STORY: This hillside cave in the occupied West Bank is the third home Fatima Abu Naim has lived in this year with her husband and five children.
But she says they’re facing the same issue here : Jewish settlers who want them to leave.
“What happens every day is that the settler attacks us, he used to come alone; now he comes with the (Israeli) army on a daily basis. They search the houses. They say they are doing a security check. If we don’t walk through the way they want, they bring the army to us. Why? To secure the settlers, but the main aim is to displace us from here.”
Similar stories have become more common across the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza 18 months ago.
It’s especially notable in the largely empty hillsides where the Bedouin people graze their flocks.
Nearly half of over 40 settler attacks documented at the end of March and early April hit the Bedouin and herding communities.
That’s according to a report by the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA, which noted incidents (quote) “involving arson, break-ins, and destruction of critical livelihood sources.”
The Israeli police did not respond to requests for comment.
The West Bank is an area of some 2,100 square miles that sits between Jordan and Israel.
It has been at the heart of the decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians since it was seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
It has been under military occupation ever since, and has been steadily cut up by fast-growing Israeli settlement clusters.
Palestinians see the land as one of the core parts of a future independent state.
Israeli settlements are deemed by most countries to be illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
Sparsely populated areas in the Jordan Valley have come under increasing pressure from outposts of settlers, who have themselves begun grazing large flocks of sheep on the hillsides.
A joint report by Israeli rights groups Peace Now and Kerem Navot found that settlers have used such shepherding outposts to seize around 200,000 acres of land, or about 14% of the total area of the West Bank…
while harassing and intimidating nearby communities to expel them.
Abu Naim said her family was among those forced to move.
But she said they have once again faced aggression from intruders who she said recently killed six of her family’s sheep.
Despite it all, Abu Naim said her family is intent on staying on the land.
“When (the settler) comes here, he says ‘you have to leave.’ I want to live here. We don’t want to leave this place, it’s our land. They attack us, and they also attack children when they go to school. They stole two cars from us, and we couldn’t do anything because we don’t want to leave here. If we do, we won’t be able to come back. We won’t leave it for settlers, it’s our land.”
