UMM AL-KHAIR, West Bank: First came the Israeli military bulldozers, which tore down a quarter of the homes in the West Bank Bedouin village of Umm Al-Khair. Then came the settler attacks.
In the aftermath, dozens of people were left homeless and without consistent access to water and electricity. Several were injured from pepper spray and sticks, and the village’s water pipe was cut — all, they said, as Israeli soldiers looked on.
”Where shall I go?” said Yasser Hathaleen, sitting near the rubble of his family’s homes, exposed to the blazing heat of summer with little to protect him. “To whom do I complain? I want a law to protect me. Where are the people of law?”
Bedouin communities in the West Bank face a double threat of rampant, unpunished Israeli settler violence and a frenzy of state-backed demolitions. Together, the two are pushing a growing number of Bedouin from their land and making any eventual independent Palestinian state a more distant reality, rights groups say.
The threats have intensified since the start of the war in Gaza, as settler violence surges across the West Bank — even as Israel faces growing international pressure to clamp down. Settler advocates hold key Israeli Cabinet positions that grant them important say over the West Bank, giving settlers greater control over their destiny in the territory.
Residents describe the escalating attacks
Settler violence and demolitions are nothing new in Umm Al-Khair, founded in the 1950s by traditionally nomadic people known as Bedouin, who settled there just after being uprooted from the Negev desert during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.
Two decades later, Umm Al-Khair fell under Israeli security control when Israel captured the West Bank. Though Palestinians seek the area as the heart of a future independent state, Israel has established a rash of settlements across the territory, viewed by the international community as illegal and an obstacle to peace.
Settler attacks, residents say, began in the 1980s, after Israel built the settlement of Carmel just meters away from Umm Al-Khair. Today, Carmel’s large houses and lush gardens sit across a barbed-wire fence from the village, whose pipes are not connected to the Israeli water network and whose homes of corrugated tin bake in the summer sun.
Settler attacks were sporadic but not debilitating, residents said, until settlers established an unauthorized outpost, called “Roots Farm,” on a nearby hilltop.
“Since then, this farm, their only goal is to target the community, to violate the people’s lives and to attack and insult people on a daily basis,” said 21-year-old Tariq Hathaleen, an English teacher in Umm Al-Khair. Most villagers bear the last name Hathaleen, all descendants of the village founder.
On July 1, in a particularly brutal recent attack described by residents and activists, settlers injured about 10 people in the village with sticks and pepper spray that made people’s eyes water.
“There were so many women on the ground, lying on the earth, struggling to breathe,” said Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist who was in Umm Al-Khair that day.
Videos taken by Palestinians in the village and sent to The Associated Press showed a man residents identified as the leader of the outpost clutching a rifle as he strides past Israeli soldiers into the village.
The military told AP the forces were there “to maintain the security of all residents of the area, and to act to prevent terrorism and activities that endanger the citizens of the State of Israel.”
In another video, taken July 3 by an Umm Al-Khair resident, young settlers are seen tampering with the village’s water pipes as soldiers look on. The military said soldiers helped repair the pipe soon after.
But residents said the pipe was damaged by settlers again days later, showing AP video of a settler near the freshly damaged pipe. When sent the video, the military told AP the pipe was damaged by erosion, not settlers.
To Tariq Hathaleen, the settlers and the state are working toward the same goal: expelling his community from their lands. Umm Al-Khair residents say they have lived there since they were expelled from the Negev during what’s referred to as the “Nakba” — Arabic for catastrophe — when roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of what today is Israel.
The residents showed AP handwritten contracts appearing to show land sales from neighboring Palestinian towns to the founder of the village, Tariq’s grandfather, during the period when Jordan controlled the West Bank.
COGAT, the Israeli military body coordinating humanitarian aid efforts, did not respond to a request for comment on land ownership in the area.
“There’s no legal pretext for soldiers to remove us from our land. So what the settlers do is they make our life the most hard life, so we eventually leave on our own,” said Tariq Hathaleen.
Outposts and settlements are growing
As some settlers expand their network of unauthorized farming outposts atop West Bank hilltops — which rights groups say are the primary drivers of violence and displacement in the territory — others in Israel’s far-right government turbocharge settlement in the territory. In the last month alone, Israel’s government has legalized five formerly unauthorized settlements and made the largest land grab in the West Bank in three decades, declaring a wide swath of the territory state land.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the UN says settler violence across the West Bank has displaced 1,260 Palestinians, including 600 children, from their homes in Bedouin villages such as Umm Al-Khair.
The UN documented 1,000 settler attacks in the West Bank in the nine months since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, averaging four attacks a day. That’s double the daily average during the same period last year, according to AIDA, a coalition of nonprofits and other groups working in the territory. The violence has killed 10 people in total, including two children, and has injured 234 people, the group says.
With the rapid and easy establishment of farming outposts, rights groups say, settlers can expand their control of the territory through violence, effectively pushing the prospect of a contiguous Palestinian state further from reach.
Outposts are now “one of the primary methods employed by Israel to take over areas in the West Bank and to expel Palestinian communities,” said a July report from Israeli rights group B’Tselem.
The crisis in the West Bank has reached such heights that Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the outgoing Israeli general overseeing the territory, used his farewell speech July 8 to denounce settler violence.
“Under the auspices of the war, and the desire for revenge, it sowed chaos and fear in Palestinian residents who did not pose any threat,” he said. He accused settler leaders of not doing enough to halt the violence.
Legality of structures is disputed
Naomi Kahn, head of the international division at settler organization Regavim, describes Umm Al-Khair as an “illegal squatters camp” on land that belongs to Israel.
Following the recent round of demolitions, the Israeli military told AP that the structures were illegal and that their construction had been carried out “in complete violation of the law.”
Palestinians have long said that securing Israeli permission to build in the West Bank is nearly impossible.
“They knock down our homes, and then we rebuild,” shepherd Bilal Hathaleen said. “They come to knock them down again, so we will rebuild. We are not going anywhere.”
Mounting home demolitions and settler attacks plunge a Palestinian village into crisis
https://arab.news/zmypq
Mounting home demolitions and settler attacks plunge a Palestinian village into crisis
![](https://www.arabnews.pk/sites/default/files/styles/n_670_395/public/main-image/2024/07/19/4473706-1383410036.jpg?itok=EoOlKfCd)
- Bedouin communities in the West Bank face a double threat of rampant, unpunished Israeli settler violence and a frenzy of state-backed demolitions
- Threats are pushing a growing number of Bedouin from their land and making any eventual independent Palestinian state a more distant reality, rights groups say
Rescue mission for ship off Yemen ‘about to begin’: EU naval mission
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- The Sounion’s crew, made up of 23 Filipinos and two Russians, was rescued the day after the attack by a French frigate serving with Aspides
DUBAI: A rescue mission for an oil tanker still ablaze after being attacked by Houthi rebels off the coast of Yemen last month, is about to begin, the European Union’s Red Sea naval mission said late Monday.
The Greek-flagged oil tanker Sounion was hit by the Houthis off the coast of Hodeida on August 21 while carrying 150,000 metric tons of crude oil.
The Iran-backed rebels said they had booby-trapped and detonated charges on the ship.
The EU’s Aspides mission said on Monday an operation involving private companies was “about to start” to salvage the vessel.
The naval force “will provide protection to the tug boats, that will deal with the salvage operation and facilitate their efforts to prevent an environmental disaster,” it announced on X.
“Several fires continue to burn on the vessel’s main deck,” the mission added, noting that there were “no visible signs of an oil spill.”
The Sounion’s crew, made up of 23 Filipinos and two Russians, was rescued the day after the attack by a French frigate serving with Aspides.
The EU naval force was formed in February to protect merchant vessels in the Red Sea from attacks by the Houthi rebels, who have waged a campaign against international shipping that they say is intended to show solidarity with Palestinian group Hamas in its war with Israel in the Gaza Strip.
According to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) agency, two other ships were struck in attacks off the coast of Yemen on Monday.
Thousands line streets for funeral of American-Israeli hostage killed in Gaza
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- Israel has killed more than 40,000 people according to Palestinian figures
JERUSALEM: Thousands of mourners lined the streets of Jerusalem on Monday to bid farewell to slain American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the best-known faces of those seized by Hamas-led gunmen on Oct. 7.
Goldberg-Polin’s body, along with the bodies of fellow hostages Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino, were recovered by Israeli troops on Sunday, triggering an outpouring of grief and rage among Israelis traumatized by one of the most devastating attacks in their country’s history.
“I feel he was like a symbol of the hostages,” Amnon Sadovsky, a 70-year-old teacher told Reuters. “We need to have humanity for all people — for Jews and for Arabs.”
Goldberg-Polin, 23, who immigrated to Israel from California at the age of seven, was at the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7, celebrating his birthday when Hamas-led militants launched their onslaught, killing 1200 people and taking 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Footage shot during the rampage showed several Hamas militants surrounding the roadside bomb shelter where he was hiding, and throwing grenades through the doorway. Most of those hiding inside were killed, while Hersh lost the lower part of his left arm.
Video showed him being loaded with other hostages onto a pickup van, his injury clearly visible.
He was last seen alive in a Hamas video released in April, addressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then his family, giving the first public sign that he had survived his injuries.
On Sunday, following the return of the bodies, an autopsy revealed he and the other five hostages had been shot at close range within 48 hours before Israeli forces arrived and recovered the bodies in a tunnel under Gaza.
In a picturesque Jerusalem neighborhood close to where his family lived, red and white banners bearing his image — a smiling young man with an open shirt and a small beard — dot the streets and hang from balconies, with the message “Free Hersh.”
The death of the six, after nearly 11 months in captivity, sparked a wave of protests, with around 500,000 people taking to the streets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on Sunday night. The protests continued into Monday with a general strike to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bring the hostages home.
Talks to bring the hostages back and end the fighting in Gaza, where Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas has destroyed much of the Gaza Strip and killed more than 40,000 people according to Palestinian figures, have stalled.
Hersh’s parents, Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin, have worked to raise awareness of the hostages’ plight since their son’s abduction, meeting officials, including US President Joe Biden.
In a tearful speech at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago last month, Hersh’s mother directed Hersh to “stay strong, stay alive.”
Adressing thousands of mourners at the funeral, Rachel Goldberg-Polin said Hersh “promoted justice and peace” and described the agony she endured for more than 330 days, not knowing of her son’s condition or if she would ever see him again.
“Okay my sweet boy, go now on your journey,” she said. “Finally you’re free.”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog expressed how sorry he was that Israel “didn’t protect Hersh on that dark day.”
“In his life and in his death, Hersh has touched all of humanity deeply,” Herzog told the crowd.
“Hersh, we failed you. We all failed you. You would not have failed you,” said Jon Goldberg-Polin.
On Saturday night, just before initial reports of his death began to spread, players from Hapoel Jerusalem, the soccer club he supported, took to the field for their first match of the season wearing black shirts with Hersh’s image against a red hourglass.
“I’ve been hoping and imagining Hersh coming back,” said Nadia Levene, a friend of the family.
“The most amazing thing is Rachel and Jon and their strength and how they went all around the world to save their son,” Levene said. “They couldn’t have done more.”
More than 400 people executed in Iran this year: UN experts
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- Iran executes more people per year than any other nation except China, according to rights groups including Amnesty International
GENEVA: UN experts voiced alarm Monday at a surge in executions in Iran last month that pushed the total in the country so far this year to over 400.
At least 81 people were put to death in Iran in August alone, significantly more than the 45 reported in July, a group of 11 independent United Nations rights experts said in a statement.
The reported number of executions since the start of 2024 rose above 400, including those of 15 women, they said.
“We are deeply concerned by this sharp rise in executions,” said the experts, who are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council but do not speak on behalf of the United Nations.
Iran executes more people per year than any other nation except China, according to rights groups including Amnesty International.
The UN experts, including the special rapporteurs on the rights situation in Iran and on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, said 41 of the executions last month had been of people convicted of drug offenses.
“Executions for drug offenses violate international standards,” they said.
The experts lamented a substantial rise in executions for drug offenses in Iran since 2021, with more than 400 drug-related executions carried out last year alone.
They also said they had received reports indicating that death penalty trials in Iran often fail to meet due-process guarantees.
They pointed to the case of Reza Rasaei, a Kurdish protester, who was executed on August 6 for the murder of an Islamic Revolution Guards Corps member at an event where he had brandished a sign reading: “Women, Life, Freedom.”
His conviction was based on a confession reportedly obtained through torture, and despite co-defendants retracting their testimonies implicating him in the murder and forensic evidence challenging his involvement, the experts said.
“Reports of serious violations of fair trial and due process rights mean that the death penalty as it is currently practiced in the Islamic Republic of Iran amounts to unlawful execution,” they said.
The experts said they were “extremely concerned that innocent individuals may have been executed” and called for a halt to executions.
Libyans deported from S. Africa training to be special forces
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JOHANNESBURG: Ninety-five Libyans deported from South Africa last month were training to be special forces for a commander in eastern Libya from where they were monitored via webcam, whistleblowers told local media.
The 95 were getting proper military instruction for the Libyan faction of Khalifa Haftar, who controls the oil-rich east of the unstable country, and not training to be security guards as claimed, they told the Rapport and City Press newspapers.
Police raided the camp near the town of White River, about 360 kilometers east of Johannesburg, on July 26 and detained the men, who were in South Africa on study visas issued for security guard training.
An investigation found the visas were “irregularly acquired” and were canceled. The men were deported on August 18.
South Africa’s Foreign Military Assistance Act makes it illegal to offer military or security training to a foreign national from a country where there is armed conflict.
The sources told Rapport that the Libyans included former Daesh fighters who were paid to join Haftar’s forces. The 95 were to have also undergone instruction in sniper-shooting, parachuting and sea survival.
One anonymous source was quoted as saying that the men trained with wooden guns because the instructors were afraid they might turn real weapons against them.
Hamas armed wing says new instructions were given to guards of Israeli hostages in Gaza
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- Abu Ubaida said the new instructions were given to guards of hostages after a rescue operation by Israel in June
- At that time, Israeli forces freed four hostages in a deadly raid in which dozens of Palestinians were killed
CAIRO: The spokesperson for Hamas’ armed wing Al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Ubaida, announced on Monday that the group has issued new instructions to guards on how to handle hostages if Israeli forces approach their locations in Gaza.
On Sunday, the Israeli military reported the recovery of the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, claiming that Hamas was responsible for their deaths. Ubaida said his group holds Israel responsible for the deaths.
He said the new instructions, which he didn’t detail, were given to guards of hostages after a rescue operation by Israel in June. At that time, Israeli forces freed four hostages in a deadly raid in which dozens of Palestinians, including women and children, were killed.
“Netanyahu’s insistence to free prisoners through military pressure, instead of sealing a deal means they will be returned to their families in shrouds. Their families must choose whether they want them dead or alive,” he said.
Israel and Hamas have failed to conclude a deal that would end the war and see the release of Israeli and foreign hostages held in Gaza in return for many Palestinians jailed by Israel.
Hamas wants any agreement to end the war and get Israeli forces out of Gaza while Netanyahu says the war can only end once Hamas is defeated.