A burned-out car in Al-Mughayyir, Saturday.Credit: AFP

“What I don’t understand is why the settlers who attacked us were masked. After all, no one will punish them and no one will do anything to them,” said a young Palestinian from the village of Al-Mughayyir on Sunday. He was just barely saved from Israeli attackers who invaded his village Friday afternoon – about 24 hours before the body of Binyamin Ahimeir, the Jewish teenager who was murdered in the West Bank that day, was found.

The statement summed up a decades-long, collective Palestinian experience. The settlers benefit from committing violence, which serves the state’s goal: to grab as much Palestinian land as possible. Through this systematic violence, dozens of unauthorized Israeli agricultural outposts and livestock herders’ farms have openly pushed the Palestinians off hundreds of thousands of acres in the West Bank. Over the past several years, the threat of settler violence has forced dozens of Palestinian herding communities to fold up their encampments and move to built-up areas in villages or nearby land.

When Defense Minister Yoav Gallant pleaded to the settlers “not to take the law into their own hands,” he wasn’t simply repeating the hollow cliché usually delivered in such situations. After all, the law isn’t supposed to collectively punish people with no connection to the crime by setting their homes and cars on fire. Gallant was describing reality. The application of Israeli law in the West Bank and the theft of Palestinian land – through bureaucratic means like expropriation, confiscation, construction prohibitions and demolitions, and through fear, threats, violence and de facto expulsion – are two sides of the same coin.

Throughout Friday and Saturday, the residents of some 10 Palestinian villages between Ramallah and Nablus lived with the knowledge that they were completely exposed to organized attacks – more violent than usual – by armed Israelis protected by the military. The villagers have no one to protect them; just the opposite. They knew that any attempt they made to defend themselves might end in dead and wounded – as happened in Al-Mughayyir on Friday afternoon. They knew that the military was also likely to raid their homes the following nights and detain anyone who dared try to keep the settlers at bay by throwing stones.

Settlers raid a village in the West Bank, Saturday.Credit: Itai Ron

The new Palestinian government condemned the attack, like all its predecessors on similar occasions. But it is bound by the Oslo Accords, which bar it from protecting its civilians when Israelis attack them, while the Israeli military protects the attackers.

Starting Friday afternoon, reports of settler attacks emerged from the villages of Al-Mughayyir, Turmus Ayya, Sinjil, Khirbet Abu Falah, Mazra’a, Luban al-Sharqiya, Atara, Duma, Qusra, Dir Dibwan and Silwad. In all of them, residents informed journalists and the WhatsApp group “Recording settler attacks” about one attack after another, more mobs of settlers at the entrances to villages, another invasion and blocking of a road. Recorded messages warned residents against traveling on the roads, and photos taken from a distance showed groups of Israelis scattered among the olive trees and fields in the area.

Before it was even clear that Ahimeir had been murdered, let alone who the suspects might be, masses of Israeli civilians who appeared to be religious Jews emerging from the outposts and settlements in the area used his disappearance as an excuse to do what they’ve been doing constantly over the years, just on a smaller scale: terrorizing, attacking villagers, destroying property, preventing agricultural work and grazing, stealing and blocking Palestinian roads.

According to the residents of Al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, Jihad Abu Alia – a young villager who was fatally shot that same Friday afternoon – was shot by settlers and not soldiers. At least four members of his family, including a woman and a 15-year-old boy, were wounded by live fire. The boy and the woman were each hit in both legs, while a man was wounded in the chest, his relatives saying that the bullet had almost reached his heart. Another man was wounded in the hip, also by live fire.

Residents reported that the soldiers had protected, through their presence and weapons, the masses of armed civilians, some masked, who raided their village. As in dozens, if not more, cases that have been documented in the past 20 years, the soldiers didn’t stop the invaders from shooting, torching houses and stealing a flock of about 120 sheep belonging to a villager – beating him when he tried to prevent the theft. During the raid, an unknown individual shot dead about 20 baby goats in another pen in Al-Mughayyir. The seriously wounded man, Jihad Abu Alia, couldn’t be driven to the hospital because the soldiers had blocked the exits from the village. Villagers said he could have been saved if he hadn’t been prevented from being taken in an ambulance.

People carried the wounded for several hundred meters to get them closer to privately owned cars that could drive the wounded to the hospital, villagers said. On Saturday morning, villagers had to use bypass roads to bring back Abu Alia’s body from the hospital in Ramallah to the village because of the blocked roads.

On Saturday evening, in the village of Beitin – next to Ramallah and Al-Bireh to the north – a 17-year-old Palestinian, Omar Hamed, was killed by live fire when residents gathered at the southwestern entrance to the village and tried to prevent Israelis from invading it. The Palestinians reported that an Israeli civilian shot and killed the boy.

A Border Police company in the West Bank, Saturday.Credit: Itai Ron

The Palestinians also reported additional homes being torched by Israeli civilians: more homes in Al-Mughayyir, as well as in Qusra and Duma. Attackers also set cars on fire. Israeli civilians and the military blocked the entrances to the villages along the Ramallah-Nablus axis, Israelis threw stones at cars with Palestinian license plates, and fired above houses on the outskirts of other villages in the area, wounding even more Palestinians.

In total, 91 Palestinians in those villages were wounded that weekend: 39 by soldiers, 43 by Israelis and nine where it is unclear by whom. Around half of them were hit by live ammunition. Twenty-three of the total are from Al-Mughayyir. In this village alone, 21 houses were fully burned by Israelis, who also damaged 32 vehicles and several agricultural structures, as well as water and sewage infrastructure. A full 360 trees were vandalized.

On Sunday, the youth who asked why the Israeli attackers bother to conceal their faces visited relatives and residents of his village who, wounded by gunfire and beatings, have been hospitalized at the government hospital in Ramallah. Other residents of Al-Mughayyir accompanied or visited their wounded relatives. Every patient and visitor spoke of the children’s fear and the fear of leaving the children alone.

The children’s fear is nothing new. Concern for the children didn’t start this past weekend. Neither did West Bank Palestinians’ knowledge that they are totally exposed to settler violence, without any local or international organization to protect them. But in the past half year, the fear of mass expulsion has been added to the list – expulsion not just from their farmland but from their very homes and villages, and from their country.

The Palestinians have always said that the goal of Zionism is to expel them, as it did on a mass scale in 1948. But their tactic of summud – steadfastness – succeeded, they believed, in thwarting the Israeli plan over the past seven decades. Since October 7, the assumption that Israel is trying to expel them has become stronger. They observe the tens of thousands of slain civilians in Gaza, the destruction in the coastal enclave, the masses of Gazans who want to go abroad to save themselves, the enormous political power of the settlers, and the Israeli talk about “voluntary” expulsion being the solution.

Every attack by settlers, protected by the army, is thus seen by the Palestinians as another step in the realization of an Israeli plan to expel them from their country.

Amira Hass