Amal Awad looks through the broken window of her house.
The house is a raw concrete structure surrounded by scrubland. It looks hastily built, but it’s been here for decades, just like Amal.
This Palestinian grandmother says that she is used to constant harassment, but maintains that now the attacks are more and more frequent.
On February 13, he says, a group of Israeli settlers surrounded his property in the middle of the night. They smashed all the glass they could see, including car windows and solar panels, before attacking the house.
They were caught on security cameras. They were like ghostly figures with baseball bats.
“I fear for my family. I have small children and grandchildren at home, “she says. “They are afraid too“.
Amal lives in the occupied West Bank and assures that it is a campaign of violence that comes from afar to force the Palestinians to abandon their land.
“Lately they have started to come every two days. We usually see them and notify the neighbors to warn them that there may be an attack,” Amal explains. “But this time they arrived after midnight, after everyone had gone to bed.“.
Palestinian officials say there have been 600 such attacks since the start of the year, a sharp increase compared to last year, when only 55 attacks were recorded in the months of January and February.
These incidents, commonly referred to as “price attacks”, are carried out by Israeli settlers who oppose the demolition of illegal Jewish settlements. The settlers want to make the Palestinian community pay the price for the loss of these outposts that do not have Israeli authorization.
The West Bank was divided into three zones under the 1993 Oslo peace agreement. Amal lives in the larger area known as ‘Area C’ which is controlled by Israel and not under Palestinian rule.
“We called the police and the army, but no one came“adds Amal, torn between despair and resignation. “So far, no one has come to check the damage.”
violent tactics
Amal says she has seen how the settlers have become emboldened over the years. The first attack of this type that he suffered in his house was in October 2021.
“The first time they threw stones at our house. We couldn’t stop them and we didn’t want to escalate the situation so we didn’t respond“, says.
“But 20 days later they came back. They used pepper spray and broke the windows and the fence.”
Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law, something Israel disputes.
Israel has built some 140 settlements housing more than 600,000 Jews since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War in 1967.
As the settlements have expanded, tensions between the two communities have increased.
Israel has also intensified raids in the West Bank, with which it claims to try to stop deadly attacks by Palestinians against Israelis.
In a nearby town Fuad Hassan is one of the volunteer guards who have joined the Palestinian Public Committee, a group of residents who organize night watches.
“We started in 2012 to protect civilians and their property from settler attacks,” says Fuad.
“When residents see any movement in the town, if they detect any activity, they let us know. We monitor the area day and night“.
With the exception of the Palestinian police in the areas they administer, Palestinian civilians living in the West Bank are not allowed to carry weapons. Instead, they say, they have to defend themselves with flashlights and mobile phones. When an attack occurs, they are often outnumbered as well.
“God is our only weapon,” says Fuad. “All we want is for these attacks to stop.”
Last year, Fuad was injured while trying to protect his neighbor during an attack on his village.
“There were only four of us and they were a big group. They had to give me five points on the head.”
But Fuad was lucky. In 2014, one of the residents was killed during a settler attack. Fuad claims that the Israeli soldier who was present did nothing to protect the village.
“The Israeli army protects the settlers and not the Palestinians,” he adds.
An Israeli army spokesman told the BBC that residents like Amal can denounce acts of violence and that Israeli forces must intervene.
But according to the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, since 2005 only 3% of all Israeli investigations into “ideologically motivated crimes” in the West Bank have resulted in a conviction.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-64813050, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-02 04:50:07
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