On Friday afternoon, I sat at home and waited to find out if Tariq Hathaleen was alive.
Tariq is an activist and English teacher in the Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair located in the West Bank, the land to the east of Israel that’s home to nearly 3 million Palestinians and would make up the heart of any future Palestinian state. He and I had just been connected by a mutual acquaintance, who suggested that Tariq would be a good person to talk to about the wave of violence unleashed against West Bank Palestinians while the world’s eyes were focused on Gaza.
Radical Israeli settlers, who intentionally build communities in the West Bank, routinely harass and assault their Palestinian neighbors. The settlers attack their herds, burn their property, beat them, and even kill them. This violence, paired with many more subtle techniques to pressure Palestinians to give up their land, has reached unprecedented levels in the month since the terrorist group Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel on October 7. At least 15 Palestinian communities have been fully displaced.
Many of these forcible transfers have happened to Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills, the West Bank region where Tariq lives. I was supposed to talk to him about what it was like to live through this at 4 pm on Friday, 11 pm his time. But when I texted, he didn’t answer. When I called, he didn’t answer again. Soon after, he sent me an ominous voice memo.
“I was about to answer and call you back, but now there’s military inside the community. We’ll see what happens,” he said.
The Israeli military, far from enforcing order, is a major part of the problem: Soldiers frequently abuse Palestinians, nearly always getting away with it. Data from the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din shows over 99 percent of official Palestinian allegations against soldiers between 2017 and 2021 did not yield an indictment, let alone a conviction. Since the war in Gaza began, sources on the…
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