In the West Bank, ‘protective presence is not protecting anyone anymore’
For decades, Israeli and international activists have put their bodies on the line to prevent the expulsion of Palestinian communities. But if they no longer deter violent settlers and soldiers, can they still make a difference?
As sirens from Israeli settlements echoed across the Jordan Valley during the first week of Israel’s war on Iran, the last remaining residents of Shkara, a small Palestinian hamlet outside the town of Duma, hurriedly packed their belongings. The alarms warned of an incoming missile attack, urging people to take cover. But in Shkara — where, like most Palestinian communities across the occupied West Bank, there are no shelters — residents were not seeking protection from Iranian fire. They were fleeing Israeli settlers.
On March 1, the day after Israel launched the war with Iran, settlers opened fire on residents in the outskirts of Duma, wounding three, and attacked others with sticks. Two days later, they cut off Shkara’s electricity. The army then declared a closed military zone in the areas most vulnerable to settler attacks, expelling Israeli and international activists. Hours later, settlers destroyed a family home. Within days, the area’s remaining 11 families had fled.
Shkara is one of dozens of Palestinian communities across the West Bank that have requested what is known as “protective presence” on a constant basis since October 7, a period in which state-backed settler violence has reached record levels and forced at least 76 entire villages or hamlets off their land. Israeli and international activists live alongside residents, sharing meals, conversations, and routines. Some villages have built guesthouses with bunk beds or mattresses to accommodate activists, while in others, activists sleep in families’ houses.
In Ras Ein Al-Auja, a shepherding community in the southern Jordan Valley, activists began providing a 24/7 protective presence in the summer of 2024. Over time, some regular activists became woven into the village’s social fabric, attending births, weddings, and funerals alongside residents.
Andrey X — a journalist who posts footage of Israeli settler and military violence to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers every day — was the first activist to live in the village full-time, moving there in May 2024. Every morning, he would accompany shepherds grazing their flocks and villagers driving trucks to collect water; in the evenings, when settlers generally entered the village with their own herds, he would try to get them to leave. “There were five or so incidents per day,” X recalled in an interview with +972 Magazine.
Protective presence is premised on the idea that Israeli settlers and soldiers treat fellow Israeli citizens and foreign nationals with greater restraint than Palestinians. But these assumptions have started to break down, as activists increasingly fall victim to physical attacks, military restrictions, and deportation, while violence against Palestinians continues to intensify.
In recent months, settler attacks on Ras Ein Al-Auja escalated to a level that residents could no longer bear. Settlers effectively besieged the village, blocking residents from getting to school, receiving water shipments, or even leaving their homes. By late January, the roughly 1,000 remaining residents had fled, describing their forced displacement as another Nakba. As X put it in a video posted on Instagram as the last residents were packing up their belongings, “Ras Al-Auja is done.”
Andrey X, a Russian-Israeli journalist and activist, in the village of Bardala in the northern Jordan Valley, West Bank, April 27, 2025. (Omri Eran Vardi/Activestills)
‘The most important thing is to just be there’
Protective presence in Palestine took its initial form after the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque Massacrein the city of Hebron, when the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) was established as part of the 1995 Oslo II Accord. With an official mandate regularly renewed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, European volunteers came to Hebron to observe settlers’ and soldiers’ behavior and try to protect Palestinians’ rights.
TIPH operated until 2019, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who, under his previous tenure in 1997, had signed the Hebron Protocol authorizing TIPH’s work — refused to renew its mandate, accusing it of “acting against Israel.”
More grassroots initiatives took hold during the Second Intifada, amid large-scale Israeli military incursions into Palestinian cities in the West Bank and Gaza. In 2001, three Palestinians and one Israeli founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), calling on volunteers from around the world to spend weeks or months in the West Bank — and, until 2016, Gaza — in full-time protective presence roles. In 2002, the World Council of Churches launched its Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), sending religious leaders on protective presence missions into vulnerable Palestinian communities.
During those years, several Israeli anti-occupation groups launched protective presence initiatives of their own, building on longstanding partnerships with Palestinian communities under occupation. And over the next decade, as settler harassment increased across the West Bank, more communities started requesting protective presence to herd their sheep, harvest crops, and mediate interactions with the army.
One group, Rabbis for Human Rights, began channeling its efforts into organizing Israeli and international activists to assist Palestinian communities in accessing and cultivating their land. Another, Ta’ayush, shifted away from a focus on discrete actions like protests and construction toward more open-ended, longer stays — particularly amid the 2014 Gaza War, when harassment by soldiers and settlers ballooned across the West Bank.
“It became clear to us that the most important thing was to just be there in the villages, standing with our partners,” David Shulman, one of Ta’ayush’s founders, told +972. Operating mostly in villages in the Masafer Yatta region, Ta’ayush started sending volunteers for overnight stays in At-Tuwani, Susiya, and Umm Al-Khair, where they would try to prevent settlers from trespassing on Palestinian property.
Activists marching during a protest against settler violence, Susiya, West Bank, June 14, 2008. (Oren Ziv/Activestills)
By the late 2010s, protective presence had developed into a more formal practice, so much so that villages like Umm Al-Khair began building guesthouses for activists. In 2017, former Rabbis for Human Rights director Rabbi Arik Ascherman set up Torat Tzedek, bringing volunteers to vulnerable communities week on week. In 2021, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence launched Hineinu, bringing diaspora Jews to live in Masafer Yatta for three-month stints.
And with settler violence escalating to new levels, the need became ever greater. By the summer of 2023, a proliferation of settler outposts east of Ramallah had succeeded in driving out virtually all Palestinians from a region spanning around 150,000 dunams (almost 40,000 acres). Then came October 7 and escalation in the West Bank that continues into today. In response, activists have launched new programs to try to expand the base of full-time volunteers.
In the fall of 2023, Amira Musallam, a Palestinian-American peace activist and NGO administrator, co-founded Unarmed Civilian Protection in Palestine (UCPiP), an initiative to train and send paid practitioners to the West Bank. Musallam spent the summer of 2024 collecting data on existing programs, identifying over 24 organizations involved in protective presence work in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — meaning hundreds of Israeli and international activists are likely in the field at any given time.
New groups are constantly proliferating as established ones perish — whether due to burnout, internal divisions, or state repression. Existing groups are also concerned that formalizing or expanding their operations could expose them to heightened scrutiny from the Israeli government.
But the lack of formal organization or centralization presents other challenges, including the difficulty of coordinating shifts and distributing activist coverage across different regions of the West Bank each day, which is mostly conducted through the high-security messaging app Signal. Inevitably, some villages are left to face settler violence more or less on their own.
The shortage of activists has become especially acute in recent months, as Israel has expanded its practice of deporting foreign volunteers and revoking their entry authorization. “We have more and more families asking for [protective] presence,” explained Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian activist and human rights defender from the village of Susiya, and co-director of the Oscar-winning film “No Other Land.” Most days, requests for protection quickly outpace the number of available activists, especially for night shifts.
Protective presence locations in the West Bank, March 2026 (Courtesy of Olives&Sheep)
“Our job is supposed to be done by UN-sanctioned peacekeepers who have the mandate, resources, funding, and support,” X lamented. “Instead, a lot of the time it’s a bunch of 18-year-old refuseniks running around with their phone cameras.”
‘You could have your bones broken or your car burned’
On a dusty road in Mukhmas last October, a handful of Israeli and international activists filmed a teenage settler leading his flock of sheep into the Palestinian village, as he had done on countless previous occasions. By now, the community had already evacuated its women and children; the only residents who remained were a few men taking shifts to guard what was left of their property. The activists and residents called the Israeli army and police when they first noticed the settler, but neither showed up.
When the settler tried to enter a Palestinian house, two activists and the resident whose home it was stood in the doorway to block him, demanding that he leave. “I’ll come back later with my friends and kill you,” the settler told the homeowner. As a military vehicle approached the scene, the boy turned and walked away, sheep in tow. While he did not follow through on his promise, others have.
The severity of violence makes protective presence an extremely risky endeavor. Israeli soldiers have killed three foreign activists in the West Bank and Gaza since 2000, all of them while volunteering with ISM. While this remains rare, the chances of being severely wounded by settlers acting with complete impunity are much higher. “You could have your bones broken, car burned, and phone stolen,” an activist with Torat Tzedek told +972.
In January, settlers fractured the skull of a young American activist. Last summer, in two separate attacks originating from the same settler outpost, Mitzpe Yair, settlers broke the bones of several more activists.
An Israeli solidarity activist is injured after being attacked by masked Israeli settlers in the village of Qawawis in Masafer Yatta, Aug. 28, 2025. (Omri Eran Vardi/ActiveStills)
Sam Stein, an activist who has spent the past six years engaged in protective presence — including a six-month spell living in Umm Al-Khair — remembers responding to an attack in the Jordan Valley two weeks after the Gaza war began. While delivering food to residents who had just been expelled from Ein Al-Rashash, Stein and Ascherman, of Torat Tzedek, were in a village near the settlement of Tomer when 12 settlers carrying rifles ambushed them.
One of them hit Ascherman with his gun, and entered the car to steal Stein’s phone. “I’m yelling at the settler, and he tells me, ‘Take one more step and you’re finished,” Stein recounted.
Experiencing this violence and impunity firsthand also takes an emotional toll on activists. One former participant of an initiative known as “The Course,” which was launched in 2021 to bring Jewish Israelis to Masafer Yatta for three-months protective presence stints, said it took him weeks to process the aftermath of a settler pogrom in Qawawis. “Waking up with the broken windows was such a hard experience for me,” he recounted to +972. “I kept thinking of what it must have done to the children who live there.”
X echoed this sentiment. “I don’t think there’s a sustainable way of living while you witness ethnic cleansing with your own eyes every day,” he said. “We all burn out — there is no real way of avoiding it. But obviously this is nothing compared to what Palestinians experience.”
Other activists note that returning back from the West Bank and encountering unabashed celebration of the military and indifference to rampant settler violence is particularly disheartening. “It’s a very discomforting feeling to return [to Israeli society],” one activist told +972. “[At least] with the hardships that we go through in the West Bank, there’s comfort knowing that you’re surrounded by people who stand with you.”
Still, while the activists have the option to get away from settler and military violence, their Palestinian partners do not. “Their presence here is a choice,” Mohammad Hureini, an activist from At-Tuwani, said in reference to the Israeli and international activists. “Ours is a condition imposed on us.”
An activist helps extinguish a fire set during a settler attack in Al-Tuban, Masafer Yatta, occupied West Bank, Jan. 27, 2026. (Roni Amir)
‘It makes us feel like we are not alone’
As settler attacks become both more frequent and violent across the West Bank, protective presence appears increasingly unable to prevent the terrorization and eventual displacement of Palestinian communities. Settler attacks often leave activists and residents alike bloodied and shaken. As Matan Meron, a field coordinator for Rabbis for Human Rights in the Jordan Valley, put it bluntly: “Protective presence is not protecting anyone anymore.”
Organizations like ISM have started calling the practice “solidarity presence” as a result of the “protective” element shrinking, and deciding the term is paternalistic. “We never want to portray Palestinians as these helpless, poor people that need help from internationals,” one of ISM’s founders, Palestinian-American lawyer Huwaida Arraf, told +972. “They are being victimized, for sure, but Palestinians show incredible strength everyday.”
Yet even as their ability to ensure physical safety diminishes, Palestinians say the presence of activists continues to provide psychological and social support. “Activists can’t protect Palestinians from attacks, but they feel a bit safer,” Ballal, from Susiya, said. Especially after families have been attacked, the presence of activists is often what allows them to get any sleep at night.
That sense of solidarity can be decisive in slowing down the process of ethnic cleansing, allowing communities to hold on a little longer than they would otherwise be able to. “I know communities that definitely would have already been forced to abandon their homes if not for the presence of activists,” X said.
Beyond boosting morale, activists’ presence also serves to document and publicize human rights abuses. X frequently posts videos of Israeli settler and soldier violence to almost half a million followers on Instagram, and other international activists reach audiences outside established Palestinian advocacy circles. The attention that comes as a result is a source of political agency for Palestinian communities — even if the activists’ access to foreign audiences and policymakers is an unfortunate reflection of the power asymmetry between them and the communities under threat.
“Protective presence makes us feel like we are not alone,” said Hanady Hathaleen, the widow of activist and +972 contributor Awdah Hathaleen, who was murdered by a settler in their village of Umm Al-Khair last July while activists were present.
A portrait of Awdah Hathaleen, in the guesthouse in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair in Masafer Yatta, February 4, 2026. (Omri Eran Vardi/Activestills)
“Fundamentally, activists provide solidarity and support,” Ballal continued. Such support — especially visual documentation — plays a crucial role in activating international pressure on Israel. “It gives us hope that something will change.”
The footage activists collect has also become a crucial archive, used by both human rights organizations and submitted to international bodies for documentation and preservation. The material could play a role in future accountability processes — whether through truth commissions, restorative justice initiatives, or international trials. “Someday, historians will tell this story,” Shulman said.
For many activists, however, the ultimate justification for their continued presence is simpler: Palestinians ask for it. “The Palestinians want us here, so I continue to come,” X said. “It’s unthinkable that we would leave them to their fate,” Shulman added.
Hosting activists can be a substantial undertaking for the families who have to serve meals and provide sleeping arrangements. Besides the material burden, which some activists and organizations help shoulder through fundraisers and donations, families also sacrifice their privacy. Moreover, Palestinian residents have reported cases where poorly trained activists make interactions with settlers and the army more hostile than they otherwise would be.
“Activists have caused problems,” Khalil Hathaleen, a resident of Umm Al-Khair who assists in coordinating the distribution of activists across the region, told +972. He remembers how a Canadian man staying there last summer refused to show the police his ID, leading to a large-scale raid on the village two days later. “People should get one or two weeks of training before they come to the village,” he said.
Activists’ presence can also draw the attention of settlers and the army, ironically causing more harassment. In the weeks following October 7, villages like Umm Al-Khair and Al-Mu’arrajat told activists to stop coming after settlers raided the villages, tied men up, and threatened to kill residents. Village leaders decided it was better to keep a low profile.
While some have accused protective presence of being a form of normalization, most involved in this kind of activism — Israeli, Palestinian, and international alike — share the same pragmatic assessment. “I don’t have time to go down that rabbit hole,” Stein said. “If people want me to do protective presence, I’m doing protective presence.”
When Musallam was 12, during the Second Intifada, three British women moved into her family home in the West Bank town of Beit Jala to help protect against settler attacks and military operations. “When you are a child under occupation, you subconsciously absorb the message that your life is less valued,” she said. “But when these internationals stayed in our house — risking it all, sharing our meals and rooms — they were telling me, without words, that my life was worthy of protection.”
As was the case with Musallam, the days spent living together can naturally give rise to relationships that become both politically and personally meaningful. After living in Umm Al-Kheir, villagers started jokingly calling Stein “Sam Hathaleen,” adopting the last name shared by many residents. “The relationships of protective presence are so subversive — they undermine the apartheid system,” Stein said. “It wants to separate us, and we refuse that separation.”
“I’m so glad that my boys spend time with people from outside the area,” said Hanady, Awdah’s widow, who often has activists sleep in her house alongside her three kids. “Activists were an important part of this hard time. We’re more than friends; we’re family.”