2023-10-21 11:05:24
He left on foot with only his shirt on his back, a canvas hat, his wife, their children and their goats. Abed Kaabneh abandoned his home and his possessions: the settlers and Israeli soldiers who chased him and his Palestinian neighbors from the hamlet of Wadi Al-Sik, in the occupied West Bank, on October 12, did not give them time to take anything away. It was a small, almost invisible forced population movement: 180 Palestinian Bedouins guiding 1,700 animals across the hills to the first town that would welcome them.
Their fate weighs nothing in Israel, which is consumed in its mourning after the attack carried out by Hamas on October 7. As for the Palestinians, their eyes are fixed on Gaza under the bombs, they have little time to pity these unfortunate brothers. “The settlers took revenge on us for what Hamas did in the SouthJudge M. Kaabneh, and we relived the story of our grandparents”the founding trauma of these families, the Nakba (“catastrophe”), during which almost half of the Palestinians were chased or fled their lands, during the war which accompanied the birth of the State of Israel, in 1948.
The town of Qusra, located 28 kilometers southeast of Nablus, and regularly attacked by settlers from the Yesh Kedesh colony, located less than 3 kilometers away, on October 19, 2023. VIRGINIA NGUYEN HOANG/HUMA FOR “THE WORLD”
The hamlet of Abed Kaabneh is not an isolated case. Since October 7, Israeli settlers, protected and sometimes assisted by the army, have taken advantage of the current disorder to depopulate hills in the West Bank. They have almost completed emptying of their sparse population the mountain ridges which plunge into the Jordan valley east of the Allon road, a trail of asphalt of around thirty kilometers, which winds through these contorted landscapes of white limestone and thorny, and from which the view extends very far, towards the mountains of Jordan. The first community was chased out in the summer of 2022. Five others followed, during the summer, then after the Hamas attack.
“A soldier gave us an hour to leave”
The same attacks are being perpetrated, at an unprecedented rate, in the north of the Jordan Valley and in the hills south of Hebron: remote regions, difficult to access and controlled by the Israeli army. Since the start of the war, 545 people from 13 Bedouin herding communities have been forced to move to the West Bank, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. On October 19, several Israeli human rights organizations sent a letter to Western diplomats calling on them to help “to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian shepherds and farmers in the Jordan Valley”.
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