Hebron Hills

These are the shepherding communities, uh, in the north of the West Bank in Hamza, around the E1 zone in Khan al-Ahmar, in the central West Bank.

Of course, as well in the southern West Bank, uh, in the s- southern Hebron Hills, um, in Masafer Yatta, in Susya.

You've had more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank murdered since October 7th, 2023.

Um, many, many thousands more wounded.

Sa'ar notes that recent moves by Israel against the UK were a response to British sanctions against Judea and Samaria, as well as additional sanctions on defense exports to Israel.

Knesset member Ofer Cassif of the Joint Arab List has been convicted of aggravated assault against a police officer during a demonstration in the South Hebron Hills area four years ago.

The Jerusalem Magistrate's Court ruled that Cassif had purposely struck the policeman twice.

The Knesset member's argument that he was acting in self-defense was rejected.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond, and no arrests were made.

In the Hebron Hills, a Palestinian family says settlers have besieged their home since Monday and set up a tent blocking the only road to it.

In Burqa, near Ramallah, a house was burned overnight.

Arrests for settler violence are highly rare, and convictions less common.

It sits inside what the Israeli army calls firing zone 918, which is a military zone.

In the early 1980s, the military declared about 30,000 denims of the South Hebron Hills closed training zones, which is half the size of Manhattan.

12 Palestinian villages were already there, farmers and shepherds, many of them living in caves, families who had been on that land since before 1967.

In 1999, the army expelled around 700 of them for, quote, living illegally in a firing zone.

Some of them lost their lives on that day, right? And it's just...

The one story that always stands out to me, and we mention in the book, is the story of the Commonsen brothers, right? They were these two brothers from what the world would call a settlement, but a community in the south Hebron Hills and in Judea and Samaria and the West Bank.

And they hear what's happening.

Again, no one asks them to go.

So Bassel Adra, the journalist from Mosafer Yatta, the one who you know from No Other Land, the documentary that won a bunch of awards.

He published a piece in Jewish Currents on September third about livestock theft in the South Hebron Hills.

So this isn't vandalism, it's theft.

It's organized removal of livestock.

And a flock of the size that we're talking about here, it's worth something on the order of tens, if not a hundred thousand dollars.

I'm flagging this because I think it's easy to hear sheep and these kinds of things and file it maybe under, like, property crime or, or vandalism or something.

But for a herding family in the South Hebron Hills, the flock is not just an asset, it's the entire productive base of the household.

It's the income.

It is currently only 23% funded.

The situation in the occupied West Bank continues to deteriorate, the UN Human Rights Office has said, pointing to the mass destruction of Palestinian villages and forcible transfer of residents in Safayata, South Hebron Hills.

In a call for an immediate halt to the demolitions, the UN Office OHCHR said that Israeli bulldozers demolished homes, farm buildings, water tanks and solar panels in the village of Jinba on Wednesday.

The forcible transfer of a civilian population from their land by an occupying power is a war crime, said Ajit Sungay, head of OHCHR in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

A statement met by Defence Minister Israel Katz's reaffirmation that the Golan Heights are an inseparable part of Israel.

The recent terror incidents include a car-ramming attack near Maccabim checkpoint that seriously wounded an American citizen, and an earlier report of an attempted ramming in the Hebron Hills.

In a significant diplomatic development, a delegation from Somaliland is proposing a military partnership with Israel.

Ahmed Diri, head of the delegation, told the Jerusalem Post that such cooperation could include an Israeli presence to counter Houthi threats and secure the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait.