Jewish settlers attack West Bank village, killing Palestinian

The following is a media release issued by Mohamed Zwahre, a member of the Popular Committees in the West Bank. The attacks detailed below in the village of Wadi Rahal came before Israel launched a major attack on several villages in the West Bank, reported as the “largest assault in twenty years”, killing at least ten Palestinians.

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In an unprecedented armed attack on Wadi Rahal, settlers from the Efrat colony killed one Palestinian and injured two with assault rifles.

Last night, on August 26, shortly before 10pm, about five settler colonists from the Efrat settlement colony that surrounds Bethlehem and Jerusalem invaded the village of Wadi Rahal in the south of Bethlehem and attacked a house, throwing stones and attempting to break in. Neighbours immediately came to the family’s defence and prevented the settlers from setting fire to the house, while the family and their two young daughters managed to escape through a back door.

When faced with the community’s defence, the settlers fired a gun into the air and, within minutes, a second group of about seven settlers, according to witnesses, arrived and began shooting what appeared to be automatic M16 assault rifles that are said to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, over distances of 500m-800m, directly at the community.

During the incessant shooting, the colonists shot Khalil Ziyadeh, who had come to the family’s defence, from a distance of what witnesses describe as roughly 20m. Khalil was shot in the back, with the bullet exiting his chest. While they tried to help Khalil, two others were shot and injured, while the soldiers blocked the road to other villages and held up ambulances, even shooting tear gas at them.

According to witnesses, it took roughly 30 minutes to get Khalil to the nearby clinic in Jurat al Shama’, which is, under normal circumstances, only minutes away. Altogether, it took almost two hours for Khalil to reach the al Husseini hospital in Bethlehem, usually a 25-minute distance away, by which time he had died of his injuries.

Wadi Rahal is a small village of about 1,000 inhabitants, and it’s the first of altogether nine intertwined farming villages that form one community south of Bethlehem. Altogether, around 3,500 dunums [350 hectares] of the villages’ lands have been illegally annexed by Israel to build the Efrat settlement colony and the Apartheid Wall. The communities have organised popular resistance and demonstrations against this ongoing ethnic cleansing for decades.

In spite of this, however, the village of Wadi Rahal has lived in an enforced co-existence with the neighbouring colonisers, with many residents labouring as day workers for Israeli employers. Until last night, they did not know the neighbouring colonists to attack them directly, let alone using assault rifles.

Last night, this changed. “They came to kill us, as many as possible”, witnesses said.

Initially, the community thought the attack came from the recent outpost in Khallet al Nahla, which was founded by more hardline colonists one to two years ago. Since the Israeli regime declared it legal three months ago, the community have observed it growing in size and colonial ambition.

The attack on Wadi Rahal is, however, the first direct, armed attack from the Efrat settlement colony on any of the nine villages in the past decades, and the community views this serious escalation as a direct result of the current regime’s escalating genocidal policies, its widescale and inciting distribution of assault rifles to settler-colonists in tandem with the international community’s complicity with it.

Witnesses identified the empty cartridges that were found in Wadi Rahal today as US-made.

Since the escalated road closures on October 7, Wadi Rahal and the neighbouring village of Jurat al Shama have become the only routes for Palestinians from the south of Bethlehem and the Hebron area to access Bethlehem, Ramallah or the north of the West Bank.

The location of the attack, which still bears cartridges, bullet holes and other damage to infrastructure, is very close to the villages’ school, which is due to resume classes next week.