Some Hamas attack victims disagree with Israel’s war on Gaza
Israeli troops attacked a Palestinian village and killed four people in the Qusra village of Esh Kodesh in the northern part of the West Bank
Palestinians in the West Bank are wondering how their lives will change as a result of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
There’s a total siege of basic goods, hospitals are running out of fuel, people are running out of food and more than 4,100 Palestinians have been killed, over 1,600 of them children.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres has said the Hamas attack – that killed 1,400 Israelis and saw Hamas take some 200 hostages – does not excuse this “collective punishment.” He has called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and demanded Hamas release the hostages. Two were released today.
The best of the attacks were in Qusra, a Palestinian village, where four people were killed. When the villagers tried to honor their dead in a funeral procession, witnesses said armed settlers murdered a father and son.
It started last Tuesday when armed settlers from the neighboring settlement of Esh Kodesh came into this Palestinian village in the northern West Bank and attacked a house, witnesses said.
A call went out for the young men of the village to rush to the house and help. In a grove of trees they came under fire and three were killed. Later that day, witnesses in this village said, the Israeli military came into Qusra and shot another of their residents.
There are pictures of dead people everywhere. They’re affixed to cars and on the walls of homes and offices. There are posters with a backdrop of Palestinian flags and they also have words aboutmartyr and killed by settlers printed at the bottom of them.
The mayor said even their funerals are not safe. He said that he worked with Israeli authorities to make certain that the road they would use to mourn the four men that were killed was safe. But they found settlers and soldiers in their path, he said.
Israelis brace for more violence after reprisal attacks in the West Bank: Why do Palestinians have no remorse in their lives? Comment on “The case of Qusra”
He said it was a trap. They had said on their social media that they would take revenge. These people are violent all the time against the people of Qusra and the neighboring villages. The war gave them power.
He said that the politics of this place are constructed on fear and racism. It’s too early to say how many people have been killed in the last week, but I think that we may have seen an increase of hundreds of percents.
The Israeli police have no arrests in connection with the killings of six people in Qusra. The incidents are being investigated. That seems to be the case for the attacks since the war began. A lawyer who represents settlers accused of violence told NPR that there have been many shootings on Palestinians since Oct. 7th and not one arrest.
The military said it was checking but didn’t give further information on whether a soldier killed a Palestinian in Qusra.
At the gathering hall in the center of the village, women come to pay their respects to the family members of the dead. They sit side by side on couches, pillows and plastic chairs, crying as they pass by posters of the men who were killed.
Palestinians brace for more violence after reprisal attacks in the West Bank: The example of Al-Qanub and Wadi Al-Sik
The young men, who were called to assist, helped when the settlers attacked. The 21-year-old was shot. his aunt and cousin drape their arms around his mother in the hall
She said the goal was to make it impossible for Palestinians to stay on their land. Other places have seen depopulation. In at least two villages, Al-Qanub and Wadi Al-Sik, there are no Palestinians left because of violence by Israeli settlers.
The settlements are illegal, with the U.N. Security Council saying they violate international law. They’re also a problem for future peace. The Oslo Accords in the 1990s raised expectations among Palestinians that the West Bank along with Jerusalem would be part of their future state. Israel maintains its authority in the West Bank.
The road from Jerusalem to Qusra shows how far beyond reach a two-state solution seems to be. The horizon is lined with Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements.
There are billboards erected on the main highway to promote real estate projects for Israelis. The expansion of the settlement has been encouraged by the government.
Source: Palestinians brace for more violence after reprisal attacks in the West Bank
The future is bleak for me, and I see it as a black future,” said Abu Alaa, a Palestinian village in the West Bank
The future is a bleak one for me. I see it as a black future,” he said, adding that “we are not against the Jews. The settlers encouraged by government officials are against the rule of law.
At the limits of Abu Alaa’s village he points to empty land. A local businessman has abandoned his plans for a building. The farmers who tended chickens are no longer here because of the violence. He points to the hilltop across the way, to three settlements and an Israeli military outpost. There is a place where settlers come to attack them.
Abu Alaa said that the aim was to separate us from the villages and cities in the West Bank. “They’ve stopped us from the south and from Ramallah.”
The separation and the pressure to abandon these lands echo what has unfolded in Gaza, where Palestinians have been under a blockade for 16 years.
He said that aggressiveness from one side to the other side is related to the aggressiveness on the one side. “I address the Israeli people and say enough killings on both sides.”
With an M16 hanging at his waist and a Glock on him, Nati Romhas lived in the area since the late 90s and said he helped establish a few of the new Israeli settlements in the area. life in the West Bank is a battle and Rom hopes other Israelis will agree with him.
He said that many of the villagers were disarmed because of propaganda and progressive things. We are working very hard to give guns to the people and civilian groups.
“The future is that we will be able to eliminate the snake,” Rom said. “They all want to kill us, some of them telling it straight away, and some of them keep it to themselves.”
Source: Palestinians brace for more violence after reprisal attacks in the West Bank
The Battle of Be’eri: a village where settlers, soldiers, and civilians cannot live together in the presence of a conflicting group
Rom denies that settlers from Esh Kodesh fatally shot any villagers in Qusra. Rom said that they need to immediately evacuate if there are any good people in the village.
Nati is more militant than other settlers, but the violent wing of the community is not just a small group. The occupied West Bank is where many people see their presence as part of an ongoing struggle.
In a settlement called Eli at the top of a hill, husband and wife Gedaliah and Elisheva Blum think they can prove that Israelis and Palestinians cannot live side by side.
“I don’t think it’s a battle over land. I believe it’s a fight over culture. Gedaliah wondered “what point should we say we can’t live with these people?” as he said it was a battle over ideologies.
BE’ERI – To walk the streets of the small village of Be’eri in southern Israel nowadays is to relive the horrors from the single deadliest attack on civilians in Israel’s 75-year history.
There are partially destroyed homes in the streets of this once close-knit community. Some were blown open, others burned. Inside one are blood-splattered walls. Two children’s rooms have books, binders, stuffed animals, and paint supplies. The blood is on the beds in the white frames.
A backhoe scoops up the bodies of Hamas fighters who killed a lot of people at this kibbutz near the border with Gaza.
The Israeli military has been leading journalists through this village in recent days to give the world a glimpse of what happened once Hamas militants crossed the border from Gaza into Israel undetected, storming several communities where they killed at least 1400 people and took some 200 hostages.
More than a week since the Hamas attack, which set off a war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza where the group is based, survivors are still waiting to identify bodies and plan funerals
“We’re just still trying to figure out how we’re going to deal with so many funerals,” Alom told NPR’s Morning Edition . They don’t know where to bury them because it isn’t safe.
“I just don’t know how to deal with it,” he said “For more than four or five hours we were slaughtered and no one came to help us. I don’t know who is to blame. We’ve been slaughtered, I know that.
Infamy in Israel: Why Israelis should not re-think the long-term consequences of the retaliation against Israel
Their anger is not yet aimed so much at the government for its intelligence failure or Israeli forces for their delayed rescues, but toward the Palestinian enclave.
Noy was sitting at a Jerusalem cafe, miles away from the Gaza border, and he wanted the war to stop. They knows Alom’s pain but wields it differently.
Katsman lost their brother, Hayim, 32, in the village of Holit about a mile from Gaza. Hayim was killed in a Hamas attack and hid in a closet.
Hayim was a peace activist for a long time. He wrote his doctorate on dangers of the right wing in Israel and he was a critic of the government for fostering illegal Israeli settlements and anti-Arab voices.
That’s why Katsman believes their brother, despite his tragic killing, “would say we should never kill innocent people” and would encourage Israelis to re-think the long-term repercussions of retaliation.
“My government, instead of saying, ‘Okay, we failed, maybe we need to do something else,’ they’re saying, ‘Oh, we need to kill more Palestinians. We need to now destroy Hamas,” said Katsman. “It’s right-wing politicians who gain power from violence and hate, these are the people who gain from it. But we lose from it.”
They said you need a basic understanding of how people feel. “If they kill us, a thousand people, we’re going to kill three thousand of them, which is not an understanding of people, because these people will grow up and hate us even more.”
Israelis care about pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel more than anything else, they said. “This question is a distraction. People die. People die from both sides.
