‘The night guards’: Inside the grassroots network fighting back against Israeli settler attacks
Masked Palestinians on guard duty during the night to fend off attacks by Israeli settlers, south of Nablus 1 March 2023.
Majd Jawad reports in Mondoweiss on 27 April 2026:
Under the midnight moon atop the mountain in the town of Sinjil, residents carry flashlights, signaling to the hills across the valley. The beams, along with the lights surrounding a small watch tent, usually used as decoration for Ramadan, serve as an early warning system. The signal that the village is awake and watching.
“Do you see that light?” one of the young men asks quietly, pointing toward a flicker across the opposite hill. I nod. For a moment, no one speaks. The wind is sharp at this height, and below us, the village is completely dark. “That means they’re there,” he says. “Watching, like us.”
As the pace of settler attacks on Palestinian communities reaches unprecedented levels, and amid a weak official response to escalating risks across the occupied West Bank, community-based volunteer groups known locally as protection committees or “night guards” have emerged as a primary line of defense against near-daily violence. The group of youth organizing night patrols in Sinjil is one of them.
The tent itself is a modest, thin fabric stretched over metal poles, its edges weighed down by stones to resist the wind. Yet it has become the village’s front line.