Settlers versus Palestinians: 'This was a battle for our homes'

• Published date: 08 October 2021
• Author: TOVAH LAZAROFF
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The shattered jagged glass is one of the many visible scars of the violent events that took place in Khirbet al-Mufaqarah on September 28, when the small, dusty South Hebron Hills Palestinian herding village of some 122 people was transformed into a battleground that left 12 Palestinians and five settlers injured.

"All the homes are like this," said Mahmoud Hamamdeh, adding that "this was a battle for our homes.... We were attacked with stones and sticks."

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His three-year-old grandson Muhammad Baker Mahmoud Hamamdeh suffered a head wound in the attack serious enough to require a three-day hospital stay at Soroka-University Medical Center in Beersheba.

A week later, dressed in gray pajamas and sandals, the brown-haired boy sat on the concrete floor in his home playing with large, multicolored Lego that two Israeli visitors had brought him.

The room was mostly bare. A number of small, thin, colored foam mattresses were laid on the floor for seating.

Muhammad had fitted the red, green, yellow and blue pieces together, as his mother, Bara'a, and his grandfather Mahmoud described how their home was pelted by stones thrown by Jewish extremists who they presumed were settlers.

"This is the room where the children hid," Mahmoud explained, because its steel shutter could provide safety.

His grandson Muhammad, however, never made it into the safe room, because he had already been hit by rocks that went through two different windows of the bedroom he had been napping in. The room was filled with glass and blood, recalled Mahmoud, explaining that they thought he had died.

Mahmoud walked over to the bedroom, where he held up the bloodstained sweatshirt Muhammad had slept in, to underscore how frightening the moment had been.

The attack, which occurred about 2 p.m. on the Simhat Torah holiday, is the worst such incident of violence in that West Bank village that anyone can remember.

The community is not linked up to an electricity or water grid and is located off a dirt road between the two settler outposts of Avigail and Maon Farm.

The three communities are all unauthorized, and as a result the status of all three communities is tenuous.

Both Palestinians and Israelis hold that their rights to the land supersede the IDF regulations that govern Area C of the West Bank where they are situated. Area C is under IDF military and civilian rule.

Palestinians hold that this land should be...