A Hellish Month in the Occupied West Bank
Inside a month of relentless violence, destruction, and suffering.
Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions.
But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank.
Each time I return to the West Bank, I tell myself—against all available evidence and my better judgment—“Maybe it’ll be calmer this time.” Never have I been proven wrong so thoroughly as I was this past month. I’m back home in New York now, and as ever, I have more material than I know what to do with.
The story, at the most basic level, is that the settlers have seized more land. With the full support of the government, they have just about finished their takeover of Area C and have moved on to Areas A and B—ostensibly under Palestinian Authority control and off limits to Israelis—something that would’ve been unthinkable just a few years ago. Villages that had never seen a settler before are now finding themselves encircled by outposts, facing daily attacks.
I’ve had countless settler encounters over the past several years, but never have I seen them come out swinging the way they are now—showing up in a village and wasting no time before physically assaulting people. Of course it’s because they know that they are far more likely to be rewarded than punished; they are, after all, doing the state’s bidding.
There are stories I want to tell about the courage of Palestinians—men, women, and even children—whom I watched fend off settler attacks, resisting the occupation with whatever they could find. They are brave because they have no choice. But I can’t tell those stories without risking their lives. This is a riddle about writing on Palestine I haven’t yet solved.
In my first dispatch from the West Bank in January 2024—You Don’t Understand How Bad It Is Here—I wrote:
So there is my next obstacle: the struggle to convey the utter pervasiveness of the occupation’s cruelty. I worry that each story I share undermines this essential aspect by implying a start and stop when the reality is more like a poison coursing through every inch of soil, emitting noxious fumes into schools, museums, hospitals, and homes, causing constant pain and suffering and degradation and, on occasion, a seizure or toxic shock or explosion of blood and death. I am convinced that no reasonable person could spend even a week here and come away believing the occupation is morally defensible under any circumstances; the trouble is that most will neither come nor even look too closely.
I haven’t solved that problem either, but I’ve committed to several larger projects that will let me dive more deeply into individual communities. Those will take time, so the pace of my posts here may slow for a bit.
For now, here’s a brief “travelogue”—written in a jetlagged haze shortly after returning home—that I hope conveys something of what it feels like on the ground in the West Bank right now.
In Bethlehem, I met Fahed Abu Haikal, whose seven-month-old son Sam was shot dead by an Israeli soldier weeks earlier while sitting in his mother’s lap inside the family car. Fahed remembers everything. He remembers the soldier’s nonchalant expression as he raised his weapon toward the car’s windshield. He remembers slamming on the brakes, then watching the soldier pull the trigger—the first bullet shattering the windshield, passing through his hand, into his baby’s face, out the back of his tiny head, and then into his wife’s face and chest. He remembers pulling Sam from the car and trying to plug the hole in his head as thick, hot blood poured out, before realizing he was holding his dead child. The car seat is still stained a dry, crusty brown. When Fahed got home from the hospital, the first thing he did was disassemble the crib and hide the parts, along with Sam’s box of toys—including the rattle he was holding when he was shot in the face—so his wife wouldn’t have to see them when she returned home.
Fahed believes they will get justice because the footage of the shooting so clearly shows a cold-blooded murder. He believes his baby’s killer will go to jail. I do not.
Just beyond Bethlehem, in Beit Sahour, settlers took over an abandoned Jordanian military base late last year, chased Palestinian farmers off the surrounding agricultural land, and installed a handful of mobile homes. Months later, the Israeli government retroactively authorized it as a legal settlement and allocated it more than 100 dunums of Palestinian land, including a public park belonging to the town of Beit Sahour. In other words, the settlers’ land grab—illegal even under Israeli law—was rewarded with post-facto legalization and even more land. That’s the whole game: violent settlers are the tip of the spear in Israel’s project of annexing the West Bank. So it goes. That night, Beit Sahour’s semi-pro basketball team beat Qalandia Refugee Camp 66–62. It was the talk of the town.
I returned to Turmus’ayya, where a group of Palestinian farmers and I were attacked by settlers last October. After footage of that attack went viral, Israeli authorities arrested the man who nearly clubbed a grandmother to death. I told them that their arrest would mean virtually nothing if they didn’t dismantle the settler terror network in the olive fields. You arrested a grunt, I told them, good for you. Now do something to actually stop the violence. You have a playbook for this sort of thing, I reminded them, you do it to Palestinians every day. Arrest their leader, Amishav Melet, the notoriously violent armed settler who established the illegal outpost. Demolish their structures. Tear gas them if they try to return. They told me they would—that they were serious about cracking down on settler violence. I told them I didn’t believe them. They said they’d prove me wrong.
The outpost has tripled in size since then. When I arrived at the lookout point, a cement truck, escorted by the IDF, was pouring the foundation for a large new structure. The large Palestinian home visible in the background of the October attack video is now occupied by settlers and off-limits to its owner, a businessman who lives primarily in Chicago. Amishav Melet is still menacing any Palestinian who dares approach their farmland. While I was there, he stole a man’s ATV at gunpoint. The settlers have taken the entire field, and the battle line has moved to the village itself. Settlers now routinely march through Turmus’ayya carrying machine guns, terrorizing residents. They want the homes. They want the whole village, of course. Maybe they’ll get it.
In neighboring al-Mughayyir, I visited the site of a school shooting in April, walking the grounds of Al Mughayyir Secondary School with its principal, Bassam Abuassaf. He showed me where a settler with a rifle crouched on a hill, peered through the scope, and took aim at panicked students trying to evacuate. Where 14-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Nassan was shot in the back of the head and killed as he frantically searched for his little brother. The whole town is traumatized. Of course it is. That’s what happens after a school shooting. But in this case, the shooter roams free, and the entire village remains under constant attack.
After the shooting, Bassam told me, Israeli authorities never even reached out to take a statement. A school shooting—and the police couldn’t be bothered to speak with the principal! But he was determined to get his students back in the classroom, and he did the following week. He found he could no longer focus on education or administration. Instead, he became consumed with protecting his nearly 500 students and staff, pacing the school’s perimeter from the first bell until dismissal. “I just thank God we made it through the school year,” he said.
I met the father of Jihad Abu Naim, the 32-year-old good Samaritan who was shot in the chest while rushing to the school to help. He showed me a photo of Jihad’s infant daughter—his new granddaughter—who was born weeks after her father was killed. Then he showed me a photo of his son’s corpse. This is a common occurrence in the West Bank: someone showing you a picture of their dead child.
As he scrolled through his camera roll, he landed on video of Israeli forces uprooting his olive trees, perhaps as punishment for having a dead son. He showed me a map, and I saw how the people of al-Mughayyir have been boxed into a fraction of their village, encircled by settler outposts and cut off from their farmland. The local economy, which relies almost entirely on agriculture, has collapsed. Military gates seal off the community for days or weeks at a time.
While I was in town, I met a friendly local who took me to see his home, which is, in fact, a pile of crushed stone and mangled rebar. The Israelis demolished it. He never found out why. Next door to his would-be home stood a house under construction, now indefinitely stalled because its owner was killed by settlers. I visited Um Saleh, the woman whose near-fatal clubbing in Turmus’ayya I documented last year. She cannot hold heavy objects with her right hand and still feels pain when walking downhill, but otherwise she is much improved. It was wonderful to see her laugh. A fundraiser after the attack helped her family buy a small flock of sheep, which now produces enough milk to support them, with virtually all other work in the area gone.
Almost in passing, she mentioned that two months earlier, soldiers had entered her home, beaten her son in front of her and his own child, slapped his wife, and stolen all the money from his wallet before leaving. She didn’t know why. They rarely do.
Last week, armed settler militias began a new round of daily, violent raids on al-Mughayyir. Another student at Al Mughayyir Secondary School, 17-year-old Fadi Al-Nassan, was shot. Months earlier, he had been filmed sprinting toward his cousin, 14-year-old Aws Hamdi Al-Nassan, after Aws was killed in the school shooting.
Fadi, who had just finished 11th grade, had his leg amputated. He was supposed to play on the national soccer team next year, and his family dreaded the moment he’d wake up and realize his leg, and his dream, were gone. Then, on Friday, he died.
In Taybeh, I visited a tiny Bedouin community—Naif—that is perhaps in the process of being run off its land. A settler arrived on a donkey with a herd of camels. Camels serve no real purpose for the settlers, I learned, except to eat Palestinians’ crops—which is, in fact, the opposite of no purpose for a group whose raison d’être is tormenting their indigenous neighbors. The camels fed from Naif’s olive trees for more than an hour as the settler rode increasingly tight circles on his donkey around a small shed, throwing the occasional stone to frighten the children playing inside.
I followed him for as long as I could, trying to keep myself between him and the home, but at a certain point I realized he was laughing at me—wearing me down so that he could later cut their water pipes with less interference. A few nights later, settlers burned down a small home there.
Khallat al-Sidra, a Bedouin village on the outskirts of Mukhmas that I visited last year, had already met the fate that may await Naif: ethnically cleansed from the land, like more than 60 other communities since October 7. It once served as an incidental buffer for the village of Mukhmas itself, absorbing the worst of the settler violence. But after settlers burned it to the ground for the third time, the Israeli military finally intervened—not by protecting the community, but by expelling the people from their land.
And so the settlers pushed the frontier once again, now setting their sights on Mukhmas, where they shot an American teenager dead in February. Nasrallah Abu Siyam may be gone, but he is everywhere in the village. A ghost. Like so many Palestinian villages, the martyr is painted on walls, displayed in restaurants, dangling from rear-view mirrors. Nasrallah was the point of reference for everyone I met in Mukhmas—Nasrallah’s aunt, his cousin, his very best friend.
I visited his father, Mohammed, who was building a house for his son when he was killed. He was a wreck. Regret was eating him alive: he’d asked Nasrallah to stay and help with the farm when he’d considered moving to America. He could barely speak. He couldn’t understand why it had happened. What had they ever done to deserve any of this? Why couldn’t it have been him instead of his son? Nasrallah’s horse, a dapple gray mare named Shams, is still out back, but Mohammed can’t bear to ride her. So Nasrallah’s friends come every day to care for Shams—to clean her pen, feed her, and take her out for rides.
I hung out with the shebab—the young men of the village who have been forced into the role of its protectors. A farmer, a student, a car mechanic.
What can you say? The man loves cars. When it was quiet, we went for drives into the mountains. Tested the boundaries—the outposts were always in view. We smoked cigarettes and talked shit. I rode on the back of a motorcycle. We went to a local honeybee farm, but the beekeeping suits left something to be desired. Like, say, full-body coverage. Like a true seal. Between the four of us, we were stung maybe a dozen times. Let me tell you, it was pure chaos. I don’t remember the last time I laughed like that. The honeycomb was warm and chewy, and I’ve never tasted anything so sweet.
I love the shebab of Mukhmas. Fearless—minus the bee thing. I joined their night watch, guarding against settlers who come from all sides, on ATVs and in trucks, smashing windows, pouring kerosene, and setting buildings on fire. Menacing with their guns. You become fast friends after nights like this.
Days after I left, a car full of Haredi settler kids being chased by Israeli police—probably on account of the clown-car number of people packed inside—drove into Mukhmas at 4 a.m. The police car turned around and left as soon as they entered the village, leaving the kids to joyride through its streets and wake its residents before they crashed straight into a wall and ran screaming for the hills. Nobody in Mukhmas ever saw them—only the car tearing through their narrow streets—but the kids reportedly called the army and pleaded for help. And so the army came in force: dozens of jeeps, drones, even helicopters. Soldiers kicked down doors, dragged people from their beds, zip-tied them, and beat them senseless. “We didn’t ask for any of this,” my friend later said. By 8 a.m., Israeli media was reporting that the Haredi boys had been “rescued” from Mukhmas and were safe. But that didn’t stop the raid from continuing until 3 p.m. Fifteen boys and men were arrested that day in Mukhmas. It appears soldiers chose their targets after stealing someone’s phone and searching a group chat for people who had warned about the settler and soldier incursion. Incriminating texts like, “Be careful.” They broke the mechanic’s jaw in four places, along with his shoulder and a rib. He said it all happened in his bedroom, seconds after he woke up. The soldier pulled him out of bed then teed off on him with haymakers and jackboot kicks before he'd even registered what was happening. Today, two young men remain in jail. Nobody knows what they’re even being held for.
I left Mukhmas for Tamoun in the Jordan Valley, where I stayed with the family of Aymen Ghreyab, a local activist and journalist who has been in jail since November over his social media posts about state and settler violence. He was taken away just weeks after his daughter’s first birthday. His wife knows what happens inside those jails—the torture, the sexual assault, the starvation. She hasn’t heard a word from him. She cries all the time, but she has young children to raise.
I visited farmland being severed in half by Project “Crimson Thread”—Israel’s plan to build a wall across the entire Jordan Valley, from the occupied Golan Heights all the way to the Red Sea. The Jordan Valley is the most fertile land in the region, the “breadbasket of the West Bank,” so it’s only natural that Israel would try to take it. The plan would annex everything east of the wall, roughly 22 percent of the West Bank. Communities there would be expelled. Everything in the wall’s path would be demolished, and a buffer zone west of the wall would make tens of thousands more dunams of land inaccessible to farmers.
From Tamoun, I traveled north to Jenin, stopping just outside the city, next to a Palestinian amusement park, to see Israeli forces rebuilding the settlement of Ganim, which was evacuated in 2005 as part of the disengagement. It’s one of four settlements they’re rebuilding in the north. Israelis resettling the northern West Bank is one of the most underreported stories in the region right now, and you can see it in the widespread construction, multiplying outposts, and attacks in Areas A and B becoming increasingly routine.
The plan had been to venture into the Jenin refugee camp, whose more than 20,000 residents were forcibly evacuated in February 2025. The Israeli military has occupied the camp ever since, leveling entire neighborhoods, leaving parts of it looking more like Rafah than anywhere else in the West Bank. From the outside, you could see buildings speckled with bullet holes, gaping craters left by drone strikes, homes turned to rubble. The IDF is currently building a military base inside the camp, the first base in Area A since the Oslo Accords.
In the end, locals warned us not to go into the camp. They insisted, in fact. May have stopped me by force—for my own safety. Too many Israeli snipers hiding inside. It’s where they killed Shireen Abu Akleh, after all. We drank coffee and ate cookies instead. I thought about the familiar online taunt: “Go to Jenin as a Jew and see how they treat you.”
We raced to Zabouba, just outside Jenin, where the earthy smell of freshly uprooted trees hung in the air after IDF bulldozers destroyed an olive field. Kids danced and played among felled trees, but the landowner walked solemnly, cursing the destruction of the land that had sustained his family for generations.
From Jenin, I drove southwest to Tulkarm, where two more refugee camps—Tulkarm and Nur Shams—remained destroyed and abandoned after the same military operation that cleared out the Jenin camp. I met Fadwa, 55, who stayed in Tulkarm Camp for nine months after the mandatory evacuation, hunkering down in her home with her cat, Koshkosh, and her dog, Jean Valjean. She had enough food and all of her books, her own private library, so she saw no reason to leave—until her health deteriorated to the point that she had no choice. I met a young man who was expelled from Nur Shams and later watched from a nearby hilltop as his home was demolished. During the demolition, Israeli soldiers shot at his feet to force him away.
I made it into the Nur Shams camp with a few other independent journalists in press vests. The word is apocalyptic. So much destruction, but so much evidence of recent life still there.
When we exited, a neighbor of the camp warned us that an IDF jeep was racing out behind us. We ran for our lives. Later that night, I got this message from a friend I made in Tulkarm:
I traveled southeast to Qusra, where settlers had recently stolen a Palestinian home on the peak of the highest hill and were using it as a launchpad for attacks on the village. In February, they beat two Israeli activists, including an elderly woman, nearly to death, cracking their skulls with clubs. In March, they shot a Palestinian man dead and nearly stabbed his father to death. The surviving members of that family, strawberry farmers, have imprisoned themselves inside a cage to keep the settlers out.
I stayed with the shebab in another home on the stolen hill, where they kept a 24/7 watch. The attacks were constant. They went on all night. A pickup truck full of settlers arrived and unloaded a flatbed of large stones on us. They came with clubs and knives. Eventually, the army arrived. Soldiers chatted with the attacking settlers, smoked cigarettes with them, before coming to the home and throwing four Palestinian men against the wall. They were there to investigate the settlers’ claims that the Palestinians had thrown rocks at them. They had no answer when I asked why the settlers were allowed to live in a stolen home and attack locals from it—but the stones allegedly thrown in response were treated as a matter of grave concern.
Nobody was abducted, fortunately, perhaps because an American journalist was sticking a camera in their faces. But the settlers returned minutes after the soldiers left, cutting the electricity, blacking out the home—including the security camera system—and attacking again, nearly scaling the wall and making it inside. Fortunately, we had an amateur electrician inside who MacGyvered a new power source.
The next day, we watched a settler grazing sheep just outside the home. “Those are my sheep,” one of the guys told me. The settler had stolen them. “That’s my land, my crops. And he’s living in my uncle’s home.” That night, settlers broke into another home on the hill and stole the doors and windows right out of the frames.
I went from Qusra to Sebastia, where the town’s beautiful archaeological sites were teeming with Israeli workers. I’ve been reporting on this town for years, but I have never seen so much occupation activity. The day before, they had stolen a newly excavated Roman column, lifting it with a bulldozer onto a truck and driving away with it. Looting the town’s treasures—exactly what they accuse the Palestinians of doing to justify their takeover of heritage sites. At a wedding, I bumped into Ayman Schaer, who was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier with a butterfly bullet during one of my visits in 2024. I saw him last October, and he was still undergoing surgeries, still unsure if he would ever walk again. He was grimacing in pain, sweating just from sitting up to talk. At the wedding, he was on his feet and smiling—the first time I’d ever seen him like that. Outside, soldiers were raiding Sebastia again, kicking in the municipality’s door.
In Masudiya, next door to Sebastia, settlers had stolen the historic Ottoman-era railroad station, where families from across the region once gathered for festivals. It’s the same story, over and over: Settlers showed up one day and planted a flag. Then they built a fence. Then their flocks were grazing there. Then local farmers were beaten and tear-gassed for trying to reach their own land. It had only been a few months, but settlers had already taken over 4,000 dunams of land—everything in Area C—and were now pushing into Areas A and B. I met a young woman who had just graduated from Birzeit University and returned home to Masudiya. Already, she wants to leave again. “I can’t even leave the house by myself anymore,” she told me.
In Burqa, settlers had stolen a natural spring that supplied water for the village and many neighboring ones. Imagine stealing a spring. They’d cut all the pipes, built a swimming pool for settlers, and rerouted the flowing water into the nearby outpost.
Next to a wall commemorating the town’s 72 martyrs since 1936, soldiers spent the night with an electric saw, cutting down a thick metal statue of Handala, the Palestinian cartoon icon. Only its two feet remained.
I drove all the way south to Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron Hills, staying in Umm al-Khair, where a settler murdered Awdah Hathaleen less than one year earlier. I’d planned to spend a week visiting different villages in the hills, but the situation in Umm al-Khair was so bad that I wasn’t able to leave for more than a short day trip. The outpost had grown exponentially since I was there in October. Israeli flags were everywhere, including covering the sign welcoming visitors to the small hamlet. A new gate was installed and closed at will by soldiers and settlers alike, blocking the only road in and out of the village. One indication that a settler attack was coming was that they’d locked the gate. A close friend of mine there told me he’d been diagnosed with depression. “I just see no hope,” he told me. “It’s all so dark.” Another told me he’d quit activism. “What’s the point?” he said. “It accomplishes nothing.” Before Portugal vs. Spain, he’d told me, “All I have left is Ronaldo.” We watched together. “If Ronaldo played for Israel, I’d have no choice but to cheer for them,” he said. He spit out his soda laughing. After Portugal lost, I barely saw him again.
The settlers’ latest gambit was attempting to steal an entire home. Salim’s home. They had been showing up in his backyard, ripping out his fence, and planting Israeli flags. They had kicked a woman out of a bathroom. On my first night there, they attacked, trying to push through the backyard and reach the house. The Palestinians and international activists formed a defensive line to try to stop them. Many of them were beaten. The settlers threw chairs and razor wire. A settler with a pistol swept my legs out from under me with a metal rod, then three men jumped on me, one of them swinging at my head. The soldiers came and arrested three activists. They declared Salim’s home a closed military zone—a classic technique to clear the area of activists—which did not stop the settlers from returning the next morning to drink coffee in his yard. Salim had not been able to reach his livestock in nearly a week. They had no food or water.
I spent time with Hanady, Awdah’s wife, and her three small children. She has been baking a lot because it is the only thing she enjoys. She discovered that I would eat anything she made. Her kids are afraid. She doesn’t know what to do. She wants to leave, but she has nowhere else to go. More than anything, she misses her husband. “Our love story was so rare,” she told me. “There’s no one else like him.”
One morning, two bulldozers drove into neighboring Deirat, accompanied by dozens of soldiers. We followed them and watched as families in every home along the demolition crew’s path scrambled to salvage their belongings. When the bulldozers stopped in front of their targets, soldiers began firing sound grenades and dragging people out with zip-tied hands. The smell of a demolished home is acrid. It burns your eyes and throat. A soldier took a video, panning from the home being demolished to the weeping women and children watching it happen. Maybe for TikTok. A young girl screamed. Her father was in jail, and now they took her home. The homes they destroyed had been beautiful.
Congressman Ro Khanna came to visit Umm al-Khair. The locals took him in, showed him how the state was erasing their lives. Shortly after he left, I got frantic texts from one of his staffers saying that their bus had been hijacked by machine-gun-wielding settlers. When soldiers showed up, they sided with the settlers. Days later, when the story made international headlines, Israel’s allies would claim it was embellished or entirely fabricated. Obviously, it was not. There is nothing remarkable about what happened there. In fact, they got off easy.
I didn’t respond to the staffer’s texts right away because I was busy being attacked myself. Shimon Attaia, the sadistic settler who established the outpost in Umm al-Khair, showed up with a mob of his vicious young disciples. They were trying to steal another tract of land. First they went for the men. I was hit more times than I could count. Kicked repeatedly in the inside of my kneecap. Punched in the gut. Jabbed in the throat. You cannot fight back, because they’ll take revenge on the community itself. It’s just what they want, and when we wouldn’t give it to them, they turned on the women and elderly. Hanady’s mother was thrown to the ground. She had to be hospitalized. Attaia kneed an old man in the groin. But it still wasn’t enough. Attaia threw a tantrum and flipped a dumpster. He called his friend, who showed up with an assault rifle that got tangled in his dog leash. Attaia called the army and stamped his feet, pointing at who he wanted arrested. I was one of the chosen ones. They detained me for thirty minutes, demanded I unlock my phone and give it to them. When I told them I was calling my lawyer, they left without a word.
(More videos from the attack can be found in this thread.)
Khanna would go home and talk about what happened to anyone who would listen. It was great exposure, I thought. You can read his account here. He said he’d never experienced racial profiling like he did in the West Bank. Then he started getting pressed on his policy positions. No to broad economic sanctions on the state. No to a full arms embargo. No to blocking the sale of Iron Dome parts. Israel had a right to defend itself, he said, but Palestinians should focus on nonviolent resistance. I found it inexplicable.
If you’ve made it this far, consider upgrading to a paid subscription at 20% off.
My last stop was al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya. This is where Mohammed Ibrahim, the 16-year-old Palestinian American kid who was abducted by soldiers and held in military prison for nearly ten months, is from. And also his first cousin Sayfollah Musallet, who was beaten to death by settlers there on July 11, 2025. I went there for the anniversary. To accompany his father, Kamel, to the site where his son was killed. Settlers had occupied the land since last April. Anyone who went near was attacked, including me, when I tried last October. The mayor of neighboring Sinjil warned us that a settler with an M16 lived on the mountain and shot from afar. We knew it was dangerous. Kamel traveled in an armored SUV with a CNN crew. I followed behind in a rental Kia with a few other independent journalists. Of course, we were attacked.
(You can watch the Democracy Now! segment about the attack here.)
I talked to an Israeli soldier after. I informed him that the settlers who attacked us were living in a Palestinian home in Area A. “Are you sure?” he said. “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.” He told me he’d visited the home and was pretty sure it belonged to the settlers. Of course I wasn’t wrong.
CNN aired the footage of the attack. Millions of people saw it. It was another PR disaster for Israel, and so they went out and arrested four settlers. It was just like Turmus’ayya—they arrested a few grunts to quiet the critics, but unless the settlers were removed from the land they had stolen, it would be meaningless. The settlers told a judge they had been sent down to detain us by the leader of the outpost. They said there was a “gun attack threat.” Ha ha. One of them was 14 years old—a child soldier. How about going after the leader?
It was a terrible week of press for Israel when it came to settler violence. First Ro Khanna, then the CNN attack. Here’s the part that didn’t make headlines in the US: that same week, Israel approved dozens of new settlements in the West Bank—including the retroactive legalization of violent outposts—committed more than a billion shekels to building them, and announced plans for new access roads to connect them. In the Jordan Valley, the government distributed drones and other military equipment to settlers living in illegal outposts. The IDF’s West Bank chief then appeared at a conference for settlers living in illegal farming outposts, many of which have been linked to violence and the displacement of Palestinian communities, where he told residents that they “greatly strengthen security.” “I love you,” he said. “I appreciate you, and I appreciate what you do.” How nice.
Five days after the anniversary of Sayf’s death, settlers came down from the same olive fields where they’d attacked us to assault Sinjil with fire and guns. Apparently those four arrests didn’t make the problem go away.
With CNN cameras gone, the military responded by tightening the siege on Sinjil, a community already trapped inside a cage. As I write this, the attacks by both settlers and soldiers are ongoing. The West Bank is the most predictable place on earth.
Every time I read any of this I am heartbroken and furious and want to throw my device across the room. Thank you for doing this. I will share the crap out of it.
thank you for this reporting