Khalil Hathaleen with an international volunteer in his village Umm al-Khair, in Masafer Yatta.
Must ReadInside the Occupied West Bank
Palestinian villagers in the South Hebron Hills say violence has worsened since their community was put under a global spotlight through the documentary ‘No Other Land’.
This article is part of a six-day series exploring the realities of life inside the West Bank, from a reporting trip carried out by Eimer McAuley, news correspondent with The Journal, in the week between Ireland’s two football matches with Israel.
‘YOU ARE STUPID, like a sheep,’ Moni, a real estate worker from Tel Aviv, says to Khalil Hathaleen from the driver’s seat of his black SUV, after he pulled up at the entrance to Khalil’s village, Umm al-Khair.
The two become involved in a tense argument that switches between broken Hebrew and English.
“You are crazy,” Khalil says, speaking over Moni, who is visiting a nearby settlement.
At one point, the Israeli man pats his leg and tells Khalil, “People like you are the reason I carry a gun.” Whether he actually has a gun is unclear.
Sitting on a bench beside a play park, Khalil says that settler activity and violence have only worsened across this network of 13 Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills, known as Masafer Yatta, since the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land brought global attention to the area.
“They don’t care about the film, they don’t care what people think,” Khalil says.
“You have to come here at night to witness it.
The attacks are relentless, every night.
“This house and sheep barn to the front of the village are always targeted,” he tells us, pointing to a nearby property.
Khalil is a young man. He is full of energy but, also, exhausted at the same time.
Official figures reflect what he and other villagers in the area say about the escalation in settler attacks and demolitions carried out under orders from the Israeli authorities since 7 October.
The UN has reported that three communities in Masafer Yatta were almost entirely demolished in September.
Those demolitions in the village of Jinba on 24 September, it said, displaced 55 people, including 32 children, who remain in the community but sheltering in caves.
Across four communities in Firing Zone 918, 122 Palestinians, including 62 children, were displaced by demolitions in the five weeks between 18 August and 23 September.
Despite all of this, Khalil is determined that he and his community will remain here.
“This is my father’s land. My grandfather’s land. I would rather die on this land than be in any other place as a refugee. It is like what they said in the movie – there is no other land. This is the place where I will be,” he says.
These are not empty or dramatic words from Khalil. His brother, Awdah Halatheen, was killed by Israeli settler Yinon Levi last summer. Levi shot him when he tried to stop him from working on a Palestinian farmer’s land.
Awdah was an English teacher and an activist, and worked as a consultant on the film No Other Land. He was 31 when he was killed.
When Khalil’s family called the police, several family members were detained when officers eventually arrived at the scene. The family then had to fight for more than a week to have Awdah’s body returned to them, a struggle that sparked protests and a global outcry.
“They wanted to release his body under conditions. That we could not bury him here. Could not have a mourning tent. That he must be buried at night, with only some people there. He is from here, not anywhere else, we could not bury him somewhere he has ever been,” Khalil says.
The Israeli courts ultimately ruled that there was no legal basis for the conditions imposed on the release of Awdah’s body.
The settler who killed Awdah claimed he had acted in self-defence. He was eventually detained and then released on house arrest by the Israeli authorities, and remains in the area.
The conditions of daily life here are extremely tough, Khalil says.
Fifty-five children in the village have been unable to attend secondary school since the end of April, after a road and fence were blocked off. Israeli army personnel must come every few days to give farmers access to their barns. In October, Khalil says, a final decision is due on whether his village will be demolished entirely, as others have been.
As we drove out of Umm al-Khair, young Israeli settlers shouted at us from vehicles carrying stacks of thin mattresses. The nearest outpost, established by Israelis from the nearby major settlement of Carmel, is just 20 metres from one family’s home in the village.
“They are adding more beds, expanding,” says a Palestinian human rights worker who is accompanying me.
These are the ‘hilltop youth’, whom Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has labelled ‘vigilantes’ when claiming that they are responsible for the majority of settler violence.
Villagers in Masafer Yatta say settlers would not be able to carry out attacks and get away with them, cut down olive trees or bring their livestock onto Palestinian farmers’ land without the complicity of the Israeli Civil Administration, police and army.
Generation after generation
In the nearby village of Susiya, I meet three generations of men from the same family: Muhammed, Nasser and Ahmed.
Life was quieter here than in Khalil’s village, which is targeted more regularly. But since 7 October, Nasser says, attacks have become weekly, while encroachment on their farmland and interference with their farming practices are constant.
“We have three outposts here that we did not deal with before. You can see this tiny house on the hill across from us, the army has actually taken this down before, because it is illegal, but they have rebuilt it,” he explains.
He is a sheep farmer, and his barn is near the road that separates him from the outposts. The barn was set on fire in a Molotov cocktail attack. The burn marks on its covering are clear to see.
Nasser is 49, and has six children. One of them, Ahmed, is a student at the nearby Birzeit University, where he is studying international relations.
“Our children are our hope for the future. We work to send all of them to university,” Nasser explains.
“The settlers would take the air we breathe if they could, but still we are here,” he says, explaining that he himself has been the victim of settler attacks.
“They stoned me when I was working one day, and they stabbed the wheels of my tractor. Many times they have brought their animals to feed off my plants, and these plants are my livelihood,” he said.
Nasser and the other farmers in the village have adapted their methods to survive in this arid landscape, but also to survive being cut off from running water and the electricity grid.
Thin wires are linked to solar panels – which have been cut and stolen by settlers multiple times, he tells me – run across the soil. Tubs of water with azolla on the surface (a fast-growing aquatic fern) are used to feed sheep and goats, due to a lack of access to grazing lands.
At a peak in the middle of the village, a chair is set up where youths sit and look out towards the outposts at night.
“We have to do this – and have lights on – to show them that we are here, and watching at night, because that is the most likely time for attacks,” Ahmed tells me.
There are signs on the housing units here that say ‘Humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank’. Irish Aid is one of the listed signatories.
Muhammed, Ahmed’s grandfather, has lived through several cycles of expulsion and demolition.
“These signs do not stop them tearing the units down,” he says.
“Every single structure here has a demolition order. At any moment our way of life could be erased, like what happened in the other villages,” he says.
As the Israeli coalition government increasingly ramps up its rhetoric around settlement expansion ahead of the election, people in these villages are all too aware that displacement is happening faster than ever. Do they see any way forward in sight?
Nasser remains hopeful. He believes this wave of settler activity is a phase, and he believes in the community’s ability to resist displacement.
Khalil’s answer is more of a plea.
“We need people to come here and stay with us. To see it and to be in the community. If you want to come you are welcome to stay with us in our homes,” he says.
An older American man, Jim, a yoga teacher and laughter coach from San Francisco, nods in agreement.
“That’s why I’m here,” he says. “They need all the help they can get.”