A march of Israeli settlers are roaming through the closed areas in the center of Hebron, as settlers celebrate what is called “Purim.”
Amid loud music, dancing, and provocative alcohol consumption, they openly disregard the feelings of Palestinian families living within the closed areas.
The Human Rights Defenders Association, in partnership with the Jaber Community Center and the Dreams of Youth Association, organized a recreational and educational activity that also provided psychological relief. The event targeted children living in the closed-off areas surrounding the Kiryat Arba Zionist settlement.
The activity began after the end of the Iftar period on Monday evening.
The event aims to strengthen and empower the resilience of Palestinian families living between Israeli military checkpoints and settlements.
It also aims to provide psychological relief for Palestinian families and alleviate the impact of the occupation on them.
Israeli settlers from H2 rampaged in the Jaber neighborhood, near the Ibrahimi Mosque, in the southern area of Hebron during Ramadan.
January. After 15 months since the start of the genocide in Gaza, the cease-fire has arrived.
As a consequence of the ceasefire, the situation in the West Bank is steadily escalating.
Since the beginning of the ceasefire in Gaza, military assaults in the Jenin refugee camp have resulted in the deaths of dozens of people.
Since the beginning of the cease-fire in Gaza, various attacks by soldiers but also by settlers in the villages surrounding the main cities throughout the West Bank are the order of the day.
Since the beginning of the ceasefire in Gaza, the Israeli army has increased its collective punishment policies against Palestinians. Checkpoints and gates have increased as never before. Israeli military checkpoints scattered across the occupied West Bank have grown to 898.
The Israeli army has closed hundreds of these checkpoints. Further blocking Palestinians’ freedom of movement. Trips from one city to another, which should take 40 minutes, can take up 8 hours for Palestinians.
Al Khalil, better known as Hebron, is one of the 8 Palestinian cities that, after the Oslo II agreements of 1995 that sanctioned the division of the West Bank into three different areas (A,B and C), constantly experiences Israeli occupation.
In the old city, in front of the school that used to be attended by Palestinian children, now guarded day and night by Israeli soldiers and not accessible to Palestinians, there is one of the historical shops. The owner shows me on the TV hanging inside his shop of Palestinian ornaments, the video of the 1994 massacre known as the “Ibrahim Mosque Massacre”.
A Zionist extremist settler, Baruch Goldstein, who lived near Hebron, in Kiryat Arba, the largest settlement in Hebron, entered the Mosque during prayer time in the month of Ramadan and, armed with a rifle, killed 29 Palestinians, wounding hundreds. Since that episode, the old city has changed its face.
The centre, once the hub of Hebron’s commercial life, has witnessed a gradual exodus of the population, but also a radical decline in commercial activity due to closure orders issued by the Israeli military authorities against hundreds of shops.
The urbanism of the old city is marked by a clear separation between Palestinians and Israelis. A world on two floors, with a line dividing the occupiers, above, from the occupied, below.
It is the only city, apart from Jerusalem, where Palestinians and Israelis live separately. Here, metal barriers accompany the walk of passers-by. Settlers occupying houses who belonged to Palestinian families, are used to throw things (rocks and rubbish) from the heights of their flats to intimidate and injure Palestinians.
Moreover, Al-Khalil experiences a territorial division all its own, between the Palestinian ‘H1’ zone and the ‘H2’ zone, where Palestinian families live with more than 800 Israeli settlers. Also established after the Oslo II agreements, the division of the city came about to accommodate the Israeli settlers who had been trying to occupy the historical and religious centre with violent actions for years.
While a tourist is free to go as and where wants, a Palestinian living in Hebron does not the right of free movement. To go to the most culturally important place, the Ibrahim Mosque, or to return home for more than 15,000 Palestinians, it is possible to access it by passing through one of the army-guarded checkpoints, which means having to pass from an H1 (Palestinian) zone to an H2 (Israeli) zone. Doing so is not easy and often depends on the arbitrariness of the soldier on duty.
Since 7 October, life for a Palestinian in the city has become even more complicated and on constant alert.
Being exposed to violence and oppression on a daily basis is not, however, the condition in which Palestinians accept to live.
Resisting the occupation happens in many different ways.
The association Human rights defenders, which was used to organised peaceful actions calling for the Palestinian right to self-determination, organises awareness-raising activities for young people who wonder how to cope with this deprivation of rights.
“How does a little bird feel inside a cage?” A drama teacher asked a group of girls which are attending the class.
The question stimulated personal considerations of an everyday experience.
Situations related to the lack of freedom of movement they experienced, such as being inside a car for five hours on the way home from Ramallah.
“It’s like always feeling surrounded by something that doesn’t allow us to live our lives peacefully,” one gentleman told me.
“Existence is resistance is”, is written on the walls in Al-Khalil.
This section of the report includes the testimonies of people living in the H2 area. As stated in an article published in Voice Over, Palestinians are too often reduced to mere victims in the public — “miserable, head bowed, wailing, weak, and begging for mercy”.7 In the same article, the writer Mohammad El Kurd, echoing Said’s writings, calls for reclaiming the narrative and, more importantly, reclaiming their anger. “We are human not just because we cry when we lose our mothers or homes. We are human because we feel rage and disdain, because we resist.”8
Human Rights Defenders provides people living in this sensitive area with a space to share their stories. The following accounts provide a glimpse of the unbearable situation that the families are going through.
In the following accounts names have been replaced with initials to protect the identity of contributors.
A woman working with B’Tselem who used to document the Israelis attacks, asked her son to take out the garbage which had been in the house for two days due to the curfew. One of the soldiers saw him so the child ran back to the house. The army stormed the house, intimidating the woman and asking her where her son was. When they found the 16-year-old boy, they blindfolded and handcuffed him and threatened him with arrest. The family was forced to leave the house for one week. It is evident that the soldiers knew that this woman was an activist, making her and her family a deliberate target. A. reports that when he visited the family, her
7 A void of words: the legitimacy of Palestinian voices comes through anger (voiceoverfoundation.org) 8 Ibid.
child was not able to eat for days because he was traumatized and in constant fear that he would be shot by the soldiers.
In the As-Salaymeh neighborhood soldiers prevented a 14-year-old girl from crossing a checkpoint when she was trying to go to the medical clinic. Her father reached her and finally they let her cross with her cousin. On the way back the soldiers stopped them from going home and forced them to wait for two hours.
A similar incident occurred with a 50-year-old woman who was on her way to the clinic. One of the soldiers blindfolded her, while her husband attempted to reason with them. Her ‘offense’ was being outside during the curfew, despite the humanitarian urgency of her trip, which was disregarded by the soldiers.
In this same area, a harrowing story happened at the beginning of the genocide. A. was visiting her father. She was pregnant and likely feeling scared, the stress reflecting on her baby’s health. Soon, she began experiencing intense pain and urgently needed to go to the hospital. The soldiers prevented her from getting out. The father was yelling at the soldiers begging them to let her go to the hospital. She decided to come back home and try to calm down, but after 30 minutes she was still feeling sick. They started to communicate with other families telling them that she was bleeding, so finally someone called the ambulance. The ambulance was also obstructed by the checkpoints. After two hours she lost her child. The ambulance was not able to save her baby.
“I live in a closed area, and because I work, I have to leave the house every day. A situation happened to me a while ago (the period is not specified). I was going home from work, and I was stopped at the military checkpoint called ‘Abu Al-Rish,’ where one of the soldiers (male) searched me. I refused that and asked to be searched by a female conscript, but the Israeli soldier refused that, and claimed that I had hidden something inside the robe, even though I was wearing a wide
robe. Apparently, he indicated that there was something inside the robe, and because he was a conscript, I refused to let him search me, so I asked to bring a female soldier to inspect me, but he refused.”
“Of course, he tried more than once to put his hand on my body under the pretext of searching me, but I refused. I asked for help from anyone passing the checkpoint, and some people who live in the same area came and took me out of the military checkpoint.”
“After that, I went to the Israeli police to file a complaint against him, but the soldier claimed that I insulted him, even though I did not insult him or anything like that.”
After that, whenever she encounters a soldier at the military checkpoint, he always prevents her from crossing, or he stops her, provokes, asks for her ID, harasses her, and stops her from an hour to half an hour.
“The entry and exit process is subject to the mood of the soldier, as sometimes I pass through the checkpoint and sometimes I am stopped for one to two hours even though they work and live in the same area. Sometimes the checkpoint gate is closed without reason for several hours and we are prevented from entering through the military checkpoint.”
“On holidays such as Eid al-Fitr, relatives were prohibited from visiting us, and even there were household items that were di cult to bring into the house, such as a knife to use in the kitchen, as I had to borrow a neighbor’s knife or bring it by passing through the neighbors’ rooftops, moving from rooftop to rooftop to bypass the military checkpoint, and I do this when the checkpoint is closed or if the same soldier who tried to search me was there.”
On the 12 of May we went to visit some of the families living in the Jaber neighborhood.
While we were sitting all together drinking chai, the mother of the family told us that her third son was sexually abused by one of the soldiers at the checkpoint. He was so afraid when he returned home that he was not even able to tell her what happened.
Their cousins, while they were coming across the neighborhood during the curfew, were stopped by the IOF and brought to the checkpoint. Blindfolded and handcuffed they were forced to stay for 6 hours kneeling on the ground, exposed to freezing temperatures. While being held like this, the soldiers spat at them, intimidated them with the dogs, laughed at them, and threw food at them. One of the boys recalls “I would have preferred to have been killed”.
This report details the violent manifestations of the Israeli Occupation, both through its practices and its architecture. Before beginning analysis, it is important to emphasize that all its settlements and outposts are considered illegal under international law. They violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population to the area it occupies.
The settlements are enclaves of Israeli sovereignty that have fragmented the occupied West Bank, making any future Palestinian state resemble a series of small Bantustans, or black-only townships, of former South Africa.
The United Nations has condemned these settlements through numerous resolutions and votes. In 2016, a United Nations Security Council resolution declared that the settlements have “no legal validity.” However, the United States, Israel’s closest ally, has provided diplomatic cover for Israel over the years. Washington has consistently used its veto power at the UN to protect Israel from diplomatic censure. Meanwhile, Israel authorizes and encourages settlements. Though it deems outposts as illegal under its laws, Israel has in recent years retrospectively legalized several outposts.
