The Israeli settler outpost of Havat Gilad, deep inside the occupied West Bank, is spread across several hilltops, its sheds and simple block houses clearly visible from neighbouring Palestinian villages. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
Last weekend saw a wave of settler attacks on Palestinian villages in the area, after an Israeli security guard from Havat Gilad was killed during a confrontation between Palestinians and Israelis in the village of Tal last Friday. Four Palestinians and an Israeli soldier were also killed in the incident, the original cause of which is disputed.
After spending the weekend speaking to Palestinians around Havat Gilad, we drove into the outpost itself, to ask one of its residents about the violence, and the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It is rare for an international media organisation like the BBC to be allowed into these outposts. But on this occasion, Yehuda Shimon, a lawyer with an organisation that represents Israelis arrested for violence against Palestinians, agreed to speak.
He told me that attacks on Palestinian villages last weekend were justified as revenge for the killing of the outpost's security guard. "I think now, after they killed one Israeli, we need to kill all the people in Tal and Sarra, even Jit and Farata," he said, naming the Palestinian villages closest to the outpost.
I put it to him that he was equating one Jewish life with hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian lives. "No," he said, "millions. One Jewish life, it's 10 million [Palestinians]." Challenged on the racism of his statement, he did not deny it. "Yes, I know," he replied. "But this is the truth, because God chose us [and] because of this you are jealous."
These extreme views – rejected by many Israelis – are crucial to understanding the conflict playing out across the West Bank, as Israel's settlements and outposts expand, and violence against Palestinians grows. Many settlers here, especially in unauthorised outposts like Havat Gilad, built without Israeli planning permission or legal oversight, see the West Bank as land given to the Jewish people by God. Both Israel's official settlements and its unauthorised outposts are illegal under international law.
Havat Gilad was established more than 20 years ago, in memory of an Israeli security officer murdered by Palestinians – a loosely scattered collection of houses with a vineyard perched high on one hill. When we visit there is a row of newly burned buildings near the entrance – the result, Shimon says, of an arson attack by Palestinians. Israeli media reported that police were treating the fire as accidental, caused by cigarette butts thrown from a car window.
Israel's government has previously said it would legalise Havat Gilad. The Israeli organisation Peace Now, which monitors settlements, says it has been unable to do so because much of the land it is built on is recognised by Israel as privately owned by Palestinians, and that the government has instead designated a patch of land to the south of the outpost as state land, to enable settlers to build there. These issues were dismissed by Shimon, who said international law was irrelevant, because the Bible gave Jews their right to West Bank land.
He criticised Israel's government and army for failing to back Jewish claims to the land strongly enough, despite a vast expansion in settlements and outposts under the current Israeli government, and the presence of far-right religious-nationalist ministers around the cabinet table who are driving it. And he criticised the Israeli army for not using lethal force often enough against Palestinians, during confrontations with Israeli settlers. "The Israeli government and the Israeli army, they like the United Nations – if Palestinians come and Jewish people come, [they] don't kill the Palestinians, [they] just separate the people," he said. "Afterwards, because they don't kill Palestinians, the Palestinians kill us."
The figures for numbers killed and injured in the West Bank contradict his statement. The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which tracks these numbers, says 64 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank from the beginning of this year until 20 July - 18 of them during settler attacks. At least 12 of those were killed by settlers, three by Israeli forces, and in three other cases it is not yet clear whether soldiers or settlers were responsible. It says one Israeli was killed over the same period. The number of injuries inflicted by settlers during these attacks has risen sharply to more than three per day this year, OCHA says.