Residents of this Palestinian hamlet look around, and see no way out

Eid Hathaleen – ‘Within the fence of Carmel [settlement], they have everything. And we have nothing.’

The face of the land tells the story. A tiny shepherd community, its homes and tents touchingly well tended, is fenced in from all sides. The wire was put up by settlers, some of whose homes abut the hamlet, even as they choke it, in order to mark the living space which for this pastoralist community is the dying space. The fences mark the “blue line” that demarcates “state lands.” For the occupation authorities and the settlers, who are interchangeable in this part of the country – the South Hebron Hills, in the cluster of hamlets known collectively as Masafer Yatta – everything that is considered state land is the private preserve of the settlers, where they can do as they please, including attacking anyone who dares venture onto it.

It’s heart-wrenching to see the hamlet being suffocated by wire on the threshold of its homes.

The Haaretz archive also tells the story. We paid our first visit here at the end of 2009, more than 15 years ago, after the military government’s Civil Administration unit issued dozens of demolition orders for the village, whose residents has been expelled to this site from the Arad area in the Negev at the beginning of the 1950s. At the time of our first visit, the main spokesperson was Suleiman Hathaleen, a colorful and tempestuous man in his 60s, who was feeling remorse. “We Bedouin are dumb. We thought the settlers would do us no harm. They did preparations here, preparations there, Carmel [a settlement] grew and expanded on our land – and we were silent.”

Thirteen years later, we saw Suleiman in a vegetative state at al-Meezan Hospital in Hebron, anesthetized and ventilated, a gaping hole in his head, after a police tow-truck ran him over and left the scene without seeing that he got medical aid. Whether the incident was malicious or not, it’s not difficult to imagine what would have happened if the driver had been a Palestinian and the victim a Jew. Suleiman died a few days later in the hospital. No one was questioned and no one was indicted.

This week we returned to Umm al-Kheir to see what the distant war in Gaza had wrought even in this small community of shepherds amid the battered landscape, which gained world fame when the documentary film “No Other Land” won an Oscar last month. Our host this time was Eid Hathaleen, the late Suleiman’s 41-year-old son.

“We have seen death in the eyes since October 7,” he says. The Passover holiday this month was a nightmare for the community. “Carmel wants to oppress us until we will leave,” says Eid, 15 years after his father spoke in a similar vein in a situation that was far more humane.

The Carmel settlement. “We Bedouin are dumb. We thought the settlers would do us no harm. They did preparations here, preparations there, Carmel grew and expanded on our land – and we were silent,” Suleiman Hathaleen said in 2009.
The “blue line” passes through the middle of Salem Hathaleen’s hut – he’s the father of nine children, and a demolition order looms over his home. A few steps from the wire that imprisons them stands a mobile home that the settlers brought in a week ago. No one knows what the structure is used for, other than to poke another finger into the eyes of the shepherds – they are not allowed to approach it, even though it’s about 10 meters from the center of their hamlet.

On Tu B’Shvat (Israel’s Arbor Day) this year, the settlers planted around 40 olive saplings – a holiday for the trees and also for the plunderers of the land. Some of the young trees were planted around the new trailer. Soon a settler outpost will spring up, which of course no one will demolish. When the Palestinian shepherds wanted to plant olive trees on their land, they requested a permit from the Civil Administration and received it. It’s their private land, after all, which they purchased decades ago from people in the nearby city of Yatta.

But on one Ramadan evening this year, while the villagers were enjoying the iftar meal, two youths from Carmel snuck in and uprooted three olive trees. The event was captured on the security cameras that the shepherds had no choice but to install. They provided the footage to the police – it shows the vandals escaping in the direction of Carmel – but nothing was done. It was then that they decided to build their own fence, which was sabotaged by settlers.

“Imagine what would happen if I were to cut Carmel’s fence. I would be arrested instantly,” Eid says. During Passover, he relates, the settlers celebrated every night along the fence, singing songs and barbecuing meat, all in order to rattle the shepherds. For six years the settlers from Carmel waged a struggle against the taboon – stone stove – that the shepherds built in their hamlet, on their private land. They said they wanted to destroy it because the smoke bothered their sensitive eyes.

First they seize control of land and build on it wildly, up to the very edge of Umm al-Kheir, and then they complain about the smoke from the taboon.

An Israeli flag flaps in the breeze on the rocky terrain on the other side of the wire fence, in a place where Israel is not (yet) the legal sovereign. Imagine, if you will, that the shepherds were to hoist the Palestinian flag here – how many arrests and interrogations there would be in the village. The settlement of Carmel is suffocating them from the west, while from the other side, past the settlement’s large chicken coop, is an outpost whose residents seems to see the relentless harassment of their Palestinian neighbors as their mission in life.

We are sitting in the hut that houses the village council, to which is attached the frame of a bus, across its length a painting in memory of Suleiman Hathaleen, a victim and the father of our host. A demolition order also hangs over the remains of the bus, and over the council’s tin shack. Some 200 people live in the hamlet, which was established in 1952 by members of the Jahalin Bedouin tribe, after their expulsion by Israel from the Negev.

Ahmed Hathaleen. “There is no Umm al-Kheir, there is only Jewish Carmel,” a soldier told him.
But one expulsion isn’t enough to sate the Israelis’ real estate greed. The next expulsion is on the way. Nineteen times the Civil Administration has demolished homes in Umm al-Kheir, but it’s still standing. The last time was this past February – three structures. “These are our last breaths here,” says Nasser Nawaj’ah, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. A resident of the Palestinian village of Sussiya in the area, he took part in the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles along with his friend and co-director of “No Other Land,” Basel Adra.

On October 7, 2023, life in Umm el-Kheir was upended, apparently irremediably. Since the start of the war, the settlers have donned uniforms. Under the dubious guise of “emergency squads,” they have become more violent than ever and the shepherds more helpless than ever.

Immediately after October 7, all the community’s exits and entrances were sealed and it came under siege, being declared a closed military zone. “A civilian population whose homes are declared a closed military zone,” Eid says. “In Carmel there is civil law, and here there is military law. Within Carmel’s fence they have everything – and we have nothing. If that isn’t apartheid, what is? And I am very careful in the use of the word ‘apartheid.'”

On October 28, a military vehicle hurtled into the hamlet. Three masked, uniformed individuals, members of the emergency squad, stepped out of it. They brought all the men together, and demanded their cell phones, “to check if they weren’t Hamas.” When they didn’t come up with anything incriminating, according to Eid, they threw the devices angrily on the ground. Anyone who dared to utter a word was kicked by the soldier-settlers. They tore down and ripped up a Palestine banner in the council hut. They were looking for Eid.

They found Eid and interrogated him. He recognized his interrogator through his face mask. It was, he says, a settler whom they were familiar with. A 16-year-old youth who accompanied him demanded of the hamlet’s men that they condemn Hamas while he filmed them.

“I exploded,” Eid says in his Israeli Hebrew. “You invade my land and you tell me what to say and what humanity is? I am against the massacre of October 7 and a settler tells me that I am Hamas and a terrorist, and threatens me with his weapon.” The masked individuals told the Palestinians that they would be back the next day at 7 P.M. and expected to see an Israeli flag flying over every hut and tent. “If an Israeli flag is not hanging on every house, you will see death. This is our final threat.”

Terrified, the villagers called the police and contacted Israeli and international activists to guard them. But the settlers didn’t return.

Three or four new settler outposts were established in Masafer Yatta under the cover of the war, and a few others were expanded. Nawaj’ah, the field researcher, estimates that there are some 20 such outposts across the South Hebron Hills. Eid relates that there are frequent night attacks on the community by both settlers and the army. And there was also a case of an abduction by the army under the guise of an arrest, which ended at first light after a beating delivered on the pretext that Jadia Hathaleen, 17, had photographed the soldiers.

Last June, 11 structures were demolished. The settlers also pasture their sheep in the hamlet in order to provoke the inhabitants. Last July 2, they invaded Salem Hathaleen’s yard with their sheep. Five women, all mothers, emerged from the tents and asked them to leave. When they tried to expel the sheep, the settlers attacked them. One of them, according to Eid, fired into the air, and the youths who had come with the sheep assaulted the women with sticks and pepper gas. A few of the women were injured, and one of the settlers prevented the Palestinian ambulance that was summoned from approaching.

“Let them die, they have to die,” he said, according to Eid, before the eyes of police officers who were called to the scene. They begged the settler to let the ambulance through. “Imagine, police officers begging a settler to let the ambulance pass. But he is above the law. He belongs to [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and the police can’t touch him. And I didn’t invade his land – he invaded my land.”

There’s no electricity here, or running water; when there was water, the settlers slashed the pipes. The Palestinians have submitted dozens of complaints to the police, but nothing has been done. The very submission of a complaint is a vexing process involving an hours-long wait at the police station in Kiryat Arba, an urban settlement adjacent to Hebron, after which one enters, only to be told that there’s no Arabic-speaking officer on duty today – “Come back tomorrow.”

The Palestinians are already selling some of their sheep; without pasture land, they are unable to afford the cost of feeding the animals. Working in Israel is prohibited. Eid: “The people will be forced either to live in poverty or to leave, which is what the settlers and the army want. The settlement has a school bus, electricity, water, they have everything. I don’t know what to say.”

A cousin, Ahmed Hathaleen, 29, relates that, in the wake of the war, he took his infant son for nose surgery, but on the way back home with the year-old boy, soldiers at a checkpoint delayed them for half an hour outside, because they discovered that he’s a resident of Umm al-Kheir. “There is no Umm al-Kheir, there is only Jewish Carmel,” a soldier told him. It was a cold day, the baby had undergone surgery, as he tried to explain to the soldiers. To no avail.

This article is reproduced in its entirety