Occupied West Bank | Palestinians driven from their villages in the shadow of war

(Taybeh) In one hour, a hamlet in the occupied West Bank was completely emptied of its inhabitants. They left on foot, with their goats and sheep.

Five days after the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian residents say dozens of Israeli settlers arrived in the village of Wadi al Seeq, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers. .

They gave the 200 inhabitants of this Bedouin community one hour to leave their land, their representatives say.

Asked several times, the army did not respond.

“We paid for what happened to them,” judges Abou Bachar, a refugee with around ten families on private land in Taybeh (central West Bank).

The 48-year-old goat farmer refers to Hamas attacks on Israeli soil, unprecedented in their violence and scale since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948: according to the Israeli toll, more than 1,400 people, the majority civilians of all ages were killed.

Since then, Israel has been at war with Hamas and has continuously shelled the Gaza Strip. More than 8,000 people were killed in the small coastal territory, again mainly civilians, according to a count by the Hamas Health Ministry.

At the same time, the West Bank occupied since 1967 by Israel, already the scene of frequent clashes, is prey to an outbreak of violence: more than 110 people have been killed there since the start of the war.

Cohabitation between the three million Palestinians and more than 490,000 Israeli settlers, whose installation is illegal under international law, is particularly tense with an average of eight incidents per day according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the UN (OCHA): intimidation, theft, attacks…

“We can’t sleep anymore, it’s a nightmare,” says Alia Mlihat, a resident of Mu’arrajat, another Bedouin hamlet between Ramallah and Jericho.

At 27, she fears that her village will be next on the list: “With the war, we see that the settlers have more weapons, it’s very difficult, we wonder what will happen.”

“We are experiencing a new “Nakba”, because of the settlers and the army,” she continues, referring to the term “catastrophe” in Arabic, which designates the displacement and expulsion of more than 760,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948.

That year, the Mlihat, like most Palestinian Bedouins, had left the Negev desert.

Since October 7, 607 people, more than half of whom are children, have been displaced within the West Bank, according to OCHA. In the previous 18 months, 1,100 people had already had to leave their land.

Rampage

Abou Bachar only thinks about coming back. “I have no other place to go,” he explains, “we have all our things there, the foodstuffs we buy in bulk, our tractors, our solar panels…”

A week after the eviction, the Israeli army allowed residents to return to collect their belongings.

“Everything was destroyed, the bags of food for our animals were spilled on the ground,” assures Abou Bachar.

On site, AFP observed the ransacking of houses: emptied wardrobes, broken children’s beds, torn curtains, administrative documents, sandals, toys scattered on the floor. Around and in the village, civilian vehicles circulate, some displaying Israeli flags, AFP journalists noted.

He wishes that “the colonists [le] let them live in peace,” but doesn’t believe it.

Vulnerable

Israeli human rights activist, Guy Hirschfeld, believes that “settlers are taking advantage of the war to finish emptying non-Jewish people from Area C”, a part of the occupied West Bank administered by the Israeli army. He claims that 150 square kilometers of land have been emptied of their inhabitants.

West Bank settlers are far from being able to claim majority support from public opinion. But that of leading officials, including within the government of Benyamin Netanyahu supported by the extreme right, is theirs.

“The army is not always present alongside the settlers [lors des raids]but when it is, generally, it does not intervene” and “its presence tends to generate more violence,” notes Allegra Pacheco, director of the West Bank Protection Consortium, a group of NGOs coordinating the humanitarian aid.