‘Israeli settlers are in partnership with the army,’ say Palestinians after two shot dead in West Bank | West Bank
Even by the brutal standards of militant settler violence in the West Bank, the raid on Deir Jarir late Sunday night that left two Palestinians dead and another hospitalized with gunshot wounds was extreme.
Palestinians in the town said settlers from a nearby police station arrived after 9pm on Sunday, claiming they were looking for stolen livestock. They were soon joined by Israeli soldiers and police, who protected several villagers as they tried to take their sheep by force.
But when villagers became alarmed and a crowd gathered, soldiers shot two men and began three successive raids by settlers and Israeli soldiers at nearby outposts that lasted until 2 a.m., according to Palestinian residents of Deir Jarir.
Saber Ajaj, a relative of one of the victims, 53-year-old Odeh Farajna, said he found her moments after she was shot in the chest. Farajna, a member of the village council, owned a flower shop and helped with stonemasonry at the local cemetery.
“The moment I put him in the car, I knew he was dead,” Ajaj said in an interview during the reception after the funeral. “This attack was intended to kill”
In interviews as they buried the two victims on Monday, families and friends of the dead Palestinian men described multiple attacks every month in which settlers, backed by security forces, would arrive at homes on the outskirts of the village and then steal livestock.
“This is a partnership between the army and the settlers,” said Adel Rashid, father of young victim Abdul Adel Rashid Abu Mukh, 26.
Rashid said local settlers stole 21 of his sheep on Sunday, while 50 of his sheep were taken from another member of the village. Video of Sunday’s incident shows a settler, guarded by four IDF soldiers in green camouflage, removing a sheep from a local house.
The raids are part of a picture of worsening settler violence in the region as Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right allies step up land grabs in the occupied West Bank.
Arbitrary checkpoints and other restrictions to close towns like Deir Jarir following Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, have been backed by government plans to approve new settlements in the West Bank ahead of national elections that could challenge the authority of Netanyahu’s government.
On the hill above the village is a settlement built last year that appears to share water infrastructure with an Israeli military base, according to Dror Etkes, an Israeli who founded Kerem Navot, an organization that monitors Israel’s land policy in occupied Palestine. Residents said settlers and the army coordinated the raid.
7 people have been killed in the village since October 7, 2023. Portraits of these people were spray-painted on the walls of the city with the date of their death.
“The murder in Deir Jarir is an example of how Israel supports ethnic cleansing in the West Bank: as settlers invade and steal, the army and police accompany them and shoot Palestinians who try to protect their homes and property,” said Yuli Novak, executive director of B’Tselem, an Israel-based human rights organization that lists abuses by security forces.
An analysis by the Guardian showed that Israel has not prosecuted its citizens for killing Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of this decade; This creates immunity for a campaign of violence.
Attacks in the West Bank are intensifying. 17-year-old Fadi Hamdallah al-Naasan from the town of al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, died on Saturday after being injured by a bullet in his leg during the raid on his house by the Israeli army and settlers on July 11.
About a thousand people, mostly men, gathered in Deir Jarir for the funeral shortly after noon on Monday. They walked, carrying the two bodies from the mosque in the center of the town to the old cemetery.
There is a new set of gates on the road into the area, at a checkpoint established after 7 October. Security forces are said to have opened and closed at will, effectively cutting off the villages from the outside world.
“When they come to attack us, they are trying to make life here unlivable,” said Iyad Odah, 56, a village council member who knows Farakhna. Since October 7, the town’s farmland, which once covered thousands of hectares, has been inaccessible as local settlers push back farmers trying to access orchards and pasture lands, he said.
The Israeli military said on Monday: They had gone to Deir Jarir to escort Israeli settlers who claimed their animals had been stolen and wanted to get them back. The army said they opened fire after Palestinians threw stones and concrete blocks at security forces. They did not respond to questions explaining why they did not use non-lethal crowd control instead of live ammunition.
Responding to the IDF’s claim that they were attacked by “terrorists” in the village, Odah of the town’s village council said: “They are the real terrorists.”
