Masked settlers next to the village of Al-Mughayyir, last month.Credit: AFP

Sunday morning April 14, Imad Abu Alia from the village of Al-Mughayyir finally answered his telephone. From the sound of his voice it was evident that he was among those wounded in the attack by Israelis on the village, which is located northeast of Ramallah, two days earlier.

“I’ve been in the hospital since Friday,” he said. Without taking the time to describe his injuries, he turned to the subject of his sheep and goats: “They stole the entire herd, 120 sheep.” When some Israelis took two of his sheep at the beginning of March, he was enraged, so it was not hard to imagine how he was feeling now. “What will I do without them?” he asked in a broken voice. “I’ve got to get them back.”

Abu Alia isn’t the only one to have been the victim of such thefts. In recent months, Haaretz has learned of several cases of armed Israelis – sometimes in Israel Defense Forces uniforms and usually wearing Jewish religious garb – stealing Palestinian sheep and goats. The incidents have occurred in places in which the number of Israelis sheep ranches has grown over the past decade. They were erected without formal authorization and are illegal according to international and local law, but they have thrived.

Later that same Sunday, in a Ramallah hospital, Abu Alia told his story: “I prayed quickly at noon on Friday because I knew that settlers were surrounding the village. That was when it was first learned that a settler boy was missing. I keep my sheep in a pen in a structure that I started to build in a level area of the village. When I left the mosque, I saw masses of settlers. I saw that several of them were breaking into the pen and taking out sheep and goats. I wanted to get on my donkey and go out and collect them. But the settlers attacked me like a burst of rain.”

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

Abu Alia says the settlers beat him with sticks and stones, causing him to lose consciousness. No one filmed the incidents, both out of fear and because they were too busy trying to save themselves and others. But his fractured rib, his swollen face, the difficulty with which he speaks, the inflammation that developed in his right ear and aches and pains in his head and body all offer ample evidence of what happened.

In addition, his house and sheep pen, along with about 12 other houses and about 30 cars, were set on fire by the attackers, while IDF soldiers were standing by. Later, 20 goats were found shot to death, lying in their blood in another villager’s sheep pen.

The residents of Al-Mughayyir say the Israelis fired into the air when anyone tried to repel them and protect their home. Jihad Abu Alia, 25, was shot and died of his wounds. Residents say he was shot by an Israeli civilian, not by a soldier.

Imad Abu Alia in Al-Mughayyir, March.Credit: Nidal Eshtayeh

Imad’s sister, his brother and other relatives were among the 22 residents who were also injured by the shooting. Due to the earthen barriers erected by the army on the roads that connect the village with others nearby and the locked steel gate on the road that leads to Allon Road, the evacuation of the wounded was delayed by two hours. Had Jihad gotten to a hospital in time, he might have been saved.

I met Imad, who is 48, and his flock of sheep for the first time at the end of March on the slopes of a green hill that rises gently from the village plain. To the east runs the Allon Road. Imad said then that on March 5, four Israelis (two in civilian clothes and two in uniform) had stolen a ram and a ewe right in front of him while they were grazing on the same hill. They came in a Toyota vehicle and approached him in an olive grove, demanding to see his identity card and threatening him with a gun before leaving with the sheep.

The day before, no fewer than 29 head of sheep were stolen from four brothers belonging to the Ghnaimat family and their neighbor from the village of Kafr Malik. Some 14 Israelis – civilians and soldiers – ambushed them while they were tending to their herds on the slopes of a mountain west of the Allon Road. During the attack, six of those dressed in civilian clothes managed to take some 350 sheep away from their owners, Abdel Karim Ghnaimat says. He, together with his brother and a neighbor, managed to bring most of them back to the village.

The houses in Kafr Malik are spread out over a few high summits south of Al-Mughayyir. Like their neighbors in Al-Mughayyir, the residents of Kafr Malik have land lying to the east of the Allon Road.

As has been reported in Haaretz several times, attacks and threats by settlers in nearby outposts have gradually reduced the grazing areas that have been used by the Palestinians long before Israel was established. The loss of access to grazing areas and the high cost of buying food for their animals have forced families to sell their herds.

The systematic violence, which has been ignored by Israeli authorities, had by 2021-2022 caused more than a dozen pastoral communities to abandon their encampments east of the Allon road, where the settlements of Rimonim and Kochav Hashachar are located, as well as a growing number of outposts. In May 2023, another herding community was also forced to leave its site east of the road, in the fertile area of Ein Samia, where it had been for decades. It included the brothers of the Ghnaimat family and their neighbor, who have learned from last month’s attack that even lands west of the road are no longer safe from attacks and encroachment.

Abdel Karim Ghnaimat in March.Credit: Nidal Eshtayeh

With the outbreak of the Gaza war, violence by armed settlers – some in uniform – has compelled another 18 West Bank herding communities to abandon their permanent sites. Five of them were located in the traditional grazing areas east of al-Mughayyir and Kfar Kafr Malik. In one recent case, the expulsion was preceded by the theft of sheep: on October 11 last year, Israelis stole about 150 head of sheep from a community of shepherds in Al-Qanub in the Hebron district. Subsequently, eight families from the community were forced to leave their encampment under the growing threat of violence.

At the end of November, Israelis invaded the Bedouin village of Ma’arajat north of Jericho and stole 20 sheep under the pretext that sheep were originally stolen from them, as reported by Hagar Shezaf in Haaretz. On February 10, Israelis were reported to have stolen six sheep from pastures in the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan in the Salfit Governorate.

A day before, Israelis stole some 200 sheep and goats belonging to Riyad Shalaldeh, 32, from the village of Kobar northwest of Ramallah. Of the shepherds whose sheep were stolen, he was the first I met, nine days after the incident. Writing about this attack and theft took me time because of the preoccupation with the Gaza war.

Shalaldeh has four young children. The family originally comes from Si’ir village near Hebron and went north 40 years ago in search of grazing land for their herd. Riyad Shalaldeh was born in Kobar, where they finally settled.

When we came, the ground floor of their house, which they use as a sheep pen, was filled with kids and lambs. They did not go out to pasture on that terrible Friday, when their nursing mothers did go out and never returned. “I had to give them formula in a bottle, like babies,” he says. “Some of them refused. Ten of them starved to death. Over the first few nights, they were crying all the time for their mothers.”

The settlement of Nahliel, west of the Palestinian village of Kobar, in the West Bank, February.Credit: Nedal Eshtayah

That day, Shalaldeh set out at 10 in the morning with the herd to his regular grazing spot west of the village. With the flock, it takes about half an hour to get there. The area itself, across the gentle slopes of a wadi, is surrounded by olive groves. Around noon, Shalaldeh recounts, a Mitsubishi off-road vehicle appeared on a road that settlers had constructed, cutting through the vineyards (since October 7, settlers have illegally built dozens of such connecting paths in the Palestinian cultivated lands in the West Bank).

Shalaldeh hurried to call home and report what was happening. He told Haaretz that four armed men in uniform got out of the vehicle and advanced on foot to the hill where he was with his herd. Three of them were masked. At gunpoint, they demanded his identity card, and he gave them his identity number (he assumed the gunman had then checked the number on his phone, as soldiers have access to the data of the Palestinian population registry).

The IDF spokesman told Haaretz that “the IDF detained a Palestinian suspect for questioning after videos in support of Hamas and photos suspected of being used for surveillance of a settlement were found on his phone.”

According to Shalaldeh, the soldiers ordered him to get down on his knees and then handcuffed him behind his back. Nine days later, there were still marks on his hands from the handcuffing. “One of them struck me on the back with his rifle,” he says. Meanwhile, others began to collect his sheep and brought them down from the hill.

He then noticed a motorcycle with two Israelis in civilian dress approaching from the south. Paralyzed by terror and anger, he watched as they directed his herd away. He told Haaretz, and before that to some Israeli left-wing activists, that the soldiers held him there for about 15 minutes, put a sack over his head and then led him away and put him in a car. The person sitting next to him put a gun barrel up close against his neck. “I felt that the barrel would soon come out the other side,” he says. He moved his head slightly in the direction of the car door to ease the pain and when the man realized that, says Shalaldeh, “he began to beat me with his rifle on the side of the head.”

Every injury was etched into his body and memory, and was reproduced in our conversation the following week. He remembered that the vehicle stopped three times before he was taken out of it. He guessed that he was being handed over to another group of soldiers. During that episode, someone grabbed him from behind, hit him on the sides of his head and pushed him so that he fell to the ground.

Riyad Shalaldeh, February.Credit: Nidal Eshtayeh

He guessed that he was in some sort of military post near the Nahaliel settlement. This is in the so-called Gush Talmonim – several settlements and outposts that took over fertile Palestinian land filled with springs of about 14,000 dunams (3,500 acres) and have blocked access to its legal owners for the past 20 years.

There, Shalaldeh was held with a sack to his head and his hands cuffed behind his back. Every so often someone came and hit him on the head, back or pelvis, or stepped on his back or head. When he fell on his stomach, someone came and lifted him up to his knees, with his covered head bent. Another came and hit him on the back of the head, causing him to fall on his face.

He especially remembers one who “attacked me and beat me as if I had killed 50 Jews. I wanted to die, just for the pain to stop. He beat me for maybe five minutes. I heard voices shouting at him – probably soldiers – and he stopped and walked away.”

He lost sense of time, only knowing that every now and then someone came and beat him. Once, someone pressed a cold metal object to his head, which Shalaldeh realized was a rifle, and told him to be ready to “die a martyr.” He muttered the words of the Shahada (the Islamic declaration of faith) said by those about to die.

Bruises on Riyad Shalaldeh.

It was difficult to hear the descriptions of his abuse, which also included a phone call from someone who introduced himself as a Shin Bet security service officer. “Put me in jail, just give me back my sheep,” he says he told the voice on the phone. The voice answered, “You have no sheep.” At this point of recounting his experience, Shalaldeh’s voice broke. That phone conversation took place at around 5:30 P.M., as he heard the call of the muezzin from his village, or perhaps from the village of Baytillu to the west.

At around 7 in the evening, his captors returned him to the place from where they abducted him. Even on the way back they did not spare him abuses, he says. They dragged him with blows to the car, and beat him outside and inside the car. Again they pressed on his neck with the barrel of the gun. After a quarter of an hour or half an hour, the car stopped. Someone opened the door and the man next to him pushed him out. The sack was still on his head, and his hands cuffed behind his back.

Two men stood him up, led him a few meters away and sat him on his knees. One of them pushed him down so that he lied on his stomach, hit him again on the head and took the handcuffs off. He removed the sack over his head. Shalaldeh then saw that his captor’s head was covered with a hood.

The man said to him in broken Arabic, “Don’t move, otherwise I’ll shoot you. Sit here for five minutes, and when we leave, go home.” Shalaldeh had no way to call home, since they confiscated his phone. With great difficulty, his whole body aching, he walked about half a kilometer until people in the area saw him. They immediately took him to the hospital in Ramallah to be examined.

It was only later that he learned that right after he called home around noon, his brother and two nephews had run to the scene. They saw him being beaten and put in a car. In their photographs, taken from a distance, the vehicle and several figures can be seen by the road. They say they saw the sheep being taken to an Israeli sheep pen in the area, and then they saw a yellow truck enter the pen and leave after a while.

Riyad Shalaldeh and his son in the village of Kobar, February.Credit: Nidal Eshtayeh

Three days later, his brother was wandering through the pasture. He says that an Israeli known as a resident of one of the nearby outposts came in his direction with 30 head of Shalaldeh’s sheep. He demanded 1,000 shekels ($263) for their return saying “the food for them cost money.” Shalaldeh’s brother paid it. Shalaldeh says that the value of the 170 sheep that were stolen and not returned is about 300,000 shekels. He filed a complaint with both the Palestinian authorities and the Israeli police.

The spokeswoman for the police’s Judea and Samaria District refused to answer Haaretz’s questions on the matter.

The IDF spokesman received Shalaldeh’s story in full, calling his detention a “delay.” The IDF did not deny that he had been held somewhere near Nahaliel and indirectly confirmed that those who detained him were local settlers who had been recruited into the reserves as part of local defense efforts.

“Since the outbreak of the [Gaza] war, many local defense forces have been operating in the area for which the Judea and Samaria Division is responsible to maintain the security of civilians, including those in the Talmonim Bloc,” the army said in a statement.

As of March 23, the spokesman said, “the circumstances of the case are being examined. Any complaint received about the inappropriate conduct of IDF soldiers, including during operational activity or towards detainees, will be considered, as is customary, and dealt with accordingly.”

Ze’ev Hever, the head of the Amana settlers group, confirmed about three years ago what Palestinians and left-wing activists had long deduced from the growing evidence on the ground: that there is a method and logic as well as institutions behind the proliferating Hebrew herders’ outposts.

A herd of sheep in the West Bank village of Mukhmas, last month.Credit: Nidal Eshtayeh

They (and the violence that inevitably accompanies them, and which Hever did not relate to) have become a proven means of quickly seizing vast amounts of Palestinian lands, far more than the land that the settlements have managed to appropriate over the years through traditional means.

We don’t know if the recent cases of livestock theft are just a series of random incidents of emulation or a conscious plan. Be that as it may, apart from murder, of all violent attacks, livestock thefts cause the most severe financial harm to shepherds and their families: the value of each animal – between 2,000 and 6,000 shekels ($533 - $1600) – is the fruit of the years of care and investment from the moment of lambing.

Herding is a way of life that has been preserved and passed from generation to generation, a source of income and a savings account of every family that wants its children to continue their path or acquire a higher education. Theft erases it and takes that all away.

Amira Hass

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