While Gaza began to breathe again the day after the ceasefire went into effect, the nightmare continues in the rural areas and small towns of the West Bank: hundreds of dead, thousands of attacks, vicious looting. The harassment by settlers drunk on their impunity is terrifying. As a member of a delegation of the International Federation for Human Rights (IFHR), I have met with Palestinians victimized by Israel’s annexation ambitions… but who refuse to admit defeat.
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Why does Palestine seem uglier, dirtier and more melancholic now than it did last spring ? Injustice is omnipresent, chokes me like a wind from hell. These highways of discrimination are hideous. They’re just one more sign that Palestine is sinking into the inadmissible. The indifference of the world should make one weep if that would ease my anger.
The facts are inescapable. Summary executions, merciless beatings, houses burnt to the ground, farms destroyed, fields ransacked, people arrested arbitrarily… And who perpetrates these daily outrages ? Settlers, organised in militias and armed by the government and by soldiers acting as oppressors, complicit in the horrors perpetrated by these so-called settlers. What’s happening in the depths of Palestine is getting “worse and worse”. Everyone tells me that.
For this IFHR delegation, the diplomacy of hugging is a token of sharing and solidarity. The men and women we meet force themselves to smile but they want to scream. “How do you put it in French? Pénible ?” says a man. He’s trying to be funny but his expression has lost all confidence as he shakes our hands.
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Israeli settlers have the same ideas as supremacists and religious extremists the world over. They’re fighting the Arabs, which means driving the Palestinians (Muslim or Christian) out of the West Bank. Rich or poor, farmers or bourgeois, city-dwellers or country folk, the colonists “show no mercy” : this is their general watchword. They’ve no reason to hold back since they are egged on by Benyamin Netanyahu’s most powerful ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir - who left the government coalition on account of the ceasefire in Gaza - and Bezalel Smotrich, both settlers themselves, like 11 other ministers in the current cabinet. A permit to massacre delivered by ministers, rabbis and generals, a death-dealing Holy Trinity.
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Some Palestinians, particularly in Jenin, have been killed by the Palestinian police, contaminated by a security complicity with Israel which disgusts Palestinians. “Help us to get rid of Hamas and Fatah,” a middle-class Ramallah resident begs us. Some Palestinians consider these to be pawns manipulated by Israel, prepared to sacrifice them for their economic and ideological interests. “And as for us, we can count the disappeared, but we can’t even draw up the lists of our dead,” bemoans one Palestinian. “We’re pariahs, the dregs of humanity”. A man we met in Bethlehem doesn’t even want to talk about the eighteen years he spent in prison. There are over 5,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israel. According to the NGO Adameer, there were 3,376 administrative detainees as of 7 January 2025 as opposed to “only” 1,264 in September 2023.
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As for the settlers, they have no doubts at all. They’ve got guns and they use them. Just like the soldiers.
The man tells us about the death of a ten-year-old Palestinian child. In November 2023, in the street, in front of everybody, cut down by a sniper’s bullet. The soldiers took away the boy’s body and brought it to his father the next day. A bit further on, in a recess in the isolation wall that surrounds the camp, is an Israeli military base, where some twenty soldiers are permanently stationed, and they’re watching us. Here, the Palestinians are under constant observation. When the day comes for a new exodus demanded by the messianic settlers and their ministers, a second Nakba, which seems almost inevitable now, the army will know where to find the suitcases to speed them on their way.
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Ben Gvir and Smotrich call the shots in all military, civilian and financial matters in the occupied Palestinian territories. These proconsuls snigger over their murderous decisions on the propaganda TV channels, astounded at the degree to which the “allies” of Israel leave them to it. Besides which, the rabbis give them their blessing; “Show no mercy” is their slogan, repeated by the thousands armed by Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Both of whom should be brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for their repeated incitements to murder and looting.
Moreover, the Defence Minister, Israel Katz, has just released the handful of settlers, sixteen in all, who were being held in administrative detention. They will be useful, the Minister declared, “to reinforce and encourage the settlement movement”. He could hardly have made the delivery of a permit to kill any clearer. These men monitor the crimes in person from inside their armoured, air-conditioned limousines cruising the restricted highways. Their world view is busy destroying Palestine, its delicately misty balminess and the vapours of the Dead Sea.
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