and then take off again – thieves in the night.
Videos from security cameras offer good documentation of the incident: They show a gang of masked people, moving rapidly from car to car, pouring fuel over the hood of each car, igniting a fire out of which a tall, dangerous flame leaps up. Had a lone resident not been awake in the wee hours of that night – to the rampagers’ disappointment – the fire could have reached and consumed the tall buildings under which the cars were parked, perhaps even killing residents in their sleep.
Late one morning this week, this part of El Bireh is quiet, with only the burned-out hulks standing like a silent monument to that early November night. This is a sleepy suburb of Ramallah, with most residents now at school or at work. In an apartment on the first floor of a nine-floor residential building, in a living room with kitschy decor, with red lights and ceramic-tiled walls, Ihab Zaban, a security guard at the Ramallah government hospital, was sitting that night, watching the National Geographic Channel. Looking down on the neighborhood from the mountaintops were the settlements of Psagot, Givat Assaf and Beit El, closing in on the city and intending it no good. They were in fact established in order to halt the development of El Bireh.
Zaban, a 42-year-old father of four, tends to stay up late. He works shifts. He was sitting alone in the living room, his children and wife having gone to bed some time before. A little after 3 o’clock he got up to make himself a cup of coffee. This was the night of Monday, November 4. As he was preparing the coffee, he suddenly heard suspicious sounds out on the otherwise silent street. He looked out of the kitchen window and saw six or seven masked men approaching the parked cars. Zaban quickly went out to the kitchen balcony, opening its window and yelling at the men, in the hope of driving them away. He knew they were settlers. Over the last five years, twice a year on average, they arrive in the neighborhood, laying waste and leaving behind slogans of hate scrawled in Hebrew. They usually break windows of cars and houses. Lovers of Israel. This time they opted for arson. A man is standing in the balcony, yelling, and down in the street the thugs are setting cars on fire, paying him no mind. Zaban says he was astonished by the speed with which the fire began to consume the vehicles and spread.
Torched cars in El Bireh, December 2024
Zaban woke up his wife, Nabilah, 40, and told her what was going on. Their four children, 9-year-old Adam, 8-year-old Siham and 5-year-old twins Mohammed and Rasil, were also awakened by the yelling. Zaban asked Adam to go to every apartment in the building, to wake up the neighbors. Nobody opened their door to little Adam, probably out of fear. Zaban got dressed and went down by himself. By the time he opened the building’s front door, the street was ablaze. He says he heard some shots and thus quickly sought shelter inside. He turned on the building’s outside lights, and a heartbeat later went out again with fire extinguishers that were placed near the entrance to the building.
When he went out again, he saw the settlers fleeing up the street toward the Givat Assaf settlement. On June 28, the security cabinet approved Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s proposal to legalize this settlement, which had been unlawfully established in 2001 by students from the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, in response to a Palestinian terrorist attack on the settlement Ofra. Perhaps the fires were part of their celebration.
Back to the street: After fleeing a few dozen meters, Zaban recalls, the settlers paused, perhaps to take a look at their blazing handiwork. They then continued their retreat from the neighborhood. After Zaban was certain they had left, he first ran to his car, a 2014 Hyundai Accent, and began to put out the fire, before moving on to other cars. He called the El Bireh firefighters who arrived within a few minutes and proceeded to put out the other fires. The Palestinian police also arrived, took a look at the scene, and left. What can it do against those violent settlers? A few hours later, in the morning, the Israel Police also surprisingly arrived at the scene and documented it; its officers left after a short while.
The building’s facade was by that time charred and blackened from the fire. In videos and photographs one can see the fire blazing in the street from one burning car to another, threatening to set the buildings ablaze. The firefighters quickly got the fire under control and it petered out. All that remained were the skeletons of burned cars.
The Israel Police told Haaretz this week: “As soon as reports of the aforementioned incident were received, an investigation was initiated by the Judea and Samaria police’s central unit, which is still underway. As part of this investigation, any and all required actions will be taken in order to get to the truth and to suspects in the incident.” The head of said Judea and Samaria unit, Avishai Mualem, it is worth recalling here, was arrested this week on suspicion of bribery. He is suspected of providing intelligence and secret information to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in return for his promotion.
We went back down to the street and Zaban identified each of the cars and their owners, his neighbors. B’Tselem human-rights group researcher Mohammed Rumana also has a detailed list of all 20 torched vehicles with the names of their owners. The Hyundai Venue belonged to Hamza Hassib. The Peugeot station wagon belonged to Dr. Ashraf Adwan. The Hyundai Kona belonged to Osama Najar. The new Skoda SUV – it is unclear whether it was a Karoq or a Kodiaq – belongs to Moussab Ayash, while the Skoda Fabia belonged to Tha’ar Karkara. The Hyundai Santa Fe belonged to Ibrahim Akra. The burned-out Kia Picanto belonged to the wife of Ayash, the Skoda SUV owner. The next Skoda Fabia in this line of hulks belonged to Yussef Anata. The Ford Focus, whose remains are now wrapped in a black plastic sheet, belonged to Akram Houli.
It turns out, however, that the settlers’ festivities affected another site: They actually began their campaign of destruction on a cross-street, burning parked cars there, too: Yussef Amro’s BMW, Mounir Abdul Hadi’s Passat and Yussef Abad’s Opel Corsa. According to the report by researcher Rumana, the arson got underway here, and only afterward did the settlers move on to the cars parked under the building where Zaban lived. He keeps repeating how, “Had I been asleep that night, the scenes would have been more horrific.”
We take a look from the barred window in his kitchen, just as he did that night: On the wall of the building across the street, the settlers left behind a Hebrew graffito to remember them by: “Over Judea and Samaria, war,” it says in red paint. The graffiti from the previous pogrom, in black letters, is already fading away.
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