Fear and goading in the West Bank

By Wendell Steavenson

At midday on Friday October 13th, a scant week after Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on Israel, Basel Adra, a human-rights activist from the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani heard a commotion and grabbed his camera. Children in the playground next to the village school were yelling and pointing across the valley. Two armed settlers and an Israeli soldier had walked down the road and were engaged in an altercation with the family that lived on the edge of the village. The men had come from an outpost of an Israeli settlement that was established on the hill opposite At-Tuwani in the 1980s, in spite of the fact that the area was outside Israel’s internationally recognised boundaries. The settlers snatched at the Palestinian family’s smartphones as they tried to film the encounter. One hit the father of the house on the forehead with his rifle butt.