Two boys shot in the chest, only one survivor. This is life in the West Bank
West Bank: If you want to see the violence, the anger that is always ready to erupt here in the West Bank, this is where you come. A petrol station on the outskirts of Ramallah on a Friday afternoon. The sound of gunfire and screeching ambulance sirens; the smell of burning tyres and tear gas. Black plumes of smoke soaring to the sky from blazing orange fireballs. Palestinian boys lobbing stones and Israeli soldiers shooting bullets. People who live beside each other but exist in largely alternative universes, driven apart by competing historical narratives and modern grievances. At least once a week you’ll find clashes like this here: ritualistic and sometimes deadly displays of division that have intensified since the beginning of Israel’s war against Hamas.
The afternoon begins peacefully with the call to Friday prayers, regarded as mandatory for Muslim men. Through Ramallah’s bustling fruit and vegetable markets, the worshippers gravitate towards the Jamal Abdel Nasser Mosque. The loss of civilian life in Gaza, the imam bellows on a loudspeaker, is as bad as the Holocaust, as bad as the creation of the state of Israel. A few doors down, a group of five friends sip Arabic coffee outside a bakery. They lay the blame for the October 7 massacres on Israel, rather than Hamas. “Israel got what it deserved,” says one man. “We are living inside a big prison with no freedom. I see no future here for my three children.”
Ramallah is a city of cosmopolitan charm, where you can smoke shisha at sidewalk cafes and indulge in succulent shawarma and stretchy mastic ice cream. It’s a gorgeous place. A tragic one too. Stencilled on walls everywhere are graffiti portraits of shaheed: Palestinian men who are regarded as heroic martyrs because they died in clashes with Israelis.
Palestinian youth during clashes with the Israeli military at the City End Circle near the al Jalazone refugee camp in al Bireh, Ramallah, West Bank.
This year was already the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank for at least two decades. Hamas’ massacre in Israel, and the resulting bombardment of Gaza, have inflamed tensions further: 103 Palestinians have died in conflict with Israelis in the West Bank in the past three weeks alone, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. “Fighting in Gaza is starting to spread to the West Bank, sparking what could become a third intifada,” Middle East scholar Daniel Byman wrote in Foreign Affairs this week, highlighting the possibility of another bloody, years-long Palestinian uprising like those beginning in 1987 and 2000.
After prayers end, a demonstration winds its way through the streets of Ramallah, the defacto Palestinian capital. Some wave the Green flag of Hamas; others the yellow flag of Fatah, the more moderate political party that controls the Palestinian areas of the West Bank. The march concludes at the petrol station, opposite an Israeli military checkpoint that guards Psagot, a Jewish settlement in the Jerusalem Mountains. Established in the early 1980s, Psagot is considered illegal under international law, as are all Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Many of the Palestinian protesters live 10 minutes away in a refugee camp, established to house those driven out of their homes by the founding of Israel in 1948.
As evening approaches, the atmosphere grows edgy as young Palestinian men use slingshots to hurl rocks towards the settlement. Many are teenage boys, hopped up on testosterone and rage. Israeli snipers, perched high on the mountainside, fire at them with live ammunition. The protesters know they are completely outgunned, yet they keep throwing rocks. One boy risks his life to plant a Palestinian flag on a petrol tanker near the entry to the settlement. At least eight protesters are rushed to hospital with gunshot wounds, many in the leg but at least one in the chest.
Martin Luther King Jr described riots as the language of the unheard, and most protesters offer a version of this statement when asked why they come here. They don’t know any better way to express their indignation at life under occupation.
o spend even a brief amount of time travelling around the West Bank is to experience the Byzantine rules that govern life here. So it is at the protest. Under the 1995 Oslo Accord, the West Bank was sliced up into three divisions: Areas A, B and C. The Ramallah protesters are standing in Area A, which is under the administrative control of the Palestinian National Authority. The refugee camp up the road is classified as Area B, meaning it is jointly run by Palestinian and Israeli authorities. Psagot, like all Israeli settlements, is classified as Area C, putting it under exclusive Israeli control.
At the protest to express solidarity is Saber Shalash, a local Fatah leader, olive farmer and military veteran. “I am against the occupation and I support Gaza,” he says. “We are the same country, the same people.”
Shalash explains that he lives in Jibiya, a nearby village classified as Area B. Five years ago, he says, an Israeli settlement popped up on the outskirts of town, leading to near daily clashes between the settlers and Palestinian farmers. We agree to stay in touch, and arrange to visit his home. A day later, Shalash calls and says that a boy was shot by an Israeli settler in the hills near his village. He is in hospital and has had major surgery.
Living in fear’
Two Palestinian teenagers named Sohaib. Both so young and with so much life left to live. Two boys who were shot in the chest by Israelis. One made it to Saturday alive; another is now regarded as a martyr. Such is life, and death, in the West Bank.
Lying in a hospital bed near Ramallah, Sohaib Mahmoud lifts up his gown to display the stitched-up chest wound where he was almost shot dead. According to Sohaib and his relatives, they were picking olives peacefully on their family land, near Jibiya, early in the morning last Tuesday when Israeli settlers started firing on them. “They didn’t even tell us to go away,” says the 16-year-old electrical engineering student. “They just started shooting. They were aiming at me.” A cousin backs up the story, showing footage he took on his phone while trying to avoid the gunfire.
While it is impossible to confirm exactly what occurred that morning, there is no doubt settler violence poses an increasingly dramatic threat to Palestinians living in the West Bank. In an olive grove, near where Sohaib was shot, we encounter a third generation olive farmer named Al-Haj and his two wives. “We are always living in fear,” he says, offering us glasses of sweet tea infused with sage. “This is a settler strategy to steal the lands. They are hunting us. They don’t want to see any Arabs in front of them.”
The United Nations recorded an average of three settler-related incidents a day in the first eight months of this year, up from two a day in 2022 and one per day the year before. The olive picking season – which runs from October to November – is a particular flashpoint for attacks.
At the White House this week, US President Joe Biden said that attacks on Palestinians by “extremist settlers” were “pouring gasoline” on the already burning tensions in the region. In a June joint statement, Israel’s top law enforcement and intelligence officials said vigilante attacks by settlers “contradict every moral and Jewish value and constitute nationalist terrorism in the full sense of the term”.
Given the bullet pierced his son’s liver and kidney, Sohaib’s father is amazed he survived. “What happened to him is what is happening to the whole of our country,” he says.
Sohaib al-Sous, 15, was not so lucky. Last Friday morning he was shot dead during Israeli military raids in his hometown of Beitunia, three kilometres west of Ramallah. According to his family, Sohaib and some fellow students were marching peacefully from their school to a military contact point when the soldiers began shooting. Defence for Children International, a non-government organisation, said he was killed after Israeli troops “opened fire indiscriminately toward a group of Palestinian youth” from 100 metres away.
A spokesperson for the Israel Defence Forces said a “violent riot developed” when Israeli troops were travelling through Beitunia after conducting a preventive operation in a nearby village.
“The forces responded with the use of crowd dispersal methods and live fire to disperse the gathering,” the spokesperson said, adding that the incident was under review.
In keeping with Islamic law, Sohaib’s funeral is held the following day near his family home. As his mother and other female mourners wait in a covered area, his male relatives carry his body on a stretcher through the street. His body is covered in the Palestinian flag, his face adorned with flowers. As he is taken away to be buried, the grieving women’s cries morph into wails of grief.
“What happened in Gaza broke Sohaib’s heart,” his grandfather Zaid tells us, describing him as a non-violent boy and a hard-working student. “His father raised him with a love of Palestine. It was important for his father to remind him that this was his land.”
‘The bumper cars keeping the country safe’
Driving south through the spectacular limestone mountains of the West Bank, we arrive at Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement an hour’s drive from Ramallah. Boaz Haetzni pulls up in a silver Suzuki, tapping the windows to show they are made of heavy-duty plastic, rather than glass. “To protect us from stone attacks by Arabs,” he says. The Israeli government, he says, covers the cost for Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria, the official Israeli name for the West Bank. In Haetzni’s view, we are meeting not in the occupied Palestinian territories but in greater Israel.
Regarded as a member of settler royalty, Haetzni has agreed to an interview despite his belief that the international media is biased against Israeli settlers. Guarded by Israeli soldiers and surrounded by Palestinian villages, the self-sufficient town of 7500 people contains its own schools, post office, bank and medical facilities. Founded in 1968, it is famous as the home of Itmar Ben-Gvir, a far-right politician who was previously convicted of supporting a terrorist organisation and incitement to racism. He currently serves as national security minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, making him one of the country’s most powerful political figures.
Sipping a cappuccino in the sleepy town square, Haetzni explains that he spent his first 15 years living comfortably in an upscale city near Tel Aviv. Then his father decided to help create a Jewish community from scratch near the ancient city of Hebron, considered one of the four holy cities for both Jews and Muslims. Defying the stereotype of settlers as ultra-orthodox Jews, Haetzni says his father, who escaped Nazi Germany aged 12, was drawn to settler life by nationalism rather than religiosity. His family had no particular ties to the area around Hebron, he says, other than a “general Jewish connection”.
Haetzni describes the Hamas massacres of October 7 as a “mini Auschwitz”, adding that he was not surprised by such barbarity. The largely progressive residents living in kibbutzes near the Gaza border were guilty of “wishful thinking”, he says. “They thought the people in Gaza were just like them, that they wanted peace. They were very naive.” The big lessons of the attacks, he says, are that it was a fatal mistake for Israel to withdraw its settlements from Gaza in 2005 and that Palestine must never be granted statehood. “To give these people a state, to give them more land is suicide,” he says.
Asked about the mounting casualties in Gaza, he evinces no sympathy, saying there is no meaningful distinction between Hamas and the civilian population. “Hamas didn’t come from the moon – they are the people who live there and were elected by the people,” he says. “These are people with a different culture, a very ugly one. Of course they are genetically human beings but culturally they are different.”
As for reports of Jewish settlers attacking Palestinians, he says the issue is exaggerated and that he believes most settlers would be acting in self-defence. In 2010, Hamas militants killed four Kiryat Arba residents, including a pregnant woman, outside the settlement. Six years later, a Palestinian from a nearby village entered the community and stabbed a 13-year old girl to death.
The number of Israeli settlers has grown dramatically in recent years, increasing from around 356,000 in 2013 to over 500,000 today. It helps that the Israeli-controlled Area C, making up 60 per cent of the West Bank, has the most room for development. Many Palestinian-controlled areas, meanwhile, are already densely populated. Haetzni says he would like to see four million Jewish settlers in the West Bank. “This is our land” he says. “There is space for everyone.”
Every day Mahmoud Abu Alia goes to work is an affront to his dignity. The 65-year-old has worked for most of his life at a petrol station on the outskirts of Bethlehem, around halfway between Ramallah and Hebron. He used to be able to easily travel to Jerusalem to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque. Then, in 2002, Israel erected a nine-metre separation wall next to his gas station, cutting the two holy cities off from each other. “It’s painful,” he says, looking up at the barrier, which is adorned with graffiti by the artist Banksy and has become a popular tourist attraction. There are few visitors here now, however, because of the war. It’s the same story at the usually packed but now empty Church of the Nativity, Jesus’ birthplace.
A ten-minute drive away, Thurraya Al-Farajeh brews a pot of Arabic coffee for husband Ahmad while her great-grandson plays nearby. Thurraya and Ahmad, aged 77 and 80, are two of the few remaining survivors of the Nakba, or catastrophe in Arabic: the displacement of around 700,000 Arabs that occurred when the state of Israel was created in 1948. Their families were forced to flee their hometown of Zakaria, now known by the Hebrew name Zekharia, settling in a refugee camp in Bethlehem, where they still live today. Although designated as Area A, Israeli soldiers regularly patrol the camp, conducting raids and making arrests.
Like many Nakba survivors, Ahmad kept the set of keys to the home his family was forced to abandon. “We are the last generation,” Thurraya says, wearing a radiant headscarf that matches her gold tooth. “It has been 75 years, and we are still waiting for the day they tell us we can go back.” Disagreement over Palestinian refugees’ right to return to Israel has been one of the biggest sticking points in past negotiations over a two-state solution.
In their urban backyard in Bethlehem, the couple has recreated a miniature version of the rural lifestyle they were forced to abandon – including pet goats for cheese and an olive tree. “The olive is a symbol of our roots,” Ahmad says, “of where we belong.”
The pair have seen many dark moments in their lives: wars, redrawn borders and missed opportunities for peace. Never have they felt so gloomy about the Palestinian cause. “Everything is darkness right now, everything is against us,” Ahmad says. “There is no future.” Although her memory is beginning to fail, Thurraya follows the latest news from the war in Gaza intently on Al-Jazeera, despairing at the loss of life.
Despite it all, they still live in hope of returning to the green fields where they were born. “If not us, my son. If not my son, my grandson. If not my grandson, my great-grandson,” Ahmad says. “We will never give up on our lands.”