Palestine: In the West Bank, free rein for settler brutality

From our special correspondent in Palestine, Jean Stern

Early in 2025 I’m racing along the highways of Palestine at breakneck speed. Well, some highways. Alongside the traditional network laid out centuries ago, as so often in the Middle East, the highways reserved for the settlers cut across the landscape, elevated, fenced in, video-monitored. Threatening, numerous and rapid, these high priority routes make apartheid appear a purely practical matter, like a transport app.

These fragmented Palestinian landscapes, deeply disfigured by colonisation, its concrete blocks, whirlwinds of dust, traces of destruction, I know them well from having roamed across them countless times over the past few years.

Why does Palestine seem uglier, dirtier and more melancholic now than it did last spring ? Injustice is omnipresent, chokes me like a wind from hell. These highways of discrimination are hideous. They’re just one more sign that Palestine is sinking into the inadmissible. The indifference of the world should make one weep if that would ease my anger.

The facts are inescapable. Summary executions, merciless beatings, houses burnt to the ground, farms destroyed, fields ransacked, people arrested arbitrarily... And who perpetrates these daily outrages ? Settlers, organised in militias and armed by the government and by soldiers acting as oppressors, complicit in the horrors perpetrated by these so-called settlers. What’s happening in the depths of Palestine is getting “worse and worse”. Everyone tells me that.

For this IFHR delegation, the diplomacy of hugging is a token of sharing and solidarity. The men and women we meet force themselves to smile but they want to scream. “How do you put it in French? Pénible ?” says a man. He’s trying to be funny but his expression has lost all confidence as he shakes our hands.

Five attacks per day on average

Israeli settlers have the same ideas as supremacists and religious extremists the world over. They’re fighting the Arabs, which means driving the Palestinians (Muslim or Christian) out of the West Bank. Rich or poor, farmers or bourgeois, city-dwellers or country folk, the colonists “show no mercy” : this is their general watchword. They’ve no reason to hold back since they are egged on by Benyamin Netanyahu’s most powerful ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir - who left the government coalition on account of the ceasefire in Gaza - and Bezalel Smotrich, both settlers themselves, like 11 other ministers in the current cabinet. A permit to massacre delivered by ministers, rabbis and generals, a death-dealing Holy Trinity.

Between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2024, there were 1,653 attacks against Palestinian civilians perpetrated by settlers on Palestinian territory, i.e. nearly five per day, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). And the result: 722 Palestinians killed “in the context of the occupation” during the same period in East Jerusalem and the territories, the UN organisation reports¹. And in the last few hours, settler attacks have become even more fierce, especially in Al-Funduq and Jinsafut, two villages located to the east of Qalqilya.

Some Palestinians, particularly in Jenin, have been killed by the Palestinian police, contaminated by a security complicity with Israel which disgusts Palestinians. “Help us to get rid of Hamas and Fatah,” a middle-class Ramallah resident begs us. Some Palestinians consider these to be pawns manipulated by Israel, prepared to sacrifice them for their economic and ideological interests. “And as for us, we can count the disappeared, but we can’t even draw up the lists of our dead,” bemoans one Palestinian. “We’re pariahs, the dregs of humanity”. A man we met in Bethlehem doesn’t even want to talk about the eighteen years he spent in prison. There are over 5,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israel. According to the NGO Adameer, there were 3,376 administrative detainees as of 7 January 2025 as opposed to “only” 1,264 in September 2023.

Palestinians under constant observation

Besides which, the territories are practically sealed off. The UNRWA , UN agency in charge of refugees, has been put out of operation by Israel. One more political and humanitarian scandal. Its little office by the entrance to camp Ayda in Bethlehem has been shut down indefinitely. Not far from there the Banksy Hotel is gathering dust. Only the lobby and the little Museum of the Occupation are still open but nobody comes there any more, the middle-class Australian hippies have all vanished. They used to arrive here in Uber saloons, dressed in their linen finery and sit quaffing cocktails on the terrace facing the wall. But at least they came. These days they’re totally absent, just like the pilgrims, after the long interruption caused by Covid. Bethlehem is dying a muted death and a few wretched vendors are hawking miserable souvenirs to the rare foreigners passing through.

A man from the Ayda camp, friendly, affable, displaying the courtesy so widespread in Palestine, flashes a melancholy smile. In his opinion, Palestine is not answering the occupiers’ brutality. “Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, we can’t help wondering about our own mobilisation. We’re too weak to oppose the Israeli army. Throwing rocks at soldiers isn’t enough.” He thinks the people in Nablus and Jenin were right to fight back and Hamas too. It’s time to take up arms. More and more Palestinians are wondering about that.

As for the settlers, they have no doubts at all. They’ve got guns and they use them. Just like the soldiers.

The man tells us about the death of a ten-year-old Palestinian child. In November 2023, in the street, in front of everybody, cut down by a sniper’s bullet. The soldiers took away the boy’s body and brought it to his father the next day. A bit further on, in a recess in the isolation wall that surrounds the camp, is an Israeli military base, where some twenty soldiers are permanently stationed, and they’re watching us. Here, the Palestinians are under constant observation. When the day comes for a new exodus demanded by the messianic settlers and their ministers, a second Nakba, which seems almost inevitable now, the army will know where to find the suitcases to speed them on their way.

Nights of barbarism

Although busy on multiple fronts, that army has reinforced its presence in the territories. It has no intention of “ceasing fire” in the West Bank. It has taken back the control of the checkpoints, increased the number of patrols, and allows hordes of young men, 16 and under, to roam about on Fridays. They have Molotov cocktails and clubs. The older men who supervise them have firearms. They drink hard liquor and scream blue murder on their barbaric nights. These terrifying kids are filmed by the surveillance cameras installed by the NGO B’tselem and other human rights organisations, like Al-Haq.

A victimized Bedouin shows us his festering wounds, inflicted by settlers a few days ago, on Friday 4 January 2025. Khaled Najjar, 71, who looks like a tired old man but with a twinkle in his eye. He bares his midriff for us, shows us a huge black swelling. He lives in the village of Masafer Yatta, where the movie No Other Land was shot. In the middle of the night, the settlers dragged him out of his house, which had already been destroyed several times by the army. “There were three or four of them, they threw me on the ground and started to beat me.” They’d begun by smashing the surveillance camera installed by B’tselem.

IKhaled spent two days in hospital, and it wasn’t the first time. “I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been wounded, I’ve spent months in hospital.” Not far from there, Bassel Adra, one of the directors of No Other Land, heaves a sigh. “It didn’t start on 7 October, but the settlers’ harassment is getting worse and worse. The authorities do nothing to stop it.” He’s handsome, sad, and friendly: his struggles are there on his face, for us to read. In front us, just a few hundred metres away, is the settlement of Regavin, once an “outpost”. And on another hilltop, close to Khaled Najjar’s own house, a bandstand has been built. The settlers gather on that prominent site before they attack, they turn their music up full blast, drink, sing and dance.

In Jerusalem, those same settlers and their friends sometimes dance in the street by the Central Station, to their biblical and warlike pop music. A furious passer-by shouts “Fascists!” at them. His anger slips over them like water off a duck’s back. The tramway, another symbol of colonisation², rumbles through the night. It is scarcely 11 pm, the passengers are all pious young men, fierce sprites from another era, some quite sinister-looking, others just tired, but all carrying weapons. There are also armed soldiers, male and female, looking at the sky and sighing. Nothing is right for them. Messianic they may be, but Israeli conscripts know perfectly well that they are bound to end up as cannon fodder. Hysterical generals and rabbis, nationalistic and religious, tell them all day long to “die for God and country!” Palestinian suffering counts for nothing. Or, what is closer to the truth, they rejoice in it.

Ben Gvir and Smotrich call the shots in all military, civilian and financial matters in the occupied Palestinian territories³. These proconsuls snigger over their murderous decisions on the propaganda TV channels, astounded at the degree to which the “allies” of Israel leave them to it. Besides which, the rabbis give them their blessing; “Show no mercy” is their slogan, repeated by the thousands armed by Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Both of whom should be brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for their repeated incitements to murder and looting.

Moreover, the Defence Minister, Israel Katz, has just released the handful of settlers, sixteen in all, who were being held in administrative detention. They will be useful, the Minister declared, “to reinforce and encourage the settlement movement”. He could hardly have made the delivery of a permit to kill any clearer. These men monitor the crimes in person from inside their armoured, air-conditioned limousines cruising the restricted highways. Their world view is busy destroying Palestine, its delicately misty balminess and the vapours of the Dead Sea.

“We’ll rebuild”

Not all Palestinians live like the destitute Bedouins of the south. Turmus Ayya, a town with a population of around 3,000 is peculiar in being peopled by Palestinians of whom 80 % enjoy US citizenship. Having made their fortune in the United States, they have come home to build huge mansions surrounded by elaborate formal gardens. Sometimes they even finance a mosque, as chic as a Beverly Hills synagogue. One of them, very snazzy in his suede jacket and pleated trousers, practised law in California. “I came back to settle but also to resist”, he claims with old-fashioned courtesy.

He takes us up to the heights overlooking the town. We find ourselves climbing to the heart of ancestral Palestine, with its winding olive groves and weeds growing between stones. Two days before we visited, on 6 January 2025, a summer house built on top of a hill had been burnt down by settlers. There had been a splendid view from that big building of recent construction, located opposite the colony of Shilo, established in 1979 on land confiscated from Turmus Ayya and which now has a population of 5,000. “We used to meet in that house on special occasions. There was something for everyone to enjoy,” the Palestinian-American told us. He doesn’t need a fancy speech to register his determination: “We will rebuild”.

But that won’t necessarily be that simple. He knows full well that down below, in the valley, Shilo’s constructions are spreading ever closer to the wonderful little palaces of Turmus Ayya. Over forty houses have been attacked and some burnt down in the last few months. It’s the ongoing annexation which so worried Antonio Guterres, UN General Secretary, on 20 January. House after house, field after field, “a very grave violation of international law”, he warned. Just like in Gaza, everything is written, everything advances. I can’t escape the feeling of anger, of rage at the blindness, the complicity of the world out there towards these pathological criminals.

Beita, coveted by the settlers

On the road to Nablus lies Beita, which I already visited in the spring of 2022. The population there stands up to the settlers who come to harass them every Friday. When a new colony, Eyvatar, began digging in on Mount Sabih near Beita in 2021, the residents fought back. Ten were killed in the protests. The Eyvatar colonists were evacuated, but came back in 2022.

With its 12,500 residents, Beita has a complicated landscape, with its many fertile meadows containing water holes which excite the settlers’ greed. Beita is surrounded by some ten settlements, of varying sizes. And since 7 October, there are incessant clashes in which over ten people have been killed. On a hill overlooking Beita, Aysemut Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish American activist, was killed by an army sniper on 6 September 2024. The 26 year-old woman was taking part in a protest against the settlers. Here too, “everything’s become worse since 7 October” an inhabitant tells us. The killings, the destructions, the harassment.

Mosad Soufan’s farm had the misfortune to be located on a hillside below the expanding settlement of Yitzhar. A few metres from his windows a new road runs straight up to the settlement, an almost unreal smooth black line in this harsh terrain. To meet with him, we had to climb a rocky path, move heavy stones the colonists had recently placed there to isolate Mosad and his family. “They were there two hours ago, watching us,” he explains. Mosad tells us of the many humiliations his family has endured for years. He shows us screen-shots on his mobile phone of a group of settlers who call themselves “Nazi hunters”. They printed his face behind cross-hairs on a poster. His dog arrives, a friendly mongrel, despondently dragging one of its thin legs behind it. “The settlers tried to poison him a couple of days ago,” says Mosad, almost apologising for so much brutality. Dusk falls... The many points of light on an orange horizon hold as much promise as threat. Mosad knows them all. Soon it will be time to lock up for the night. Until the next alert.