Survivors of an attack by violent Israeli settlers have described being “hunted” across aWest Bankvalley by men armed with pistols, rifles and batons, who beat them so badly that all 10 had to be taken to hospital for their injuries.
They included a 14-year-old Palestinian boy, eight other Palestinians and an Israeli activist, who had three cameras, his phone, car keys and wallet stolen.
Moments before the attackers reached the activist, Avishay Mohar, he managed to remove and hide memory cards with photos documenting the early stages of the attack.
The assailants, some of them masked, descended on Palestinians dismantling the last homes in the village of Mughayyir al-Deir, east of Ramallah. Its residents had all been forced out by Israeli settlers in an aggressive campaign that lasted less than a week.
A group, includingtwo men on UK sanctions listhad before established an illegal outpost, consisting of just a basic shelter and a sheep pen, barely 100 metres from a Palestinian home.
Although settlers have long used illegal outposts to harass and displace Palestinians from their land, setting one up effectively inside a village was unprecedented. Rights groups warned it was a sign of both settler impunity and official tolerance for increasingly open and violent land grabs.
Images of the latest violence were later recovered by Mohar, a photographer who works for B’Tselem, one of Israel’s most influential human rights groups.
“I went to document the residents fleeing the village,” he told the Guardian. “Throughout the day, settlers that now live in an outpost located dozens of metres from the village started wandering around provoking the residents.”
When the attack began on Saturday, the group of activists called in the police and the army. Within minutes, a military truck arrived, and soldiers moved in to disperse the settlers, eventually persuading them to retreat to their outpost.
But once the soldiers had left, the settlers resumed their assault on the Palestinians. They climbed on to the roof of a livestock shed the villagers had been dismantling and began trying to push Palestinians off the structure.
“At that point, the Palestinians tried to defend themselves and the settlers started hitting them, Mohar says. They started throwing stones on both sides. Meanwhile, the settlers started making phone calls. I heard them calling other settlers, telling them that the stones were being thrown at them and to come there quickly.”
Moments later, dozens more settlers, some masked, descended on the village aboard trucks and ATVs. Many were carrying batons; others had firearms and rifles.
“Things escalated at that point,” he said. “One of the Palestinians got hit by a rock in his face and started bleeding. Then I saw a settler that also was hit by something. I didn’t know what it was, but he fell on the ground. He had a gun on his belt. Another settler immediately took the gun off his belt and started shooting. It was a pistol.”
Palestinians fled alongside the activists, scrambling toward a nearby valley while settlers continued to fire shots and hurl stones.
“My son Omar, who is just 14 years old, was taking videos to document the attack of the settlers,” said Mlehat, 47, one of the Palestinian men. “The settler used a drone to chase us. They beat my son Omar on the head, he was left more than half an hour bleeding on the scene.”
“They did not shoot in the air,” Mohar said. “One had a pistol and two were shooting with M16s or other long rifles. Some of us were hit on the way. I was hit by a rock. On the way, two settlers caught me and hit me and stole everything from me. I had three cameras, one video camera. They stole everything and also my backpack. They searched my pants and took my wallet and car keys.”
Mohar began to run as settlers kept shooting in his direction. When they reached the main road, Palestinians and activists realised they had been surrounded.
“We had nowhere to go,” Mohar says. “Those settlers kept shooting at us and telling us to come over to them. We understood that we had nothing to do other than to walk towards them.
“When we got there, the settlers immediately took all of our phones and all the things we had in our pockets and smashed it with rocks. Then they made us all sit on the ground. Both masked and unmasked settlers started hitting us with batons and with rocks. They kicked us while we lay on the ground. I got hit by batons on my head, on my eyes, on my back.”
“I was sure that they were going to kill me because they kept hitting me with batons and kicking me. But then I heard one of the settlers telling his friends – because I’m Jewish and not Palestinian – ‘don’t kill him, hit him in the balls’. Then they tried to spread my legs and hit me, but I managed to flip on my belly.”
The settlers left the injured where they lay and departed before the ambulance arrived. Ten Palestinians were wounded, some with multiple fractures.
“This is all part of a project of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank,” said Mohar. “It’s not done by crazy settlers. It’s a state project. The state is informed of everything. If there was a will to stop those attacks, it would have happened in a minute.”
Two violent Israeli settlers, Neria Ben Pazi and Zohar Sabah, who had joined the campaign to drive Palestinians from their homes in Mughayyir al-Deir,had sanctions imposed on them last week by the UK. According to witnesses, they did not take part in the attack.
“We lost 25 houses,” said Mlehat, father of the injured 14-year-old boy. “The whole community were displaced. Those settlers are terrorists. They pursue ethnic cleansing against us. They don’t care if you are a child or a grown-up, they do not discriminate between a man or a woman. All of us are a legitimate target for them. What can we do?”
For many of the families forced out, it was a second displacement at the hands of Israelis, as their parents and grandparents had been forced from land near the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva when the state was formed in 1948.