The other mass displacement: while eyes are on Gaza, settlers advance on West Bank herders
The other mass displacement: while eyes are on Gaza, settlers advance on West Bank herders
Nearly 2,000 Palestinians displaced amid settler violence since 2022; 43% since 7 October 2023
1 November, 2023
Shortly after armed Israeli settlers threatened to kill them if they did not leave, 24 Palestinian households totaling 141 people, half of whom are children, were displaced from Khirbat Zanuta in the southern West Bank. On 28 October 2023, the families dismantled about 50 residential and animal structures and vacated the area with their 5,000 livestock. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has previously documented settler attacks in this community, most recently on 12, 21 and 26 October. About two thirds of the families that comprised this community are now displaced.
“On 26 October, settlers attacked us, destroying our homes, water tanks, solar panels, and cars,” said 43-year-old Abu Khaled from Khirbet Zanuta. “I felt the presence of death so tangibly as if I saw it with my own eyes. I was torn between staying in or leaving the place I love, where I belong, where I may die. On 28 October, I made the hardest decision in my life: to leave Zanuta and leave everything behind, as memories. I did this to protect my children.”
These experiences are not unique to Khirbat Zanuta. In 15 herding communities across the West Bank, at least 98 households comprising 828 people, including 313 children, have been displaced amid settler violence or increased movement restrictions since 7 October. That was the day of Hamas’ attack in Israel, where Palestinians from Gaza killed an estimated 1,400 people, injuring others and taking hostages. Since then, Israeli settler violence has increased significantly, from an already high average of three incidents per day thus far in 2023 to a current average of seven per day.
Read the full report: The other mass displacement: while eyes are on Gaza, settlers advance on West Bank herders
One of the families displaced from Al Ganoub in October 2023. ”We’ve been intimidated by settlers in our home many times. Since the attack against my husband, my little daughter is traumatized. Every time she hears a car passing or sees someone she doesn’t recognize; she’s scared that they might be settlers.“ Wa’ad, 26, mother of six whose husband was run over by settlers in 2021, Al Ganoub. The quote and pictures are from before the displacement. Photo by OCHA/Manal Massalha, 2022
“They prevent us from grazing our sheep.” Mohamad Abu Seif (Abu Khalid), 90, speaks to an OCHA staff about how settlers have intensified their pressures on his community to leave after 7 October.
Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel Flash Update #32. Nov 7
For the second consecutive day, on 7 November, the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of the Rantisi hospital in Gaza city, claiming that armed groups were using its premises and surroundings. This hospital is the only pediatric facility in northern Gaza, and it also accommodates about 6,000 IDP (internally displaced people). According to the MoH in Gaza, its evacuation would jeopardize the lives of 15 children on life support, 38 children undergoing kidney dialysis, 10 children relying on artificial respiratory devices, and others who are injured.
According to WHO (World Health Organization), due to the lack of medical supplies, hospitals in the north are conducting complex surgeries, including amputations, without anesthesia.
The current water aid entering from Egypt in bottles and jerry cans is addressing only 4 per cent of the residents’ water needs per day, based on an allocation of three litres per person per day for all purposes, including cooking and hygiene. Water assistance is being primarily distributed in the south, where over 700,000 people have sought refuge in shelters.
The number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank since 7 October accounts for more than one-third of all Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank in 2023 (397). About 55 per cent of the fatalities since 7 October occurred during confrontations that followed Israeli search-and-arrest operations, primarily in Jenin and Tulkarm governorates. Some 30 per cent were in the context of demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza; eight per cent were killed in settler attacks against Palestinians, and the remaining seven where while attacking or allegedly attacking Israeli forces or settlers.
read the full report: Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel Flash Update #32
Palestinian mother and her newborn baby girl in a school used to shelter displaced people in the Gaza Strip. "There is no bathroom, no water, and no proper care,” she says. ”I have not checked or cleaned the caesarean section stitches yet.” Screenshot from a video by UNICEF
Alliance Water Fact, Nov 6th
Water Fact – November 6, 2023
A ‘textbook case of genocide’ is on display in Gaza with no end to bombardments and no clean water to drink
That’s what Craig Mokhiber, the former director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called Israel’s war on Gaza in his blistering October 28th resignation letter.
“The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine,” he wrote. “What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations ‘to ensure respect’ for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities.”
With the known toll of slaughtered Palestinians now above 10,000 – who knows how many bodies are buried under the rubble? - Israel’s relentless airstrikes have been killing a child every 10 minutes. Save the Children stated on October 29 that “the number of children reported killed in Gaza in just three weeks has surpassed the annual number of children killed across the world’s conflict zones since 2019.”
While the Biden Administration has refused to call for a ceasefire – it prefers a ‘humanitarian pause’ which Netanyahu bluntly rejected on November 3 - an internal State Department report expressed concern that 52,000 pregnant women and over 30,000 babies under the age of six months were being forced to drink potentially lethal water polluted with sewage and salt.
Drinking seawater can be deadly for humans, leading to dehydration and organ failure. For babies and fetuses the combination of salty and polluted water causing severe diarrhea is a likely death sentence.
On October 28, the aid group Action Against Hunger warned: “Gaza is dying of thirst. 2.3 million people living in the Gaza Strip urgently need clean water…more than half of the water supply infrastructure is currently damaged and in need of repair….people are rationing water and drinking only one liter a day. Water tankers have no fuel. Desalination plants don’t work. You can’t access groundwater without fuel to pump it into the water network…Dehydration, extreme fatigue, along with thirst and dehydration or concentrated urine, which could mean that many people are suffering from kidney failure, are some of the symptoms we are starting to see.” The over 640,000 Gazans in UNRWA shelters can expect only one-half liter of clean water – amounting to two glasses - a day.
Action Against Hunger called for the immediate entry of fuel to be able to pump water, re-start desalination and wastewater plants and enable trucks to distribute water: but fuel is precisely what Israel has bannedfrom the pitifully few trucks (374 between Oct. 21 and Nov. 2) that have been permitted to enter through the Rafah Crossing. Before the war 550 trucks carrying fuel, water, food, medical equipment and educational material entered the blockaded Gaza Strip on a daily basis. But even then the fuel that made it into the Gaza Strip was not sufficient to keep electricity on more than eight hours a day.
Now there is no refrigeration to preserve whatever food is on those trucks, and lentils and rice cannot be cooked without fuel. Very limited supplies of fuel which UNRWA and UNICEF had in storage were distributed to keep 20 pumping stations and two desalination plants in southern Gaza working at 40 percent capacity. By November 2, these sources of water shut down as fuel was exhausted. On the same day three trucks entered Gaza with 100,000 liters of water, enough for 20,000 people for a single day. The only other source of clean water is a limited supply from two pipelines erratically serving southern and middle Gaza which international pressure had induced Israel to turn on. On Nov. 4, PBS quoted UN deputy Mideast coordinator Lynn Hastings as saying that one of those pipelines was not working and “many people are relying on brackish or saline ground water, if at all.” The third Israeli pipeline serving northern Gaza and Gaza City remains turned off, and at least 25 sewage pumping stations in the north have ceased functioning.
As for the food supply, according to the UNRWA director for Gaza, “the average Palestinian in Gaza is living on two pieces of Arabic bread made from flour the United Nations had stockpiled in the region.” Despite starvation conditions “now people are beyond looking for bread. It’s looking for water.”
As Gaza faces a catastrophic water, sanitation and food crisis and over half of its hospitals are shut down because of damage or lack of fuel, Israel is intensifying its bombing of hospitals and ambulances, schools, mosques and churches that are serving as emergency shelters, as well as densely-packed refugee camps, wiping out entire families in a second. According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, by November 2 Israel had dropped 25,000 tons of explosives on more than 12,000 targets in the tiny Gaza Strip, roughly equivalent to the nuclear explosives that the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
In this heart wrenching BBC interview a pediatric intensive care doctor from the UK who has been training medical teams in Gaza for the past decade called the situation “an avalanche of suffering that is unprecedented in modern times” and “a stain on our collective humanity.” Israel and the US call it a legitimate exercise in self-defense and continue to oppose a ceasefire which mass demonstrations around the globe have been demanding.
The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine is holding its next Stand Out for Gaza on Wednesday, November 15 from noon to 1 pm at the First Baptist Church, 633 Center Street, Jamaica Plain. Please join us!
Friends, if you would like to be on a list about Alliance standouts and demonstrations in the Boston area, please contact us at waterjusticeinpalestine@gmail.com
photo from Boston rally