WEST BANK SETTLER RAMPAGE

  Following Israel’s invasion of Gaza, it’s open season in the West Bank too. Wadi al-Siq, a small Bedouin village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, now lies empty. Community leader Abdulrahman Kaabneh describes the violent assault that led to their 12 October 2023 expulsion as the culmination of repeated attacks since Israeli settlers built an illegal outpost nearby earlier that year.

A group of armed settlers and masked soldiers tied up the handful of men yet to flee the village, and beat them ‘without mercy’, Kaabneh says. The injured men were given an hour to leave or, the settlers warned, they’d be killed. With blood dripping from their faces, the Palestinians were forced to flee on foot, only allowed to take what they could carry.

With the world’s gaze fixed on Gaza, the forcible displacement of the Indigenous population in the West Bank has rapidly intensified. In the first three weeks of Israel’s ruthless assault, 13 Palestinian villages were emptied. Armed gangs of settlers have terrorized communities, pouring concrete into wells and forcing Palestinians to raise Israeli flags at gunpoint.

At the time of writing 173 Palestinians, including 43 children, had been killed in the West Bank – figures that would normally make headlines alone, were hundreds not dying daily in Gaza.

As Kaabneh highlights, this isn’t a new phenomenon. His people were already turned into refugees in 1948 when they were forced out of the Naqab desert by Zionist militia. Today, hundreds more villages in Area C, the parts of the West Bank under full Israeli military and civil control, are at risk of expulsion. Palestinians living in Area C are subjected to racist Israeli policies, making it impossible to defend and develop their land. At the same time neighbouring Jewish-only settlements, illegal under international law, expand and flourish, raising the spectre of formal annexation. ■

NEW INTERNATIONALIST