Israeli settlers’ West Bank rampage escalates
The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) 19 July advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories violates international law argued that the occupation should be ended “as rapidly as possible”.
The 83-page judgement further found that “Israel’s policies and practices in the West Bank and East Jerusalem implement a separation between the Palestinian population and the settlers transferred by Israel to the territory”.
In other words, Israel is implementing apartheid.
The ICJ declared Israel was obliged to “immediately cease all new settlement activity”, repeal legislation and policies that discriminate against Palestinians or are “aimed at modifying the demographic composition of any parts of the territory” and “provide full reparation for the damage caused” by its illegal occupation.
Twenty years ago, the ICJ issued another advisory opinion that the construction of Israel’s “separation barrier” (better known as the apartheid wall) inside the West Bank was contrary to international law. Just as it did in 2004, Israel is today thumbing its nose at the ICJ’s findings.
Since Hamas’ “Operation Flood” on 7 October last year, Israel’s efforts to extend and consolidate its occupation of Palestinian territory through settlement expansion and settler violence have dramatically escalated.
According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 465,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank in September last year. An additional 230,000 lived in East Jerusalem. From 1 November 2022 to 31 October 2023, 24,300 new settlement housing units were approved, the largest increase on record.
This year, the Netanyahu government has announced thousands of new settlements planned across East Jerusalem and the West Bank. At the same time, settlers have become increasingly emboldened to establish new outposts. These typically begin without official government approval but receive assistance to establish roads and infrastructure. The Israeli military stands ready to detain any Palestinians that get in their way.
On 21 July, Faz3a (a civil protection group, pronounced faz’a) reported that just one day after the ICJ statement, three of its international volunteers were evacuated to a hospital after being attacked by Israeli settlers in the village of Qusra in the northern West Bank. The volunteers were part of Faz3a’s recently launched Defend Palestine Campaign, which seeks to build a mass protective presence for Palestinians under attack.
The settlers, using metal pipes and wooden batons, attacked Palestinian farmers tending to their lands alongside the volunteers seeking to protect them. As in past cases, the Israeli military failed to stop the attack.
“The attack today, not even 24 hours after the ICJ ruled that Israeli occupation is illegal and that settlers enjoy impunity when exercising violence, serves as further proof for the dire need for international civil protection in Palestine”, Mohammed Khatib, a Defend Palestine Campaign organiser, said in a statement. “Eighteen communities in the West Bank have been completely wiped out by such violence since October, and the Palestinian people have no time to wait.”
According to Faz3a, Qusra has been the target of “nearly daily attacks by Israeli settlers, who attack villagers, vandalise farms and have even burnt several houses in the village with complete impunity”.
On 11 October, four Palestinians were killed in the village when settlers attacked a family home. Two more were killed the following day.
Saeed Amireh describes a similar situation in his village, Ni’lin, located west of Ramallah in the central West Bank. Amireh told Red Flag that the violence of the Israeli soldiers and settlers since last October “is something we’ve not seen in decades”.
“Since 7 October, they have blocked the entrance of my village to isolate it and cut it off from the rest of Palestinian villages and cities. We can’t move in and out easily and we risk being shot dead”, Amireh said.
The siege of Ni’lin is having a dire economic impact on its residents. Those employed outside of the village have lost their jobs. Farmers were unable to harvest their olives last season because of settler and soldier attacks. Eight olive pickers were shot, according to Amireh, his cousin being permanently disabled as a consequence.
Many residents are unable to pay their electricity bills because they are denied an income. Settlers are also attempting to deny residents access to communal water sources.
“When we try to protest, they shoot directly at us with live bullets and arrest us”, Amireh said.
One of the most violent settler groups, known as the “Hill Boys”, is directly supported by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
“The Hill Boys have even stolen sheep from Palestinian Bedouin communities and cut us off from all sources of life and existence”, Amireh told Red Flag. “The settlers are helped fully by the Israeli soldiers at every step. They work as gangs ... they invade our homes, they steal whatever they see of value: money, phones, televisions, gold, cars etc. They even film their actions and laugh about it.”
The pattern of Israeli soldier and settler violence has been repeated throughout the West Bank over the past ten months. Since 7 October, according to UN monitoring group Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 554 Palestinians have been killed by the military in the West Bank, and at least ten more have been killed by settlers.
According to UNICEF, 143 of the Palestinians killed are children. On average, a Palestinian child has been killed every two days in the West Bank since October, an unprecedented figure.
The OCHA further reports that, since 7 October, Israeli authorities have demolished, confiscated or forced the demolition of more than 500 Palestinian homes, resulting in the displacement of nearly 3,000 people.
Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes and displacement of residents is not a new policy. Since 1967, the Zionist state has continually expanded its West Bank settler population to take more and more Palestinian territory. However, the escalating state violence is making Palestinian resistance more difficult.
Amireh told Red Flag that military checkpoints are now a daily occurrence in Ni’liin.
“If they find anything [on residents’ phones] related to Palestine such as a Palestinian song or flag, or that the person liked something in favour of the [Palestinian] resistance ... they arrest that person directly and put them in administrative detention”, he said.
“Administrative detention” refers to imprisonment without charge or trial, which is lawful in the West Bank for stateless Palestinians, who are subject to military law, but not for settlers, who hold Israeli citizenship.
Amireh explained that, since last October, the military has detained 743 Ni’lin residents, mostly under administrative detention orders. Only seventeen have been released. A further 900 people have fled, while the remaining 4,300 residents remained trapped and isolated in the village.
In the last ten months, according to another report recently released by the OHCHR, the military has “initiated daily mass, apparently arbitrary, arrests of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, affecting all sectors of Palestinian society”.
By the end of June, 9,440 Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem were being held in Israeli prisons, effectively hostages of Israel, almost double the number held at the end of September.
Palestinians are held in shocking conditions. In interviews conducted by the OHCHR, former detainees alleged torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including sexual abuse of both women and men.
“The testimonies gathered by my office and other entities indicate a range of appalling acts, such as waterboarding and the release of dogs on detainees, amongst other acts, in flagrant violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law”, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said on 31 July.
According to the OHCHR, at least 53 Palestinian detainees are known to have died in Israeli military facilities and prisons since 7 October.
The village of Ni’lin sits in West Bank Area B, defined as land that is under joint Palestinian Authority civil control and Israeli military control. The Palestinian Authority (PA) acts as Israel’s accomplice.
Since 7 October, PA forces have reportedly killed eleven Palestinians protesting in solidarity with Gaza, and arrested hundreds more. Like the Israeli military, the PA has been found to carry out arbitrary detention, torture and ill treatment of its prisoners. One former detainee, arrested by the PA while participating in a Gaza solidarity demonstration in Hebron last December, told the OHCHR that during his detention he was slapped and punched repeatedly, kept in solitary confinement and deprived of the use of toilet for more than seven hours.
In Area C, approximately, 300,000 Palestinians live alongside the 400,000 Israeli settlers, who reside in approximately 230 settlements. This area, which constitutes 60 percent of the occupied West Bank, remains under Israeli military control.
“The big target for the settlers is to annex all of Area C”, Amireh told Red Flag.
Israel’s Civil Administration administers Area C directly, along with Israel’s settlements across the West Bank. The Civil Administration is headed by Smotrich, who is himself a settler.
“To keep his coalition government alive, Netanyahu has given the settlers the West Bank like a gift to do whatever they want. They [the military] have armed over 150,000 settlers. They are very well armed and are preparing to massacre the [Palestinian] people. They are escalating the situation step by step, beginning by isolating people, separating us from each other. They are focusing now on attacking us in bigger and bigger groups”, Amireh said.
“My greatest fear is that if a war starts with Lebanon, they will try to massacre us like they did in 1948. It will become a catastrophe.”
In response to the escalation of settler violence, Faz3A is appealing for international volunteers to travel to the West Bank for the next olive harvest in the coming months. Once in Palestine, Faz3A volunteers undertake training to provide both direct protection to Palestinian civilians facing Israeli settler violence and attacks, as well as to monitor, document and report on violations of their rights.
At the same time, solidarity activists need to increase the pressure on our governments to isolate Israel. In this regard, the ICJ opinion focuses attention on the many ways Western governments continue to aid and abet Israel’s crimes.
The ICJ noted that all states must cooperate with the UN to put in place measures to end the occupation (in other words, sanctions) and achieve “the full realisation of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”. No state, it said, should “render aid or assistance in maintaining ... Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
To date, the Australian government has followed the examples of the US, Britain and Canada by announcing sanctions against only a handful of extremist settlers. However, this measure avoids any meaningful action against Israel.
If Israel is to be stopped from ethnically cleansing the entirety of historic Palestine, we must act now to demand our government—and governments around the world—break all diplomatic, military and trade ties with apartheid Israel.
Nick Everett is the chair of Friends of Palestine Western Australia.
