Behind Every Israeli Who Bombs and Burns Is a Mother or Wife Who Refuses to Know
Settlers have wounded 689 Palestinians in the West Bank since January; the Israeli army has killed 1,123 in Gaza since the "cease-fire." The silence of Israeli mothers and wives is a historical contribution
Every hilltop youth and every grown man with dangling sidelocks and tzitzit, who beats an elderly man with a club, torches a field of crops and drives an ATV into a herd, has a mother.
Every anonymous pilot or drone operator who slays a family in a single strike, severing a baby's hand or leg in the process, and every Unit 8200 genius who cross-references intelligence, algorithms and weather data – each of them also has a mother, and past a certain age, a wife.
Whether in the army militias that answer to the Yesha Settlements Council or Israel's bombing force, every soldier or child soldier plays an important role in the gradual implementation of Bezalel Smotrich's "Decisive Plan" to subjugate the Palestinians. Expulsion and bereavement on the altar of more and more clods of earth.
We must not, therefore, overlook the historical contribution of the supportive and proud mothers and wives – those who cheer on, those who stay silent, those who look away, those who neither ask nor want to know.
Whether the wife and mother wraps her head in a scarf and sells boutique wine, lives on a kibbutz or works as a psychologist – she is the wind at the backs of her sons, her husband and her grandsons.
The photographs and videos keep coming. All the time. Live, or a day later. Any woman who wants to can watch a video of a bombed baby wrapped in a blanket, his mother bidding him farewell in bitter tears; a torched mosque with a threatening Hebrew inscription on its wall; a family loading up its belongings and leaving a hill, where the next day another woman's son or grandson, in a kippa, will be photographed smiling; another family in a tent as hot as a greenhouse, infested with rats and bedbugs, in a neighborhood the husbands flattened a year ago; people scattering in every direction as a drone drops more exploding metal onto a tent camp.
Maya Rosenfeld, sociologist'Almost every day, people who were severely wounded in earlier attacks die of their injuries. One man who was wounded last week, for instance, died two days later.'
Perhaps it's the grandson – the one who always loved video games – who pressed the button; maybe he is among the youths who smashed a car window on the holy Shabbat or the grown man who opened the valve on a water tank to drain away the only water a shepherd has.
Perhaps the sweet son, the mischievous nephew or the nice neighbor is the one who, on July 8 and 13, cut the power cables to several homes and a water pipe serving eight families in the village of Qusra in the northern West Bank. No big deal: The supply was cut once for 15 hours and once for eight. In the neighboring village of Qabalan, settlers backed by the army stopped municipal workers from installing electrical infrastructure and uprooted three newly placed utility poles.
Perhaps their sons were the ones who, on July 18, killed an entire family from the air in the al-Nasser neighborhood of Gaza City: the parents, Adham and Marwa Nasman, and their children Arwa, 8; Ibrahim, 15; and Yahya, 17. Everything is legal and proportionate, the military advocate general will tell them. And the same will be said about the helicopter-fired missiles that, on July 15, wiped out Omar and Asmaa Abu Qassem and their 6-year-old daughter, Habeeba, in their home in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza. Their 3-year-old son, Sami, was pulled from the rubble alive, with burns and other wounds.
If there are wives and mothers who still want to know, there's an Israeli WhatsApp group called "Updates from Gaza." Maya Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies Palestinian society, compiles chilling, regular, hard-to-read tallies of the dead and wounded from recent days – adults, teenagers, women and infants. "Almost every day, people who were severely wounded in earlier attacks die of their injuries. One man who was wounded last week, for instance, died two days later," she says, noting that the IDF's main instruments of killing are drones of every kind – surveillance drones, strike drones and suicide drones that strike around the clock, almost without pause.
The statistics are a click away, too. According to a recent report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – which counts every attack that harms people, property, livestock or crops – settlers have wounded 689 Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the year through July 13, in hundreds of attacks, most of which never reached Israeli media.
The report finds that the share of injuries linked to settler attacks is climbing, reaching about 55 percent of all Palestinian injuries in the West Bank this year. In all of last year, settlers wounded 832 Palestinians. This year, they will likely set another record.
In roughly 10 months of "cease-fire" in Gaza, the beloved sons and husbands killed 1,123 Palestinians and wounded 3,616. The living dead are packed into about 30 percent of the Gaza Strip – some 120 square kilometers (46 square miles).
And since the start of the year, 1,260 settler attacks on Palestinians causing injury have been recorded in about 250 communities in the West Bank. Six a day, on average. The UN doesn't have the staff to count and document the raids, harassment and abuse that leave no physical mark.
The usual settler cocktail of attacks and threats drove an entire Bedouin community from Jabal al-Aqra in the northern West Bank last week – their home for 70 years. It is the 47th community forced off its land since January 2023 by Israeli terror that has a devoted mother and a loving wife.