Unsettlers

THE ASSAULT WAS ALREADY UNDER WAY in September when, having hastily collected her youngest child from a neighbour, Baraa Hamamda, 24, ran home to find her three-year-old son, Mohammed, lying in a small pool of blood and apparently lifeless on the bare floor where she had left him asleep. “I thought that’s it, he’s dead,” she says. “He won’t come back.” Mohammed wasn’t dead, though he wouldn’t regain consciousness for more than 11 hours, having been struck on the head by a stone thrown through a window by an Israeli settler, one of dozens who had invaded the isolated village of Al Mufakara, in the West Bank’s rocky, arid south Hebron hills.

At about 1.30pm, settlers from the two outposts, Havat Maon and Avigayil – illegal even under Israeli law – which the Palestinian village sits uneasily between, advanced on the flock of a Palestinian shepherd from neighbouring Rakiz, throwing stones and stabbing sheep, killing six of them. More than a dozen of Al Mufakara’s 120 residents retaliated with stones in an attempt to repel the settlers. But the settlers, several armed, rapidly entered the village and, as women barricaded themselves and their children in their homes, left a trail of smashed windows, an overturned car, shattered windscreens, punctured water tanks, slashed tyres, vandalised solar panels – and six injured Palestinians, including Mohammed.

At first a few troops apparently tried to separate the sides – an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) video shows them restraining one settler. But Mahmoud Hamamda, Mohammed’s grandfather, says that when reinforcements arrived they focused on dispersing the Palestinians defending the village, about half of whom retreated into the valley below. “They were beside