Bedouin were murdered in the Hamas attack. And saved lives. Now settlers are forcing them from their West Bank home

Zakaria Abu Jama was shaken awake in the early hours of 7 October by the massive blast from a missile hitting his home. Amid the flames and the debris, he saw his infant daughter covered in blood. She was hurt but alive. But near her lay the body of Yazan, his five-year-old son.

The little boy was one of 19 members of the Bedouin community who would be killed in the raid by Hamas who had come across the border into Israel, and the missile barrage they subsequently launched from Gaza.

“My daughter was injured by glass from the windows. She is just a year old and we feared she may not live. But she will recover, thanks to God. I have two other girls, and they are alright as well. But Yazan, my son, my only son, has gone forever, I think of him all the time,” says Zakaria, wiping away the tears rolling down his cheek.

After a moment staring into space, Zakaria waves his hands at his shattered house in the village of Arara: “We have to repair, rebuild, we need somewhere to live. But how long will be before this happens again? This house falls again? Will my daughters be safe staying here?”

Ten-month-old Elias almost became another child victim of the attack. He was with his parents, Hamid and Fatima Altlkat, who were driving to work from Arara to the nearby town of Ofakim when Hamas gunmen on motorcycles ambushed them, spraying the car with repeated bursts of sub-machine gun fire.

Fatima flung herself onto her baby to protect him. She was hit a dozen times and had no chance of surviving. Hamid clung to his wife as she whispered the shahada, the prayer before dying. “And then she passed away,” he says. “I knew she had been in pain and now she was in peace. We have had a very happy life together, but it ended that day.”

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Elias was also injured by bullet fragments, and Hamid desperately wanted to get his son help. But he had not learned to drive, and, in any event, the car was in no state to be driven. There was shooting everywhere and the only place to offer any safety was an abandoned building.

But the terror continued. Israeli troops arrived and a firefight broke out between them and Hamas fighters who had been hiding nearby. For the second time that day, Hamid thought he and his son were going to die. A bullet which came through the walls grazed him.

Some of the Hamas gunmen were killed, others fled. An ambulance arrived and took Hamid and his baby son to a hospital. Fatima’s body was found after three days of searches by him and his relations.

Hamid is left to bring up his seven daughters and two sons by himself. “I’ll never forgive Hamas for what they did to my wife and also all those other innocent people. They wanted to kill as many people, Jews, Muslims, Christians, as possible, we were all targets,” he says.

Youssef Ziadna, a Bedouin bus driver, rescued 30 people, all Jewish Israelis, when the Supernova festival came under attack by gunmen, some of whom had descended by paragliders.

“I would not want anyone to see what I saw that day. They are memories I will always have with me. I cry when I think about what happened to the people there,” he says. “There was shooting everywhere. It was madness. I get asked how we got out of it. I suppose that we did it was a sign that we were meant to continue with our lives. I am glad I could help people to get away from there, and of course others helped as well”.

A cousin of Yousef was killed during the Hamas raid. Four members of his family are missing. The Israeli government, he hopes, will now do more to help protect the Bedouin community, which is particularly vulnerable to attacks.

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Many of their villages are not considered by leaders to have had proper planning permissions for construction and thus are not officially recognised as habitations. As a result, they are not provided with alarm systems, which warn of impending rocket attacks, or reinforced shelters to take cover. Concrete structures are not allowed. The roofs are made of aluminium sheeting which become flying shards when blown apart by explosives.

Zakaria Abu Jama is convinced that his son would be still alive and his daughter would not have been wounded if they were allowed the protection they needed. “I feel very sad this thing happened to us when it could have been prevented,” he says. “We have been asking for a long time now, but they always refuse.”

Youssef Ziadna wanted to stress that individual sacrifices like his should be recognised: “Other people could have turned the bus around and fled, but I didn’t because we are all part of one country. The government should treat our people like part of this country, we need to be united.”

Sami Gregawi was another bus driver who continued with his job on the day of the massacre. He was spotted, and then shot, by Hamas gunman. One passenger who also died was a worker from Gaza, one of several thousand who had recently been given work permits by the Israeli government to seek employment across the border.

“You have a worker from Gaza, sending money back to his family in Gaza, killed by Hamas who are from Gaza. What is the justification for that?” Sami’s cousin, Nissem Gregawi, wants to know. “Sami was from the Bedouin family. The company he worked for was Jewish. He was driving Palestinian Arab workers. He got on with everyone and everyone liked him. He wanted everyone to live their own lives.”

The Gregawi family, too, rue the government’s rules which impact the Bedouin community. In their village of Wadi al-Na’am, they point out, lack of permits means buildings are extremely vulnerable to structural attacks. “If someone tries to make things better for his home the inspectors can come and just say it’ll be pulled down. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, so you’re always living in this uncertainty,” says Nissem Gregawi.

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In the West Bank, Bedouin families face another deadly threat which is growing by the day. They are being forced off their land, often through organised violence. Since the day of the Hamas attack, Jewish settlers in the West Bank have acted with mounting aggression in taking over Palestinian areas. The Israeli police and military are accused of not doing anything to stop them; often helping the settlers to carry out the land grab.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government have parties which are openly committed to the annexation of the West Bank, currently administered by the Palestinian Authority, and the appropriation of Arab land. Two senior cabinet ministers live in settlements. The national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has announced that his ministry will supply settlers with 10,000 assault rifles, and thousands have already been handed out.

Both US president Joe Biden and French president Emmanuel Macron have condemned the aggressive activities by settlers and asked the Israeli government for urgent action to curb the violence – to no discernible change.

Last week 30 Israeli human rights and civil society NGOs signed a letter saying: “The Israeli government is supportive of these attacks and is doing nothing to stop this violence. The only way to stop the forcible transfer in the West Bank is a clear, strong and direct intervention by the international community.”

The United Nations has said that the number of daily attacks by settlers has risen from three to seven. The Palestinian Farmers Union say the real number is 11 a day now. More than 130 Palestinians have been killed in clashes between the settlers and Israeli security forces in the last month.

The forced evictions often start with organised intimidation. Bedouin shepherds’ pastures for livestock are taken over by settlers, their irrigation systems destroyed, their animals poisoned and shot.

The number of attacks began to rise sharply in the aftermath of the Hamas raid. A video has emerged of a settler shooting a Palestinian man at point-blank range at the village of al-Tawani while Israeli soldiers look on.

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Road links began to be closed for Bedouin communities as settlements surrounded them, with settlers posting messages on social media encouraging intimidation and confrontation.

One such post said: “The roads are closed to the movement of the Arab enemy, there won’t be any olive picking in the area, and no enemy can come near you.” The post advised members in the chat group to keep at least a hundred bullets each to “wipe out” any Arabs who dare to approach. Another post said: “The army has a finger on the trigger, any pedestrian or vehicle that goes out into the street will die immediately, and that’s how it should be”.

Guy Hirschfeld, a veteran Israeli peace activist, issued a warning on Facebook after seeing calls on a settlers’ social media site for a full-scale attack on the village of Wadi al-Siq. The community’s alarmed mukhtar, or chief, Abdelrahman Abu Bashar Kaabneh, decided to evacuate the community for their safety.

“The language used on the settlers’ post was so violent, so aggressive that I thought something terrible, even by the standards of what’s been happening here, may take place, so I put the message out,” Hirschfeld says. “The settlers have total impunity now. They can shoot people, call it self-defence, and just get away with it. The scale of frequency of these attacks is unprecedented. But it is not random, there is a brutal system behind it,” he adds.

What happened at Khirbet Zanuta in the South Hebron Hills followed a pattern from elsewhere. The settlers at first began to stop Bedouin shepherds from grazing their livestock. This was followed by water tanks being smashed, and electricity cables being cut. Then, with the villagers corralled into their homes, the settlers began to break in and beat up families.

The villagers were told one day they had 24 hours to leave the area. Anyone still found there after would be killed. “We decided we had to go after that or someone would have been killed,” says Amin Hamed al-Hadhrat. “We feel great sorrow about what has happened. This was our home, we love this land where I grew up with my brothers and sisters, my friends. Now we have lost it all. They [the settlers] took over this place, they took over other places, there’s no one to help us.”

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Abbas Milhem, a senior official with the Palestinian Farmers Union, says: “We have had a thousand families who have been forced to leave their homes in the South Hebron and Jordan Valley and we have Israeli government ministers calling for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank.

“There are killings taking place with little notice from the outside world. The days after Ben-Gvir gave out M-16s [assault rifles] we had one man killed and others injured. After this war began, the settlers were basically told they could do what they liked. They are targeting livestock farmers. Bedouin [are] being forced off land which had belonged to them for generations, this is happening every day.”

The latest attack was at the weekend when two dozen armed settlers came to the village of Khirbet Yarza in the Jordan Valley, attacked shepherds who lived there, and ransacked their homes.

Mukhles Mosaied, the village mukhtar, says: “They came suddenly and said they were going to carry out searches. We had people beaten up. Luckily the ambulance managed to get through.” One of those taken for treatment, Jihad Mosaied, says: “It wasn’t a fight, You can’t fight men carrying guns with bare hands, they just wanted to hurt people. They want to frighten us into leaving.”

Israeli soldiers arrived at the village. “They saw what was happening. When we asked them to stop the settlers, they started arresting the shepherds whose land was being stolen,” says Mukhles Mosaied. “We know what’s going on. The settlers are using the Hamas attack as an excuse to get rid of us.”

Hirschfeld, the Israeli activist, says: “What Hamas did showed they are animals. I’m an Israeli, I fought in the Israeli army and of course Israel must defend itself. But what has the West Bank got to do with that? What’s happening here is that 7 October is being used as an excuse for stealing land. Other countries, US, UK, know what’s going on here but do nothing.”

Ziadna, meanwhile, has since received death threats from Hamas sympathisers. But he has no regrets about what he did. “We are Israelis, we are one people, we live here together, we need to go hand in hand,” he said.

But in the West Bank, there are Israeli settlers who refuse to co-exist with Yousef’s Bedouin community and reject they are fellow Israelis. And in the current climate atmosphere of tension and strife, it is they who hold the whip hand.