Felicity:
Here is the latest news from the Villages Group, who continue, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, to visit their friends in the South Mount Hebron hills [near the southern border of the West Bank]. This report concerns a tiny village, Umm al-Khair, where once I sat with children in a tent and sang with them. Already, they knew constant violence from their neighbours in the settlement, and they were already deeply traumatised.
Since 7 October, Villages Group members have witnessed and documented a huge upsurge in violent aggression by people in the settler community, to whom the government is providing both weaponry and encouragement in increasingly explicit terms for them to take the land across the West Bank and drive the Palestinian people out.
Hundreds of Palestinians have already been killed there, thousands more wounded: the terrifying realisation is that, having succeeded in its genocide in Gaza, those in power in Israel will do the same in the West Bank – again, while the world watches and lets it happen.
What happened in Umm al-Khair in July would seem to confirm this fear – and the world wasn’t even watching, because our mainstream media are directing our attention elsewhere.
The Villages Group is now doing everything they can to help the people of Umm al-Khair.
Erella:
Our friends all,
When we visited Umm al-Khair in mid-June, we asked Tareq whether the settlers from Carmel continue their daily harassment of the villagers.
Tareq said that nonviolent resistance has its benefits – there have been no harassments by Carmel’s standby squad for about a month now. They used to infiltrate the private space of the neighbours and do as they pleased there, while armed and wearing army garb.
This morning, at 8.27am, Eid sent a message on WhatsApp: two bulldozers and a convoy of military vehicles are standing near Umm al-Khair, and I answered: as usual, demolition is coming. We just don’t know where, yet. What stress.
At 9.11am, Tareq sent a voice message with his trembling voice, saying they are demolishing the tent of the community centre that has had a demolition order since 2008 but was not destroyed for the past 16 years.
At 9.48am, he reported they were demolishing the electricity control centre of the village as well as the solar panels, and that the bulldozers were already standing next to Eid’s house.
They are demolishing Eid’s home. Then they proceed to demolish another five houses in the compound belonging to Yasser, Eid’s uncle.
During this entire horrible time, we could not enter Umm al-Khair, in spite of our proximity. The army had closed it off from every possible direction.
At 2.30pm, the demolition convoy left the village after this surprise attack. 30 men, women and children, babies and the elderly were left homeless. It’s a very hot day. Not a scrap of shade in this desert.
2.35pm: a tent is rapidly put up to give a bit of shade.
At 3pm, we reached Umm al-Khair. I hugged Tareq. Then I met Eid. For a long moment we cried on each other’s necks. Then Eid said he was tired. I told him I was too. The we just looked into each other’s eyes and I said I was helpless, and Eid said he was, too. And I said we have only our friendship and no bulldozer could demolish that. Eid said this was so true. And, again, we shed a polite tear.
Irene wrapped us with love, Yair spoke with Tareq, and Noga took photos of the house that had collapsed, burying an entire life underneath.
Then I met Mu’atasem, Eid’s brother, who is also a close friend of ours. He said they – the forces – are not human. I said that the worst thing is that they are human. Mu’atasem understood exactly what I meant and gave me his wise, beautiful smile. Then I hugged Ne’me (Eid’s wife) and cried again. Then we parted and were on our way home.
At 5.05pm, army-garbed armed settlers entered and confiscated the tent that was put up hurriedly in order to give some shade, and arrested Mu’atasem who had tried to put up another small tent for the same purpose.
At the same time, Umm al-Khair was declared a ‘closed military zone’ in order to prevent the entrance of any kind of aid.
At 6.10pm, the army announced that Mu’atasem was released in Susya, but for many hours no one heard anything from him and his whereabouts were unknown.
Only at 8.30pm did we finally hear that he had returned home, and there are as yet no more details.
I write this in a blurry state, as my mind is exhausted.
PN:
This report was written on behalf of the Villages Group on 26 June. The attack was so severe, it was actually reported in the Guardian on 28 June, which included this comment: ‘Palestinian infrastructure in the area is frequently demolished on the grounds that the residents do not have building permits, which are nearly impossible to obtain, while surrounding illegal Israeli settlements flourish. UN experts have said such demolitions can be considered war crimes.’
Erella reported later that, on 1 July, another group of settlers ‘invaded the remaining homes at Umm al-Khair, beat up the villagers, pepper-sprayed their eyes and put up a tent in their yard.’
Four elderly women, and a boy who was about to sit his university entrance exam the next day, had to spend the night in hospital.
Then, on 3 July, the settlers returned to cut the main pipe supplying water to the village (see photo). Erella wrote: ‘250 women, men, the elderly and children are left without water on days close to 40 degrees centigrade.’
Later that evening, the settlers stole the few remaining pieces of wood in the village, which would have been used to bake bread in the outdoor oven.
Erella: ‘Actual physical nausea floods me. How low can one still go? How vile and disgraceful. And so much violent brutality in that vileness.’
That same night, 3 July, settlers went to a nearby village, Khalet a-Dab’e, where they set fire to farmland and an orchard of fruit trees, broke into 12 homes and vandalised them, and stole 82 sheep and goats belonging to two of the village’s families.
Solar panels were smashed and one home went up in flames.
No settlers were arrested. One Palestinian villager was arrested.
Erella, who is a Jewish Israeli, born in Haifa, summed up: ‘In the first week of July 2024, Jews perpetrated a pogrom upon the Palestinians of Umm al-Khair and Khalet a-Dab’e.’