Surrounded by settlers

”I woke up in the middle of the night with a man standing above me with a gun in his hand. My wife and I had been sleeping, and then he was there in the middle of our house. He asked if I had any cigarettes, and I gave him three.”

Abu Osama, recalls another time when he together with his wife, son and grandchildren were trapped inside the house with big dogs barking outside. The settlers from one of the twelve nearby settlements had come to his house, and brought the dogs. Abu Osama called the Israeli army, and the Palestinian DCL, but nobody came.”Now I don’t bring my kids or wife here anymore, because my wife has already been attacked twice.”

The house where we are is on land belonging to the village of Khallet Sakariya, and is daily visited by settlers. During our visit there are several settler cars driving by, and as we leave in two UN cars, a military jeep appears. It is a very small house with one room, and the house has no electricity. Right outside the house passes the large electricity line between the settlements, but Abu Osama cannot use it. There is no running water, and it is instead carried from the village to the house. On either side of his land, large Israeli flags were recently placed by settlers, despite it being Palestinian land.

As we sit in the sun outside Abu Osama’s house, he is serving us both coffee and tea. He then goes on to say: “only last night they came again, the settlers. Now I do not have a bathroom, if you ask me to use the toilet I will offer to drive you to the village.” The radical settler from the near-by settlement of Efrat destroyed the lean-to just by the house, which functioned as the bathroom and toilet.

“I want to build a fence around my land, so they cannot get in” he concludes. It is evident that Abu Osama’s family cannot live on their land, and that they do not feel safe in their own home. The settlers are guarded by the Israeli military and there is additional security for the settlements. For Abu Osama, neither basic services nor respect is granted, and the protection in place for the Palestinians nowhere to be seen.