Beatings, threats at gunpoint and fleeing in terror: Inside the most aggressive West Bank land grab in 50 years

The man in Israeli military uniform sliced off Mohamed’s clothes with a knife, urinated on him, and then, after relentlessly beating him, tried to rape him with a stick. He details the assault that took place in the village of Wadi al-Siq, about 20 miles northeast of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.

Mohamed Mattar, 46, a Palestinian activist and humanitarian, had come to this Bedouin community to assist 30 Palestinian families that lived there. They appealed for help as attacks by Israeli settlers across the occupied West Bank had surged and become dangerously violent in the aftermath of Hamas’s brutal attack in southern Israel on 7 October.

There were reports that armed settlers were planning a “cleansing day” in retaliation for the attack by Hamas that killed 1,400 people. And so on that day – 12 October – panicked families in Wadi al-Siq, who had already been subjected to multiple terrifying armed raids, decided to evacuate. With Mohamed’s help, they began loading the cars up, but before they could successfully leave, two pickup trucks arrived, packed with armed settlers and men in military uniforms.

Mohamed says the men – he identifies them as a mixed group of Israeli police, soldiers, and settlers in military uniforms – forced those gathered to empty their bags at gunpoint, and found kitchen knives among their belongings. Mohamed says they accused him of planning to stab one of them.

“They took me and two other men deep into the village so that no one could hear our voices. And then they took turns to hit us one by one for two hours,” Mohamed tells The Independent while showing photos of his injuries immediately after the attack, and of the scars that still crisscross his body. He was blindfolded, and his hands were bound by metal wire, which has left permanent gouge marks on his wrists.

He says one of his assailants – who he believes to have been an Israeli settler in military uniform – then cut off his clothes with a knife, sprayed him with water, urinated on him, and started beating him savagely with sticks and a rifle.

“My attacker lost his mind – he started jumping on my back to break my spine, like he wanted to disable me. He kept shouting, “All Arabs should die. All who don’t die should go to Jordan,” Mohamed says.

Then the man tried to insert a stick into Mohamed’s anus, he says. “I fought him hard to get him off my back to stop him from assaulting me like this. He broke the stick into three pieces by beating me.”

In the end, after multiple calls were made to the Israeli military, a commander intervened. Mohamed was released and remains wounded weeks later.

But the 30 families, comprising 180 people including 25 children, were forced to flee their homes despite having lived in Wadi al-Siq for more than three decades.

“They told us at gunpoint we had to leave,” says Ali Arrara, 35, a father of five, speaking from a tent in an olive grove in a nearby town where he is now camping with the other displaced families.

“I wanted to take the medicine for my immunocompromised three-year-old daughter from the fridge, but they wouldn’t even allow me to do that.

“They destroyed the fridge and the medicines in front of me,” he adds.

The children now live in fear, and cannot stop crying. Behind Ali, one of his sons, a six-year-old boy, is in floods of tears.

“My older daughter, who is four years old, was so scared. Now, whenever she sees a car or pickup truck, she screams ‘They are coming,’” says Ali.

The story of Wadi al-Siq is not an isolated one. The occupied West Bank is fast “boiling over”, according to the UN, whose top officials have repeatedly raised the alarm. They fear a spillover risk from Gaza, which could open another front in this already devastating war.

Around 450,000 Jewish settlers now live in the occupied West Bank, which is home to around 3 million Palestinians. The settlements – which range in size from hilltop caravans to sprawling commuter towns – are built on land captured by Israel in a 1967 war, and have been steadily expanding. They are illegal under international law, and are often cited as the main obstacle to peace, and to a two-state solution involving Palestine.

International and local rights groups say that “state-sponsored settler violence” has long been on the rise, and is used, alongside building restrictions and the strangling of access to amenities, to force Palestinians off their land. Most of this action is concentrated in Area C (where Wadi al-Siq is located), which makes up two-thirds of the West Bank. As laid out in the second Oslo Accord of 1995, it is under Israeli civilian control.

But these attacks, and land grabs, have accelerated in the month since Hamas’s brutal massacre, which Israel has responded to by ferociously bombing Gaza.

Xural.com