Aysar alZaben’s body was found in his plot by family members only hours after he was shot. He was found lying dead on the ground, face down, with a bullet hole in his back after being missing since the evening.

According to initial information, alZaben was shot by a settler when tending in his lands between 4:30 and 6:00 pm. At the time, a group of youth from the village scuffled with a settler near the adjacent Route 60. According to the testimonies of some of these youth, they were throwing stones towards Route 60, near a roadblock preventing Palestinian access to the road. At some point, a settler stopped his car and exited it, beginning to shoot live ammunition towards them, which caused them to run away back to the village. Escaping the shots, they were not aware that alZaben, who wasn’t with them and did not participate in the stone throwing, was hit.

As hours passed and alZaben did not return home, his family began looking for him. Having heard the shots earlier in the day, they began calling the Israeli Army, police and Civil Administration trying to locate him, thinking he may have been detained. Eventually, they set out to look for him in their fields, where they knew he had worked in the afternoon. According to his uncle, his lifeless body was found lying face down on the ground with a bullet hole in his back.
Mazra’a alSharqia is an agrarian village of about 5,000, located 15 kilometers Northeast of Ramallah. Despite the village’s location next to Route 60, which runs across the West Bank from north to south and was, in part, built on the Mazra’a's lands, residents have no access to the road, as all the paths leading to and from it have been blocked by Israel.

After being disconnected from Route 60 in recent years, the only road from the area’s villages to Ramallah is a dangerous old agrarian road, which due to the mountainous terrain is often flooded in winters, completely disconnecting the region from the rest of the world.
Last Tuesday, a group of settlers from a nearby settlement have amassed in the Mazra’a alSharqia’s lands and attempted to enter the village after the Israeli government announced it will demolish illegal houses in a number of West Bank Jewish-only settlements. Residents, who suspected the settlers intend on holding a “price-tag” action in the village, confronted them, and manged to ward off the invasion.

They were then attacked by a force of soldiers who shot dozens of rounds of live ammunition and eventually also invaded the village.

Settlers Attacking at Hilltop 18

Yesterday masked settler youth attacked Ta’ayush activists at an illegal outpost called Hilltop 18 near the mega settlement of Kiryat Arba in the South Mount Hebron Hills. This is an outpost that Ta’ayush has been monitoring for over one year and Mairav/I have written about in Haaretz. Below is a video of settler demi-god Baruch Marzel attacking Ta’ayush activists at Hilltop 18 last April.

The settlers reacted with pure violence and hatred towards Ta’ayush activists who came to the outpost in order to monitor its construction which has been deemed illegal by international and Israeli law. The right of center mass daily Yediot Aharont has run a typically skewed account of the day’s events. Please follow the link for video form Ta’ayush. (Hebrew Link). I will be posting video of the event when I have it. Notice that no comment is made about how the army/police handled the settlers obivious attacks.

No settlers were arrested or charged with any crime despite the clear violence of the attacks. This attack has come a day after the Sheikh Jarrah protest which has garned international headlines. Unfortunately, this attack will not penetrate mainstream media outlets in the same way despite its obvious news quality. Even the left leaning daily Haaretz is not covering the crimes. Only Yediot because of the papers obvious right wing leanings.

Channel Ten TV’s military affairs correspondent reported Monday evening that “these [see video below] pictures give the IDF a serious headache,” because they show soldiers who join rioting settlers and using their IDF-issue weapons. Soldiers manning an observation post of the Etzioni Brigade, which is the Bethlehem brigade, were amazed when their security cameras spotted two of their comrades out there. Corporal Baruch Brandoi of the anti-terror school and Sergeant Nahman Alfasi of the Artillery Corps, both residents of the settlement of Bat Ayin, took their M-16’s and joined their friends on a revenge campaign against the nearby Palestinian village of Hirbat Zafa. The incident took place shortly after the lethal ax attack in Bat Ayin. The settlers wanted revenge. A group of settlers started throwing rocks at the Palestinian village. The Palestinians responded in kind, but then came the two armed soldiers. Brandoi fired 26 rounds and kept firing even after the Palestinians have fled. Alfasi fired 12 rounds. [Full translated transcript here.]

The “headache” was not bad enough, apparently, for the IDF to put some serious effort into disciplining these soldiers, despite the extraordinary evidence.

Presenting the pictures before the court, the military prosecution argued that the two soldiers were under no life threat and thus had no reason to open fire, but was forced to make a plea bargain deal with them, and each of the shooters was handed down a sentence of 21 days in the military prison.

The de facto parallel hierarchies – military and rabbinical — that the many fundamentalist combat soldiers owe allegiance to have been a major problem for IDF operations in the West Bank for some time. One only needs to skim through Yesh Din’s numerous publications in order to understand how blurred the lines between the IDF and settler paramilitaries have become.

The IDF’s patent inability or unwillingness to deal with the problem is evident on a nearly daily basis. Here are two examples just from this morning:
IDF reservists in a unit specializing in West Bank operations publish a petition calling on the unit to desist from participating in outpost evacuations. This is shortly after the a group of new recruits to the unit who staged a protest [!] in the middle of a major basic training ceremony were given slaps on the wrist.
Students at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva find “the subject of killing gentiles, and more specifically Palestinians as part of the ongoing battle against terrorism, particularly relevant for [those] who have served, are presently serving or plan on serving in the IDF.”

At the recent gay pride parade in Jerusalem last month – massively diminished in size and vigor since the 2005 stabbing of several people by a religious Jew – a small but noisy crowd chanted anti-gay slurs and held signs calling gays beasts and perverts. Two prominent figures of the settlement movement that we am unfortunately all too familiar with were there. Itamar Ben-Gvir and Baruch Marzel, both of whom live in the Israeli-occupied Hebron area and have, on repeated occasions, attacked Jewish-Israeli peace activists. In addition to physical violence, we have seen and heard Ben-Gvir verbally abuse Ezra Nawi for being homosexual, calling him a pervert and accusing him of raping little children. This is not isolated. In most places where we have come into contact with settlers, we have heard them equate our leftwing views with homosexuality, calling us disgusting and wimpy liberals who like it “up the ass.”

This morning, just hours after last night’s terror attack in Tel Aviv, the Palestinian Hanoun family of Sheikh Jarrah was physically evicted from their home by Israeli police and in their place, Jewish settler families (comprised mostly of teenage boys resembling classic hilltop youth) entered in their place. It is no coincidence that these events happened so closely together, as clearly the police and settlers who took over these houses in East Jerusalem are aware the media would be dominated by the murders in Tel Aviv.

Take these recent incidents and add them to the violent weekly protests of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem against the opening of parking garages; the violent protests and death threats with regard to the ultra-Orthodox mother who obviously neglected her child; the pipe bomb that exploded at Professor and peace activist Ze’ev Sternhall’s home last September; rightwing Knesset members organizing protests in Arab villages and participating in rallies shouting racist slurs against Obama that include the presence of outlawed Kahane enthusiasts; the settlers continued violence against Palestinians and Israelis and the IDF in the occupied West Bank, which includes children barely potty-trained throwing rocks at fellow Jews; and the murder of Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir – and what you get is a clear picture of a trend that combines religious, messianic Judaism with the settling of the Land of Israel with violent rejections of democracy, liberalism and equal rights that is being waged against gays, lesbians, peace activists, academics and of course all Palestinians.

First it was violence against Palestinians, then it was violence against Israeli peace activists, now it is also violence against homosexuals. You know where it starts, but you have no idea where it ends!

Yesterday, Peace Now was on the ground in the West Bank but this time with a television crew from Israel Channel Two. What they found was what we often encounter, settler violence. Here is the video that channel two produced and was broadcast on the nightly news.

For more information please go to the Peace Now website.

Yesterday, I got the distrusting news that the many fruit and grape trees had been uprooted or set on fire by the setters in Bat Ayin. I filed these reports with Mondoweiss about the incident:

Israeli settler violence against Palestinians is routine, and unreported
Just got an update from Amiel, a Ta’ayush member, who was in Safa this morning. He told me that settlers uprooted around 150 olive and grape leaf trees in Safa as a protest of our action last Saturday. Some of the grape leaf trees in the video were uprooted this morning. The only news source covering this right now is the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency. It is telling that they are the only ones covering this blatant act of settler violence. Yesterday, in the village of Susya next to the Jewish settlement of the same name, settlers set fire to one of the main tents with people inside at four in the morning. Another act of violence only covered in the Palestinian news sources. How can we talk about the problem of settler violence if no one reports it?

Settler arson and vandalism go uninvestigated
Joseph Dana follows up on his report of this morning from Safa in the West Bank:
I just got an email from Ta’ayush activists who went to Safa this afternoon with the Palestinian land owners whose fields were burned and trees uprooted. Soon after they arrived at the farm land, IDF and police showed up. An IDF commander proudly announced that he spotted the fire last night and put it out. The Ta’ayush activists then pleaded with the forces to collect the evidence that the settlers had left behind which included matches and other material to start fires. The IDF and police refused to do so and then declared the area to be a closed military zone basically forcing the activists out of the area. After getting kicked off the land, they accompanied the land owner to file a complaint at the police station in Gush Etzion. The police said that the complaint could not be filed without sufficient evidence. There was a run around regarding the evidence in Safa ending with the police saying that they will ‘look into it’. Ta’ayush is using every possible avenue to contest this legally. There is still nothing in the Israeli press about this event.

Here is a new video of yesterday in Safa

If you are able to read Hebrew you can read the High Court ruling that we were citing yesterday here. Sorry no English translation as of now.

Here is a brief clip of the settlers attacking us with stones: