Settler outposts spread among West Bank villages, fuel fear of more attacks
Turmus Ayya: The fear is palpable in this Palestinian village. It’s clear how farmers gather their harvests quickly, how they scan the valley for movement, how they dare not stray past certain roads. At any time, they say, armed Israeli settlers could descend.
“In a matter of minutes, they get on their phones. They gather themselves, and they surprise you,” said Yasser Alkam, a Palestinian-American lawyer and farmer from the village of Turmus Ayya. “They hide between the trees. They ambush people and beat them up severely.”
In recent months, Alkam says Turmus Ayya has weathered near-daily attacks by settlers, especially after they set up an outpost that the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now says is on his village’s land.
Alkam says he can’t reach his own fields for fear of being assaulted. In a particularly gruesome attack, he watched a settler beat a Palestinian woman unconscious with a spiky club. The fear is shared throughout the West Bank. During October’s olive harvest, settlers across the territory launched an average of eight attacks daily, according to the United Nations humanitarian office, the most since it began collecting data in 2006. The attacks continued in November, with the UN recording at least 136 more by Nov. 24.
Settlers burned cars, desecrated mosques, ransacked industrial plants and destroyed cropland. Israeli authorities have done little beyond issuing occasional condemnations of the violence.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the attackers as a minority that did not represent most settlers in the West Bank, where settlements are considered illegal by most of the international community. But their continued expansion of outposts — conducted in public with seemingly few legal repercussions — and the violence have cemented a fearful status quo for their Palestinian neighbours. While driving in fields east of Turmus Ayya on Oct. 19, Alkam saw Afaf Abu Alia, a grandmother from a nearby village, harvesting a grove of olive trees. They were loaned to her after the Israeli military bulldozed her own 500 trees this year, she said.
She worked until she heard yelling in Hebrew. Settlers descended on the road nearby. Suddenly, one ran toward her with a club. “The monsters started beating me,” she told The Associated Press three weeks after the attack. “After that, my memories get all blurry.”
Video of the attack obtained by the AP shows a settler beating Alia with the jagged club, even after she was motionless. She was hospitalised for four days, requiring 20 stitches on her head, she said. Asked for comment on the attack, the military said its troops and police had “defused” a confrontation in which Israeli civilians were torching vehicles and using violence.
