The wild West Bank: The lawless settlers terrorising Palestinian farmers

Susya, West Bank – Wadi Raheem is a dry riverbed near the Palestinian village of Susya in the South Hebron hills in the occupied West Bank. The area has a stark beauty that is characterised by rolling hills, rocky outcrops and stunning vistas. Despite the generally poor soil, Palestinians have managed to eke out an existence here – reportedly since at least the 1830s – by practising subsistence farming and animal herding.

It is four o’clock in the afternoon and brutally hot. Khalil al-Harini, who owns part of the wadi, has asked me and two other activists to accompany him as he grazes his sheep. Israeli settlers have been harassing him for decades, but the frequency and severity of the attacks have increased significantly in the months since October 7, and he is worried.

Al-Harini is 81 years old, and his face, framed by a plain white keffiyeh, is lined from exposure to the sun. But he walks energetically among his sheep, waving his stick at them when they stray too far. He tells me his grandfather’s father was born on this land, and I can picture the same idyllic scene taking place a century earlier – an old man tending to his herd silently, with only the sheep’s rhythmic munching of the dry grass interrupting the quiet.

This stillness belies a deep concern for his family. His 15-year-old grandson, also named Khalil, had been threatened the previous day in the wadi.

First, two teenagers had come roaring down into the valley on all-terrain vehicles, music blaring and Israeli flags flapping in the wind. When they saw Khalil tending sheep, they turned up the music even louder, jumped off their vehicles and began to dance, thrusting their hips. The message was clear: “We can do whatever we want, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.”

Shortly afterwards, a settler armed with an M16 rifle showed up. He said that the wadi was a security zone and he promised that there would be “a big problem” if Khalil was there the next day.

As we found out, he meant it.

Under a veneer of legality

Like much of the West Bank, al-Harini’s home village of Susya has suffered its share of injustice meted out by Israel. Since seizing the West Bank in 1967, Israel has refrained from formally annexing it – with the exception of occupied East Jerusalem – and has instead focused on expanding its presence.

Israel has built illegal settlements, effectively incorporating these areas into its territory, while simultaneously keeping the number of Palestinians in Israel’s expansion as low as possible. Much of the effort to expel the Palestinians from their land has occurred in Area C (61 percent of the West Bank), such as in the Jordan Valley or the South Hebron hills, which are sparsely populated.

The authorities have seized roughly half of the West Bank for military and state purposes and also expropriated land for public needs.

And so it has been with Susya. In the early 1980s, remains of an ancient synagogue were discovered nearby – this was used as justification to expel all the villagers, including al-Harini and his family.

“I lived in old Susya in a cave inside the village,” he tells me. “But then the Israeli occupation forced us to leave in 1986.”

More expulsions of the residents of Susya followed in 1991 and 2001. On each occasion, they were forced to move farther and farther from the original village, however they made sure to remain on their ancestral agricultural land.

“We always want to stay on our land,” Nasser Nawajah, a resident of Susya who works for the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, told me. “We are afraid that if we leave, we’ll never be allowed to come back.”

Susya is now a hamlet of a few dilapidated shacks. The residents are afraid to build more permanent structures because they know there is a real threat that they will be demolished by the authorities. The entire village has been torn down on seven separate occasions.

Targeting Palestinians and their property

There are currently more than 700,000 settlers living in 150 illegal settlements and 128 outposts (settlements unauthorised by the Israeli government) in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

Many settlers choose to live in the settlements for the economic advantages granted by the government, but roughly one-third are considered ideological settlers, who believe they are doing God’s work by settling the land.

Over the years, settlers have targeted Palestinians and their properties through various means: throwing stones, setting fires to homes and businesses, cutting down olive trees, damaging water infrastructure and stealing or killing livestock.

Settler violence has also involved beatings and, in extreme cases, the shooting and killing of Palestinian civilians. In addition, settlers have often seized (PDF) private Palestinian land, with next to no assistance from the authorities to enforce the law and return the land to its rightful owner.

“My family was subjected to many attacks by settlers, and they were often very violent with us,” al-Harini says. “I remember there was an attack on me personally when I was grazing my sheep on my private land. Two masked settlers came and started hitting my sheep with stones. I tried to stop them, but they pushed me, and I fell on my neck, which led to a fracture in the third vertebra.”

A kidnapping at the wadi

Back at the wadi, al-Harini’s fears have been realised.

A white van stops on the dirt road in the valley, a hundred metres (328 feet) away. Three uniformed men emerge, M16s in hand. They run towards us, screaming, with guns pointed in our direction. “On the ground! On the ground!”

Khalil, having seen the settlers approaching, enters the wadi to join us. The uniformed men quickly pin him to the ground, a gun at his back.

The settlers continue to threaten us, telling us they’ll shoot if we make one wrong move. They call us Nazis, Hamas, ISIL (ISIS), anti-Semites. The hatred in their eyes frightens me.

I think about my friend Peter, who was beaten unconscious with a metal pipe by a group of settlers in Hebron a few years earlier. I cannot imagine what it is like for Khalil, who knows the settlers will act with complete impunity. Palestinians’ complaints to the authorities about these attacks are typically ignored. According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, 92 percent of investigations into settler attacks on Palestinians are closed without indictment.

I ask the settlers why they are threatening al-Harini, an old man simply grazing his sheep on his land.

The response: “He may be innocent, but I’m sure that his family wants to kill all Jews. Everybody hates the Jews. But that’s OK. God is with us.”

Eventually the settlers tire of the confrontation. They steal our passports, phones and cameras, and say we will be arrested if we ever return. Khalil is zip-tied and shoved roughly into the back of the van. They drive off. I shudder to think what will happen to him.

After the attack, I walk slowly up the hill to al-Harini’s house, where he is now with his wife, Hakimeh.

“My baby. My baby,” she cries softly. “When is he going to come home?”

An ‘unbearable’ situation

Everyone I spoke with in Susya noted a sharp rise in settler violence after October 7.

“The attacks increased on the village in general and were more violent than before. They attacked us at night and during the day,” says al-Harini.

“Settlers wearing army uniforms would come in the middle of the night and search and vandalise the houses. They cut the water pipes connected from the water well to the inside of the house. They prevented us from ploughing our land or even grazing on it.”

Data collected by the NGO Armed Conflict and Location Event Data confirm the villagers’ experiences. The number of violent incidents in the West Bank involving settlers doubled in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared with the third quarter, and the number of attacks with firearms increased sevenfold.

“The situation … is unbearable. The violence has reached levels we’ve never witnessed before,” Yasmeen el-Hasan, coordinator of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, a Ramallah-based grassroots organisation helping Palestinian farmers, told The New Arab in May.

She was speaking in mid-April after 1,500 settlers attacked the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, targeting cars, houses and livestock. During the three-hour raid, which was reportedly in response to the killing of a settler, one resident was killed and at least 25 others were injured.

The heightened violence is not random. With the world focused on the continuing genocide in Gaza, far-right factions of the Israeli government have used the opportunity to further their goal of annexing the West Bank.

Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who oversees settlement planning and has promised to flood the West Bank with a million new settlers, revealed as much to his colleagues in the Religious Zionism party, when he said that he was “establish[ing] facts on the ground in order to make Judea and Samaria an integral part of the state of Israel”.

Much of the violence is also promoted by Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose past includes threatening to kill former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, being indicted at least 50 times for incitement to violence or hate speech and referring to Baruch Goldstein as a hero. Goldstein massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in a Hebron mosque in 1994.

Ben-Gvir bought at least 10,000 assault rifles for security teams in October and proudly announced in March that 100,000 new gun licences have been distributed to Israeli civilians since October 7.

“The hordes of settlers that swept all over Palestinian villages were emboldened by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s ideological and material support of settler militias throughout the West Bank, even more so after 7 October,” said el-Hasan.

The consequences of the increased violence have been devastating. Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 600 Palestinians in the West Bank and seized 37,000 acres (15,000 hectares) of land since October 7. To date, 18 Palestinian communities have been emptied.

‘I thought they might kill him’

Khalil returned to the wadi the day after he was taken away by the authorities.

He says that the settlers had blindfolded him before taking him to a nearby army base for questioning. “They asked me about the land, and I told them it belonged to my family,” Khalil recounts. “One of the soldiers said, ‘Look at my face and know well. If you return again to that land, you will see something that you do not like.’”

Khalil was then dumped on the side of the road outside as-Samu, a town about 25km (15 miles) from Wadi Raheem. He walked to a house with a light on and called his family to pick him up.

With Khalil back home al-Harini talks about the fear he felt for his grandson. “I cannot express what was inside me that night,” al-Harini says. “When I saw them taking Khalil to the car, which was a civilian car belonging to the settlers, I became really afraid, and I thought they might kill him.

“Yes, I had that feeling. Because these settlers are very violent.”

“I felt afraid for him,” says Khalil’s grandmother, Hakimeh. “I started crying. My heart broke for him. He is still a child, no more than 15 years old. I expected that I would never see him again, especially in light of the circumstances we are living in.”

What would she say to one of the settlers if he were standing in front of her, I ask.

Hakimeh answers, “This is my land. I will not leave it, no matter what I have a right and I am the owner of this land. I will not give up a speck of dirt from my land. I will die and be buried on it. This land is our land. Nobody will force us to leave our land and our home.”

With additional reporting by Hamdan Ballal