ON JULY 1ST, Samira was feeding her two young children in her home in Umm al-Khair—a small Palestinian Bedouin village of some 250 people in the southern West Bank region of Masafer Yatta—when she heard cries for help. She rushed outside to find her 16-year-old cousin on the ground, tears streaming down his face as Israeli settlers from a nearby outpost stood over him, pepper spray in hand. Other women from the village, many of them elderly, gathered around, and the settlers began to beat them with sticks. “I saw my mom lying on the ground next to me, and my mother-in-law on the other side of me,” Samira, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her safety, told me. “I didn’t understand what was happening.”
Samira recognized these settlers; they often harassed the village’s residents, and had become bolder in the past weeks after the Israeli military demolished 11 structures in Umm al-Khair, leaving 38 people, including 30 children, homeless. Three days after the demolitions, the settlers arrived and forcibly entered Palestinians’ homes, demanding to be served coffee; two days after that, they carried out the attack Samira witnessed. During that incursion, Shimon Attia, a notoriously violent local settler, arrived with a gun and began shooting live fire into the air as his compatriots continued pepper spraying and beating the old women. When an ambulance eventually arrived to try to bring the six injured women and children to a hospital, the settlers blocked it, with Attia calling out in Hebrew, “come on, come on, to the grave, to the grave!” ….more