For as long as my generation can remember, our community of Masafer Yatta in the south of the West Bank has been standing on the edge of a cliff. For decades, settlers have been attacking our homes, the Israeli occupation forces have been demolishing them, and the highest ranks of government have been planning to remove us from the region entirely. Things had already been bad for a long time when Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, settlers themselves, were elected to power in 2022 – but we sensed that it was about to get much worse. We began to experience firsthand the intensified violence of settlers now fully and openly backed by the state.
But after 7 October, the violence became a whole new story. We saw how the international community’s unconditional support of the genocide in Gaza emboldened the settlers in the West Bank in general, and in Masafer Yatta specifically. They started to kill Palestinians on sight. For the past sixteen months, it has seemed they have no limits – that when they see a Palestinian they have to kill them. Last year, in the days following 7 October, settlers critically wounded Zakaria Al-Adara in his home village of Tuwani: they simply approached and shot him at point blank. ….more