‘If you try to defend yourself, you’re dead’
Palestinians in Wadi Rahal were left to pick up the pieces after settler-soldiers from a nearby outpost stormed the village and killed one resident.
On Tuesday morning, the streets of Wadi Rahal were littered with stones and bullet casings — evidence of an attack the night before. According to the Palestinian residents of the village, which is located south of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, about a dozen Israeli settlers had driven in, some of them armed. They threw stones at cars and houses, and when residents came out to defend themselves, the attackers opened fire.
One resident, 47-year-old Khalil Salem Ziadeh, who divided his time between Jerusalem and Wadi Rahal, was shot dead. Four others were wounded. Ziadeh’s family decided to bury him in the village, and hundreds of his relatives and local residents attended his funeral on Tuesday afternoon.
Ziadeh’s murder comes just two weeks after a pogrom in the village of Jit, where settlers set houses and cars on fire and shot dead another Palestinian man. Israeli political and security leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several members of his cabinet, were quick to condemn that attack — likely as a result of the heightened scrutiny resulting from international sanctions — and the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, penned a harsh letter condemning “Jewish terrorism.” But with only a handful of the more than 100 rioters arrested, their words rung hollow, and settler violence continues uninterrupted.
After the attack in Wadi Rahal, the IDF Spokesperson released a statement claiming that “Palestinians threw stones at an Israeli vehicle” and “at other Israeli citizens who arrived in the area,” before “mutual friction developed between the two sides.” But residents who saw the events unfold reject the claim that any violence from Palestinians preceded the settlers’ aggression.
Stones litter the entrance to Wadi Rahal after a settler attack, August 27, 2024. (Oren Ziv)
“Nothing happened before it; there were no problems,” Munir Faura, a resident of the village, told Local Call and +972 Magazine. “They are the ones who started it, they came here and attacked us.
“I was sitting with the martyr [Khalil], and news arrived that settlers were attacking the houses of our neighbors,” Faura recounted. “We drove over and saw the settlers throwing stones, destroying cars and a house. We parked nearby, and were surprised when some of them started shooting. Young [residents] came out to help defend the village. A settler opened fire on them, hitting Khalil and wounding four others.”
According to Hamdi Ziadeh, head of the village council, it took the Israeli army more than half an hour to arrive at the scene and put a stop to the attack — despite the fact that they had forces stationed nearby at the entrance to the settlement of Efrat. And the settlers, he said, came from the adjacent outpost of Givat Eitam, whose residents “harass the village on a daily basis.”
Whereas the villagers were sure that it was settlers who shot at them, the army stated that its own forces “arrived on the scene and responded by opening fire amid the disorder that had developed.” This may be explained by a report in Haaretzsuggesting that soldiers from the army’s Area Defense Force — a reserve force made up of settlers responsible for their settlements’ security — participated in the attack, possibly without uniforms. These settler-soldiers are technically forbidden from operating outside of their settlement without permission, and the army has opened an investigation into the matter.
Mourners carry the body of Khalil Salem Ziadeh through Wadi Rahal, August 27, 2024. (Oren Ziv)
‘As soon as there’s an outpost, there’s violence’
According to Mahmoud Zawahra, an activist and resident of the nearby village of Al-Masara, the situation for Palestinians in this part of the West Bank deteriorated severely as soon as the war started.
“On the morning of October 7, the Israeli authorities closed all the gates of the villages in the area so we were unable to move, which reminded us of the Second Intifada,” he said. “Farmers couldn’t reach their land for the olive harvest, and shepherds were also prevented from grazing. This went on for months, with residents of the villages unable to get to the city [Bethlehem] for education, work, or services. People had to use narrow backroads, with the highways reserved for settlers.”
Israeli settlers have also taken full advantage of these conditions. “The settlers create facts on the ground, blocking communities in the area from accessing their lands,” Zawahra explained. “They used the war to expand outposts like the one near Wadi Rahal [Givat Eitam], and they’ve been carrying out more attacks.
According to Kerem Navot, an NGO that monitors Israeli infrastructural developments in the West Bank, Givat Eitam was first established more than 10 years ago, then dismantled and established again about seven years ago northeast of Efrat. The outpost is east of the approved route of the separation barrier that Israel started building around two decades ago —which remains unfinished in this area — and serves to connect Efrat to the settlement bloc of Tekoa and Nokdim.
View of Efrat, an Israeli settlement, from Wadi Rahal, August 27, 2024. (Oren Ziv)
“For more than a decade Israel has been trying to take control of the area toward Bethlehem and [the Palestinian village of] Irtas,” the NGO’s founder, Dror Etkes, told Local Call and +972. “It’s clear that the construction there will have far-reaching consequences, since it is to the east of the fence that they wanted to build and did not finish.”
In the latest attack on Wadi Rahal, Etkes continued, we see the same process that has been taking place in the West Bank for decades: “As soon as there is an outpost, there is violence, because they do not want the Palestinians to be on the land.”
Now, Palestinians in the area are increasingly fearful about what’s to come. “The settlers have always used the road belonging to the village [to get to their outpost], but now they are being more aggressive, provoking the residents,” Zawahra said. “In a few days when the academic year begins, the children will have to use this road to get to school. How can we make sure they are not attacked?”
Zawahra also explained how the latest attack has forced village residents to reevaluate what they held to be true: that there is safety in numbers. “We thought that the more people there are [when settlers enter a village], the lower the chance that they will attack. But they shot randomly. If you try to defend yourself, you’re dead.”
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.