In the early hours of 13 March in the village of Humsa, in the northern Jordan Valley, a Palestinian family was subjected to yet another extremely violent attack by illegal Israeli colonial settlers.
The family and international solidarity activists were tied up by their hands and feets before being kicked and beaten by 30 masked settlers.
They told the victims:
We want to kill you… We are Jewish, this is our land.
The settlers also blindfolded activists, beat up one Palestinian man with rocks, and sexually assaulted another person. Activists were asked if they wanted their fingers cut and their rings were stolen as well as their passports, phones and money.
After the attack, because the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) blocked their access to the property, it took three hours for the first ambulance to arrive for the injured.
US activist, Ava Lang, and her friend were with the Palestinian family as International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteers when the settler attack took place.
Here, Lang recalls the shocking details of the incident in her own words.
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‘We are going to kill you!’
When the illegal Israeli settlers arrived, I was waiting for my night watch shift, asleep in the corner of a small tent which we share with the Palestinian father who stays up to protect his family.
He and I woke up at around 1.20am to my friend screaming at us to get up, before immediately being swarmed and trapped in the tent by about six masked Israeli settlers. They were armed with heavy wooden sticks. They immediately beat the three of us to the ground, smashing our faces with their fists and clubs.
They zip-tied our hands and feet and were yelling things like, “We are going to kill you!” They pulled down the Palestinian father’s pants, poured water all over him and brutally beat him into the dirt. All he could do was curl into a foetal position and scream when they beat him with their clubs.
Others ransacked our bags, stealing our wallets and passports. One asked me for my phone and every time I said I didn’t know where it was — because the whole tent was a mess and I could not move — he would hit me in the face.
Once they found our phones, they dragged my friend out by her ankles as she could not stand up because of the zip ties. They pulled me up and dragged me out of the tent by my hair. They shoved the father out barefoot.
‘All you could hear was shouting and screaming’
While out in the open they continued hitting the Palestinian father with their clubs, bashing his left eye. One held me by my hair and continually grabbed my ear, ripping downwards as if to pull it off. They then pushed the three of us, while hitting us with their clubs, towards the centre of the property.
Here we witnessed the chaos of the family’s flock of sheep let loose and around 30 illegal Israeli settlers running around beating the rest of the Palestinian family. All you could hear was shouting and screaming.
Then the settlers ushered us into a different tent, severely hitting my butt on the way in, leaving a large welt. They blindfolded my friend and shoved all three of us to the ground in the tent with other Palestinian men. They intermittently hit and kicked all of us, the Palestinians receiving the most brutal of their blows.
I laid shaking with my hands protecting my face next to the elderly patriarch of the family. He was curled up in a foetal position, zip-tied. He had a bleeding gash on his swollen cheek and looked to be unconscious. We learned later that he was assaulted with rocks. All of the children, around six or seven of them, were gathered at the back of the tent, whimpering, and forced to watch us.
‘It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen’
The Israeli settlers threw a cloth over my face and continued kicking or punching, and terrorising. If the children began to cry, the settlers would scream at them and go over to scare them. I could not see if they were physically harming them or not.
In a whisper, you could hear the kids praying. It was one of the few things that pulled me through the horror. They screamed at my friend and I to remove our rings, saying, “I will break your fingers if you don’t take them off faster” and hitting my face as I struggled to take them off while my wrists were bound.
They would occasionally ask our names and where we were from. They then poured water all over us. I thought it was gasoline at first and thoughts of being burned alive in the tent with the Palestinian family flooded my mind. Someone ripped my jacket open with a knife, aggressively cutting from my left armpit to my hip. One settler messed with my belt and I screamed because I thought they were going to rape me.
Before reaching this new tent, we had witnessed the settlers collectively brutally sexually assaulting someone. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. The whole time after, I thought we were going to be raped. Then suddenly they cut all of our zip ties, rolled my friend on top of one of the other Palestinian men on the ground and retreated.
Upon standing up we tried consoling the children in the tent, but everyone kind of ran out into the night and general chaos. It was mostly dark. There were only a few flashlights as the settlers had destroyed or taken down the family’s floodlights.
The men of the family tended to the wounded and ran into the hills seeking the sheep. Luckily they found a few of them, so they herded them back into the pen. Some of the older children helped with this, but the settlers stole 350 sheep.
The IOF blocked ambulance from arriving
The young toddlers were running around without shoes, crying for their mothers. I did not know where the mothers were or what the settlers had done to them. There were a couple of months-old babies crying alone in one of the tents. Some Palestinian vehicles arrived with family members to support.
At one point some of the young Palestinian men returned over the hill from their search for more sheep, but before we all knew they were Palestinian, everyone near the tents panicked and screamed for a moment thinking the settlers had returned.
About an hour later, two others from Jordan Valley Activists arrived on the scene. Then the IOF arrived and questioned the men, and inspected the injured people. It took the red crescent ambulance three hours to show up because the IOF blocked it from arriving. It transported four Palestinians to the hospital in Tubas, with severe head injuries and other trauma wounds.
My friend and I sat watching the Palestinians finally receive medical treatment as the dusk’s first light crested their ancestral hills. Tears and bloody snot covered my face. I cried silent tears over the lack of reprieve for this Palestinian family.
They were lucky that the IOF, or Israeli occupation police, did not detain or arrest any of them for some falsified reason, as is often the outcome when they arrive after a settler incident.
Nowhere is safe for the family. There is no-one for them to call during these attacks that will protect them. Even the ambulance took hours to arrive because of the Israeli occupation’s oppressive movement control.
An Israeli flag recently put up by settlers. Photo supplied by International Solidarity Movement
‘The international community refuses to intervene’
And I cried for their land. If they choose to remain, they are simply waiting for the next settler attack, but the human body and nervous system can only take so much trauma. Yet they have nowhere else to go.
They have lived on their land since before they can remember and they may never return if they are forcibly displaced. The settler colonial state of Israel does not uphold the UN human right of return, nor give reparations for Palestinian displacement.
Worst of all, there is no end in sight to such abuse. Deadly illegal settler attacks in coordination with the Israeli state and military have increased exponentially since 7 October 2023. The settlers rarely receive punishment for their theft, violence and murders, let alone their status as illegal occupiers on Palestinian land.
The IOF arrests and kills Palestinians when all they do is seek to exist on their land. All while the international community refuses to intervene in, and even funds, Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians.
My body aches, but the racist settlers inflicted far worse injuries upon the bodies of the Palestinians. As a privileged international, it is easy to call this the worst fucking night of my life. But for Palestinians, it is but another violent injustice imposed by “Israel” on an infinitely long list of human rights abuses.
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Israel’s must be stopped
Lang says this attack is just one of the human rights violations suffered by this family. Settlers have also carried out theft, destroyed property and physically assaulted them. Also, as with many Palestinians in the village of Humsa, livestock is their livelihood but settler shepherds are now grazing their sheep on the family’s land, forcing them to keep their animals inside and buy costly grain to feed them.
All day every day, the terrorist state of “Israel” commits human rights abuses, including the war crime of forcible displacement against an occupied population. The purpose of these actions is to fulfill the zionist regime’s dream of a “Greater Israel“.
It is the moral and legal responsibility of us all, including the governments of the so-called democracies of the world, who talk endlessly of human rights and freedom, to stop these actions of the terrorist state of “Israel” now.
Featured image via residents/International Solidarity Movement
By Charlie Jaay
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