A Cancer on the West Bank
Image by Dylan Shaw.
In 1979, I made the first of what would turn out to be decades of periodic visits to Israel and the West Bank. I traveled there for the New York alternative publication The Village Voice to investigate Israel’s growing settler movement, Gush Emunim (or the Bloc of the Faithful). The English-language Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, then reported that settlers from Kiryat Arba, a Jewish West Bank outpost, had murdered two Palestinian teenagers from the village of Halhoul. There, in one of the earliest West Bank settlements established by Gush Emunim, a distant cousin of my husband had two acquaintances. Under cover of being a Jew in search of enlightenment, I spent several days and nights with them.
Gush Emunim: The Origin of the Settlement Movement
Zvi and Hannah Eidels, my hosts, lived in a four-room apartment in the settlement, which jutted out of an otherwise lovely Mediterranean landscape dotted with stone terraces, olive trees, fruit groves, and grape vines. Kiryat Arba flanked the Palestinian city of Hebron and was an eight-minute car drive from Halhoul on which I wrote a separate article about the murder of those two teens.
My initial evening with the Eidels happened to be on the holy day of shabat.
The rush to finish cooking ended just before sundown and 32-year-old Hannah, very pregnant with her sixth child, turned to me. “Do you light?” she asked. For a moment I thought she was asking how I coped with power failures in the American economic twilight. She took me to the 10-by-12-foot living room. Just above a photograph of the spiritual father of Gush Emunim, Rabbi Avraham Kook, a bearded man with a fur-trimmed hat and heavy-lidded eyes, stood a row of candles on a tiny shelf. I suddenly recalled Friday evenings in my grandmother’s apartment in Philadelphia and was unnerved to find myself, an assimilated Jew — an atheist, no less — standing in Kiryat Arba, once again brushing up against Orthodoxy. I nonetheless took the matchbox, lit the candles, and stood there quietly for what I hoped was a decent interval.
Later, Hannah filled me in on her theory of Jewish superiority: all of creation, she assured me, is suspended in a great chain of being. On the bottom: inanimate non-living things. A link farther up: animate vegetation. Then, non-human animal life. Next, animate non-Jews. On the top, of course, were the Jews. “This may shock you,” she said, “but I don’t really believe in democracy. We believe,” she faltered for a moment, glancing at Zvi who was sitting quietly beside us cracking sunflower seeds and spitting the husks expertly onto a plate, “in theocracy. Right, Zvi?” “Not exactly,” said Zvi. “Not a theocracy. The government of God.”
Gush Emunim was both religious and militant. In a curious blend of ultra-Orthodoxy and historically secular Zionism, “the Faithful” claimed as their own some of the territories conquered in the Six-Day War, the 1967 conflict Israel fought against a coalition of Arab states, during which it took the West Bank, which its leaders called “Judea and Samaria.”
“Here began our first place,” one movement leader told me, “in Schechem [Nablus], where Jacob bought a plot of land. Here is the true world of Judaism.”
“Some people think the goal of Zionism was peace,” another Gush activist explained. “That is ridiculous. The goal of Zionism is to construct a people on its land.” But, he continued, “there were moral problems. There were Arabs living here. By what right did we throw them out? And we did throw them out… All the stuff about socialism, about national redemption, may be true, but that’s only one part. The fact is, we returned here because the Eternal gave us the land. It’s ridiculous, stupid, simplistic, but that’s what it is. All the rest is superficial. We came back here because we belong.”
And so began the settler movement, which, to this day, has never ended or stopped taking land from the Palestinians.
The Alon Plan
Even before that Jewish supremacist incursion, Yigal Alon, Yitzhak Rabin’s deputy prime minister, drafted a plan calling for settlements that would extend Israel’s political boundaries to the Jordan River. Such new Jewish settlements would ring Palestinian villages and towns and separate them from one another. In 1979, when I interviewed the mayor of Halhoul, where those two teens had been murdered, he took me to a hilltop, pointed to Kiryat Arba, and said all too prophetically: “The settlements are a cancer in our midst. A cancer can kill one man. But this cancer can kill a whole people.”
Following the Six-Day War, leaders of the Faithful supplied the shock troops for those growing settlements. It was common wisdom then that the situation “on the ground” was changing from month to month in favor of the Israelis. When I first started reporting there, a trip between East Jerusalem and Ramallah took about 20 minutes. However, once settler-only highways had been built and checkpoints put in place for Palestinians, the trip became at least twice as long. Initially, just soldiers posted on the roads, such checkpoints would later be industrialized with footpaths, tunnels, and turnstiles that looked like the ones in the subway system of New York where I later lived. Palestinians were then often forced to wait, sometimes for hours, before being allowed — or not — to proceed to their destinations.
The Israel-U.S. Peace Process
In 1993, a “peace process” was launched in — yes, you could hardly get farther away — Oslo, Norway. It “changed the modalities of the occupation,” as Noam Chomsky put it, “but not the basic concept… [H]istorian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that ‘the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever.’” The U.S.-Israeli proposals at Camp David in 2000 only strengthened that colonialist urge. Palestinians were to be confined to 200 scattered areas. President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed the consolidation of the Palestinian population into three cantons under Israeli control, separated from one another and from East Jerusalem.
From then on, Israel only continued its relentless occupation of Palestinian land. In 2002, it started erecting an enormous barrier wall along the Green Line and parts of the West Bank. At its most dramatic, that wall is a series of 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.
After 1979, every time I traveled to the West Bank I saw new Jewish settlements in formation, with their characteristic red-tiled roofs and white walls. Meanwhile, the Israelis restricted Palestinians from building new homes or even additions to current ones. In the West Bank city of Ramallah, that prohibitive situation has resulted in an uglified city center with ever taller buildings. Today, in photos of Ramallah’s contemporary downtown I can’t even recognize the place I last visited in 2009.
Violence
From the very start, Jewish violence has accompanied the proliferation of settlements. In 1979, settlers and soldiers were already terrorizing residents of the Palestinian village of Halhoul and committing violence elsewhere. “A rash of civilian acts of vandalism occurred last spring,” I wrote that year. “Settlers… uprooted several acres of grapevines belonging to farmers from Hebron… Kiryat Arba residents also broke into several Arab houses in Hebron and wrecked them.” A four-year-old boy slipped out of his house during one of the curfews (levied by the Israelis on Halhoul, but not, of course, on Kiryat Arba). That child was then stoned by Israeli soldiers. Five months later, I reported speaking with his mother. She “thrust the child toward me and pointed at a scar that still showed on his forehead. ‘What can we do?’ she implored me. ‘We have no weapons. We are helpless. We can’t defend ourselves.’”
In 1994, an American extremist settler, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinian worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and wounded another 125 of them. He was a supporter of the extremist Kach (Thus) movement founded by American rabbi Meir Kahane. In 1988, that movement and a split-off from it called Kahane Chai (Long Live Kahane) were declared to be “terrorist” in character by the Israeli government. It mattered little, however, since terrorism against Palestinians continued to flourish.
Too Little, Too Late
Forty-five years after my first report on the settlements, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that a farmer in his seventies living in the West Bank village of Qusra, Abdel-Majeed Hassan, had shown him “the blackened ground where his car had been set on fire, the latest of four cars belonging to his family that he said [Israeli] settlers had destroyed.” Six residents of Qusra had been killed in such attacks, Kristof reported, between October 2023 and late June 2024. Israel’s government responded to the October 7th Hamas assault in Gaza by endorsing “more checkpoints, more raids, more Israeli settlements.” Almost duplicating the agonized statement of that Palestinian interviewee of mine in 1979, another Palestinian, an American engineer who had returned to the West Bank, told Kristof, “I’m an American citizen, but if they attack me here, what can I do? They can break my gate; they can kill me.”
His article was entitled “We Are Coming to Horrible Days.” Coming? The horror began over half a century ago. Had the New York Times run similar articles, starting in the late 1970s; had successive American governments not turned a blind eye to what was happening; had Washington not continued funding Israel’s crimes with some $3 billion a year in aid, that country’s land thefts and other crimes on the West Bank could never have continued. In 1979, Israel was already confiscating water from Halhoul and other Palestinian villages, while in the ensuing years you could see swimming pools and lush lawns in the Jewish settlements there, even as Palestinian villages and towns were left to collect rainwater in barrels on housetops.
Twenty-three years after I made my first trip, the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem reported that, in “the first decade following the occupation, the left-leaning ‘Alignment’ governments followed the Alon Plan.” It advocated settling areas “perceived as having security importance” and sparse in Palestinian populations. Later, governments under the far more conservative Likud Party began establishing settlements across the West Bank, not just based on security considerations but ideological ones.
Jewish Supremacy
A word about the attitudes of Israeli Jews. In 1982, I interviewed a group of Israeli teenagers, one of whom, the daughter of Israeli leftist acquaintances of mine, told me that each new generation in her country was more right-wing than that of its parents. On one of several trips to Hebron in those years, I read this graffiti on a wall: “ARABS TO GAS CHAMBERS.” It certainly caught the mood of both that moment and those that followed to this day. For decades, in fact, the cry “Death to Arabs!” could be heard at some Israeli demonstrations. By the time Israel began its genocidal campaign in Gaza in 2023, you could watch videos of Israeli soldiers dancing and chanting “Death to Amalek! (The name Amalek refers to ancient biblical enemies of the Jews.)
Kristof writes that “Israel’s ‘state-backed settler violence,’ as Amnesty International describes it, is enforced by American weapons provided to Israel. When armed settlers terrorize Palestinians and force them off their land — as has happened to 18 communities since October [2023] — they sometimes carry American M16 rifles. Sometimes they are escorted by Israeli troops…The United States is already in the thick of the West Bank conflict… Many settlers have American accents and draw financial support from donors in the United States.”
But keep in mind that this is nothing new. Baruch Goldstein, that infamous mass murderer of 1994, was an American and it was very clear even then that American Jews were among the most rabid of the settlers.
In 2021, fulfilling the prophecy of the very first Israeli settler I ever visited, Zvi Eidels, the Israeli regime established what the human rights organization B’tselem called “a recognition of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
It feels bitter indeed to me to be able to say, “I told you so.” My accounts were largely ignored in those decades when I periodically reported from the West Bank. After all, I wrote for The Village Voice and other non-mainstream publications. The New York Times was largely silent on the subject then and Kristof’s recent telling observations sadly come decades too late. Even as I was finishing this article, Israeli forces were bombing densely populated neighborhoods in the Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps in the northern West Bank. (The Nur Shams brigade, which was an Israeli target, is an armed resistance group affiliated, according to Mondoweiss, with the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.)
Raja Shehadeh, one of Palestine’s greatest writers, recently let me know that even he – whom Israeli forces once recognized as an illustrious person and allowed to travel in relative freedom — fears venturing outside since the settlers are “all over” the West Bank. In a recent Guardian article he wrote: “I spent the last 50 years of my life getting used to the loss of the Palestine of my parents; and… I might spend the remaining years of my life trying to get used to the loss of Palestine in its entirety.”
I’ve known Shehadeh since 1982 and never in all those years had I seen him despair. It’s unbelievably depressing to find him writing this now. All I could write back was: “I’m afraid you may be right.” Sometimes evil does triumph. Israel has now become a largely fascist country with a deeply fascist government and it has been transformed into that, at least in significant part, because my country has profusely underwritten the most malignant developments there, which are still ongoing.
Just as I was finishing this article, in fact, the Associated Press reported that “Israel has approved the largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in over three decades.” That land grab, its account added, “reflects the settler community’s strong influence in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the most religious and nationalist in the country’s history.” Thus have the prophecies of the religious-nationalist Gush Emunim been fulfilled.
[Author’s Note: I am forever indebted to Noam Chomsky, with whom I first became friends in 1964, and whose 1974 book, Peace in the Middle East?, taught me about the realities of Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians. For my first trip, he provided me with the name of a person of great influence, the incomparable Dr. Israel Shahak, as well as of other holocaust survivors opposing Israel’s occupation. Noam Chomsky launched me on the long trajectory of my writing about Palestine from 1979 to this very moment. He is now 95 years old and in Brazil with his wife Valeria, recovering from a stroke. May he be blessed through the ages.]
This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.
Israel quietly disappears West Bank land
Israeli settlers are the foot soldiers of the state and its expansionist policy ( APA images)
As Israel’s genocide in Gaza enters its tenth month, its settler-colonial project advances relentlessly across historic Palestine.
The UN Human Rights Office is sounding alarm bells over Israel’s accelered land theft in the occupied West Bank, exacerbated by the forcible displacement of Palestinians through settler violence, home demolitions and access restrictions.
“The situation in the occupied West Bank is a matter of grave concern as Israel allows and facilitates an environment characterized by fear forcing communities from their homes and lands,” the UN office said.
Settlers, the statement continued, “acting with the protection and support of Israeli security forces, are escalating violent attacks on herding communities in the South Hebron Hills, Jordan Valley and East Jerusalem that have been encircled by settlements and outposts.”
Israel’s so-called security cabinet approved the legalization of five settler “outposts.”
While all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law and building them is a war crime, what Israel refers to as “outposts” are often built without even Israel’s permission and are considered illegal under Israeli law.
In their early stages, they often comprise a small number of the more extreme settlers gathering in a certain area with few caravans or structures, often unconnected to water and electricity.
Bezalel Smotrich, the ultra-far-right Israeli finance minister, is attempting to streamline the process of legalizing and recognizing outposts under Israeli law by providing them with basic services and creating facts on the ground.
As part of Smotrich’s push to legalize over 60 outposts in the occupied West Bank, he is now instructing ministries to put them “on the same legal footing as regular settlements,” The Times of Israel reported.
At a private conference of the Religious Zionism Party which was held at a settlement outpost near Qalqilya in the occupied West Bank, Smotrich discussed creating a “legalization bypass route” for outposts, by funding and providing services to them, according to settlement watchdog group Peace Now, which obtained a recording of the conference.
Smotrich described how what he called “farm outposts” would pave the way for taking over Palestinian land.
“The farm outposts are a mega-strategic tool for the protection of lands,” he said, Peace Now reported.
“We did not invent the wheel. Always in the state of Israel, pasture has been the most effective tool for preserving lands,” he added.
“You take a farmer, a thousand head of cows, a dime and half an investment and it protects you 40,000 dunams. A tool that, like everything else in the settlements, started from the bottom up.”
Smotrich is saying “out loud what Netanyahu is trying to hide,” Peace Now said.
“While all eyes are on what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza, they are also actively pursuing annexation of the West Bank,” the group added.
“Since the war began, over two dozen new outposts have been established, and a similar number of Palestinian communities have been forcibly displaced.”
Land theft
Last month, Israel quietly announced one of the largest state land grabs since the signing of the Oslo accords in the mid-1990s, Peace Now reported.
This involved 12,700 dunams (12.7 square kilometers) in the Jordan Valley, which were declared “state lands” by the Custodian of State Property within the Civil Administration, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation.
Declaring Palestinian land as “state land” is a legal maneuver aimed at confiscating land belonging to Palestinians by interpreting an Ottoman law that was utilized in a completely different context nearly two centuries ago.
This tactic enables Israel to circumvent the technical legality of land ownership, as “most privately owned land in the West Bank is not officially registered,” Peace Now says.
“The declaration of state land is one of the main methods by which the state of Israel seeks to assert control over land in the occupied territories,” the group says.
This method amounts to “overt measures that could facilitate the annexation of Palestinian land in violation of international law,” the UN human rights office said.
The newly declared state land borders another sizable territory that was designated as state land earlier this year, creating “territorial continuity” between settlements in the Jordan Valley region, as can be seen here.
This continuity is precisely the goal.
“I tell you that really, this is the significant revolution: if in five, six, seven years it is possible to get anywhere in Binyamin, Samaria, the Jordan Valley, within fifteen minutes on a two lane road,” Smotrich said at the conference.
“This is a revolution,” he continued, “this is how you bring a million people to [the West Bank].”
The current government has also transferred the authority over bureaucratic and legal work related to settlement declarations from the military to civilian bodies, streamlining the process of land theft.
Peace Now called this “a blatant violation of international law.”
At the June conference, Smotrich made this exact declaration.
“This thing is mega-strategic and we are investing a lot in it,” he said.
“We can produce much more capacity of work, much more [land] surveys, more [land] declarations, more plans, more of everything. This is something that will change the map dramatically.”
Smotrich said that declaration of state lands in 2024 will be “roughly ten times the average in previous years,” estimating that by the end of the year “between 10,000 and 15,000 additional dunams will be declared [as state lands].”
Israel has already declared nearly 24,000 dunams (24 square km) as state lands in the occupied West Bank, and the year is far from over.
Forcible displacement
While Israel steals land from Palestinians on one front, it drives Palestinians out of their homes and demolishes their property on another.
Israel has demolished, confiscated or forced the demolition of nearly 1,120 Palestinian-owned structures since 7 October, of which 38 percent were residential buildings.
These demolitions drove over 2,500 Palestinians out of their homes, nearly half of which are children, according to UN monitoring group OCHA.
The group said over half of those displaced were driven out during military operations, particularly in Jenin and Tulkarm in the north, and surrounding refugee camps.
Over 40 percent of those demolitions happened under the pretext of Palestinians building without a permit.
Israel refuses to permit virtually any Palestinian construction in Area C, which constitutes 60 percent of the occupied West Bank under the terms of the Oslo accords. This forces residents to build without permits and live in constant fear of demolition.
And the numbers exclude Palestinians who were forcibly displaced as a result of settler violence or access restrictions, more than 230 households, or nearly 1,400 Palestinians, including over 660 children.
Israeli settlers threaten Palestinians at gunpoint, vandalize their property, hamper their access to water, ruin their trees, damage their vehicles, steal their belongings and intimidate and physically attack them.
“Alongside demolitions carried out by the Israeli Civil Administration, such attacks are forcing Palestinians to leave their lands,” the UN human rights office said.
“This, in turn, aids consolidation and expansion of Israeli settlements and outposts in the areas.”
Settlers carried out over 1,080 attacks against Palestinians since 7 October, as per OCHA, causing both injuries to Palestinians as well as property damage.
At least 46,500 trees or saplings owned by Palestinians have been destroyed by those known or believed to be settlers.
Settler-colonialism is the goal
On 11 July, the United States announced sanctions on a number of outposts in the occupied West Bank, as well as on extremist individuals, and Lehava, an extremist group.
“We are imposing sanctions on four outposts that are owned or controlled by US designated individuals who have weaponized them as bases for violent actions to displace Palestinians,” US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said.
Miller said that Israeli outposts “disrupt grazing lands, limit access to wells, and launch violent attacks against neighboring Palestinians.”
This follows previous declarations by the US and other allies of Israel who have constantly supported its actions in Gaza while punishing a handful of settlers and their organizations.
But this has been a mere distraction.
The notion that settler violence is caused by a few bad apples is not only false, it sidesteps the centrality of settler violence to Israel’s settler-colonial project.
Settlers are not acting as individuals but on behalf of a state whose goal is the theft and total control of all the land in the West Bank.
They are the foot soldiers of the state and its expansionist policy, and view even the Biden administration as not going far enough to support their colonial mission.
Lehava slammed US President Joe Biden as “senile and anti-Semitic” and grouped him in with other “enemies” of Israel.
News of the US sanctions came as foreign ministers of the “Group of Seven” major Western powers also denounced Israel’s expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank, saying it was “counterproductive to the cause of peace.”
Israel’s genocide in Gaza, due to its staggering scale and magnitude, has diverted attention from the occupied West Bank, facilitating the state’s theft of Palestinian land, with Jewish settlers on the frontlines of that violence.
Ultimately, Israel’s so far futile effort to achieve its stated goal of eliminating Hamas in the Gaza Strip aligns with its broader objective to suppress any resistance to its settler-colonial violence across historic Palestine.
Even as Israel employs the Palestinian Authority and its security forces as subcontractors in the West Bank, armed resistance has flourished in smaller cells spread across refugee camps, towns and cities.
Settlers and some Israeli ministers may publicly dream of resettling the Gaza Strip, but their primary focus remains on the larger territory, constituting one-fifth of historic Palestine: the occupied West Bank.
Israel Targets Palestinians from Land and Air in West Bank
Mourners carry the bodies of four Palestinians killed by an Israeli airstrike late Tuesday during their funeral in the West Bank refugee camp of Nur Shams, near Tulkarm, Wednesday, 3 July ( APA images)
At any other time in Palestinian history, the West Bank’s resistance to Israel’s lethal military raids and colonial encroachments would earn the title of a third intifada.
Since 7 October, Israel’s military has intensified its raids into occupied West Bank cities, towns and refugee camps. These military operations, which often involve special units and an array of armored vehicles and bulldozers, have wrought widespread devastation, severely damaging electricity networks, water and sewage infrastructure, uprooting roads and destroying homes.
In the West Bank, Israel has been killing Palestinians by various means.
Israeli forces shoot Palestinians at protests, during military incursions or even by carrying out extrajudicial executions.
Now, even aerial attacks in the occupied West Bank is not an unusual occurrence, after the practice was dormant since the second intifada until last summer. Since 7 October, Israel has conducted dozens of airstrikes in the occupied West Bank, killing at least 86 Palestinians, including 14 children, according to records kept by UN monitoring group OCHA.
Armed Palestinian cells have expanded and refined their tactics to resist and confront Israel’s military raids, particularly in northern cities and refugee camps. One such tactic has been the wider use of explosive devices planted within roads where Israeli armored vehicles pass. Palestinians remotely detonate the explosive devices, killing and injuring a number of Israeli soldiers in recent months.
Refined resistance
In under one week, between the end of June and the beginning of July, roadside explosives killed two members of Israel’s army – a sniper team commander who was killed in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank on 27 June, and a combat driver who was killed in another explosion in the Nur Shams refugee camp near Tulkarm on 1 July.
Under the guise of wanting to uproot explosive devices from roads, Israeli bulldozers ravage through the streets of cities and refugee camps “to shave the upper layer of asphalt on the roads,” as The Times of Israel put it.
This has wreaked havoc on Palestinian communities, commercial stores and civic infrastructure in those areas.
During a 15-hour Israeli military raid in Nur Shams refugee camp on 9 July, bulldozers destroyed roads in and around the camp, damaging water, electricity and internet infrastructure, OCHA reported, in addition to the walls of homes and commercial stores.
The Israeli army claimed that the discovered explosive devices were “targeted toward civilians and Israeli security forces.”
Armed resistance has seemingly adapted to the Israeli army’s methods to combat them and inflict punishment on the entire community in the process. The Times of Israel said the explosive that killed the sniper commander in the Jenin refugee camp was a “100-kilogram” device and may have been placed 1.5 meters underground.
The device that killed the combat driver in the Nur Shams refugee camp also breached his vehicle’s IED protection, severely damaging it and flipping it upside down, suggesting the explosive device was particularly large and powerful.
“All of the explosive devices detonated against Israeli targets in the West Bank over the past year were made of improvised homemade materials, and some were very high quality,” The Times of Israel reported.
The increasingly sophisticated and organized resistance tactics are concerning the Israeli army in the West Bank as it invests in a larger effort to combat it, including an intelligence unit aimed at detecting them.
Since the beginning of the year, the Israeli army dismantled production labs for these explosives, as well as discovered and neutralized planted devices, the Israeli newspaper reported, figures that likely originate with the Israeli military. Around 1,000 IEDs targeted Israeli troops.
Since 7 October and through 8 July, 14 Israelis, including nine soldiers and five settlers, have been killed in the occupied West Bank, OCHA said.
Deadly raids
Children bear the brunt of Israel’s lethal military incursions into West Bank towns, cities and refugee camps.
An atmosphere of constant impunity demonstrates Israeli soldiers’ “contempt for Palestinian children’s lives,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at Defense for Children International – Palestine.
On Thursday, as Israeli forces withdrew from nearby Palestinian villages, they passed by the entrance of Meithalun, a town in the Jenin area. Palestinians threw stones at the invading Israeli military vehicles.
One kid who allegedly threw stones at Israeli forces near the entrance of Meithalun was fatally shot by an occupation soldier.
An Israeli soldier in a heavily armored vehicle shot 14-year-old Ali Hasan Ali Rabaya from a close distance of 20 to 40 meters, striking him under the armpit.
Ali managed to run for about three meters before collapsing to the ground.
“Israeli forces continued firing in Ali’s direction, striking at least five other Palestinian children,” DCIP reported.
Israeli military fire continued for about five minutes, preventing any nearby Palestinians from approaching Ali to provide medical care or transport him. It was only when Israeli military vehicles withdrew from the area that Ali was transferred to a nearby hospital by private car, where he was pronounced dead.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces killed 14-year-old Ghassan Gharib Zahran while he played with two friends at the entrance of the Palestinian village of Deir Abu Mashal, west of Ramallah.
Three Israeli soldiers traveling in a vehicle nearby opened fire on the kids from a distance of 80 to 100 meters, striking Ghassan in his back, DCIP said.
“A group of Israeli settlers gathered after Israeli soldiers shot Ghassan and began throwing stones at Palestinian village residents attempting to reach him,” DCIP said.
“Israeli forces opened fire on the Palestinian residents to prevent them from reaching the child, who remained lying on the ground bleeding for 15 to 20 minutes.”
“Unlawful killings of Palestinian children have become the norm as Israeli forces become increasingly empowered to use intentional lethal force in situations that are not justified,” said Abu Eqtaish.
“In short, these are war crimes with no consequence.”
Israeli forces and settlers have killed 57 Palestinian children since the beginning of the year, including two US citizens, according to documentation by DCIP.
More than 550 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, including at least 536 by Israeli forces, according to OCHA.
Israeli settlers have killed at least 11 Palestinians, and another six were killed by either Israeli army or settler fire.
Of those killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, 137 were children.
At least 246 of those killings have happened since the beginning of 2024, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Over 700 Palestinians, including 150 children, were injured.
Israeli forces and settlers have injured over 5,500 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, at least 800 of them children. One third of all injuries were by live ammunition.
• Article first published in The Electronic Intifada
Tamara Nassar is an assistant editor at The Electronic Intifada. Read other articles by Tamara, or visit Tamara's website.
