‘The soldiers opened the way for the settlers’: Pogroms surge across West Bank
Hussein Dawabsheh, head of the Duma town council, inside a burned house in the town, occupied West Bank, 14 April 2024
Oren Ziv reports in +972:
Israeli settlers embarked on a murderous rampage across the occupied West Bank over the weekend, killing at least three Palestinians and destroying property in more than a dozen villages and towns. The immediate trigger for the attacks was the disappearance on Friday, April 12 of Binyamin Ahimeir, a 14-year-old Israeli who went out shepherding that morning from the recently “legalized” Malachei HaShalom (“Angels of Peace”) outpost. By the time Israeli authorities found Ahimeir’s body the following day and declared him a terror victim, the settlers’ rampage through the surrounding Palestinian communities was already in full swing.
According to the human rights group Yesh Din, Israeli settlers attacked 11 Palestinian villages and towns on Saturday alone. They threw stones, set fire to more than 100 vehicles, damaged scores of homes and businesses, and slaughtered hundreds of livestock. In the village of Beitin, near Ramallah, settlers shot dead 17-year-old Omar Hamed. In Al-Mughayyir, slightly further north, 25-year-old Jihad Abu Aliya was killed in circumstances that are still somewhat unclear: settlers were attacking the village at the time, but the Israeli army stated that Abu Aliya was killed by their fire. Another incident captured on a security camera shows Israeli soldiers standing guard while settlers set fire to a car in the town of Deir Dibwan, also near Ramallah.
The pogroms continued into Monday, when Israeli settlers shot dead two Palestinian shepherds — Abdelrahman Bani Fadel, 30, and Mohammed Ashraf Bani Jama, 21 — on land belonging to the community of Khirbet al-Tawil, east of the town of Aqraba near Nablus. According to testimonies from villagers, a large group of settlers, some of them armed, entered privately-owned Palestinian land near the residents’ homes at around 4 p.m. with a herd of cows (settlers are increasingly choosing to herd cows over sheep and goats because they eat more and are harder to frighten). Later, more settlers arrived, some of them armed and masked. Soldiers also arrived on the scene.
Shortly thereafter, according to eyewitnesses, in broad daylight, settlers opened fire on the Palestinians, killing the two men. The IDF Spokesperson subsequently announced that the shooting had not been carried out by soldiers. The event was live streamed on the Facebook page of the adjacent Palestinian town; in the video, dozens of shots can be heard ringing out in several clusters for more than a minute.
Nidal, whose cousin, Abdelrahman, was killed yesterday and who was present at the scene, told +972: “I told the soldiers to push the settlers out and we’ll leave. Some had weapons and clubs, some were masked.” According to Nidal, one of the settlers then pepper sprayed one of the Palestinians, and a brawl ensued. “The soldiers fired in the air, and seconds later the settlers fired M16s from up close,” he said. “I’ve lived here for 35 years — there’s no law here. The settlers are above the law.”
For now, it appears that the Israeli authorities are taking the incident seriously: the military did not allow the bodies to be evacuated, transferring them instead to the National Center of Forensic Medicine for autopsy, which theoretically could enable the police to identify the shooters. On Tuesday morning, officers from the police’s Forensic Science Unit were seen at the scene of the shooting, collecting evidence and photographing the area.
The chances of a violent settler being brought to justice under Israeli law, however, are extremely low: since 2005, only 3 percent of Israeli police files opened regarding settler violence ended in conviction. In response to our request for comment, police told +972 that no arrests have been made so far in connection with the incident.