When they exit the dirt road that leads to Douma, the West Bank agricultural village below, from which columns of black smoke rise, it is best not to cross their path. They belch, threaten. There is rage, this Saturday, April 13, among the men, rather young – some barely out of adolescence -, who have just burned houses and attacked the inhabitants, sometimes with knives, in this large Palestinian town of two thousand people, nestled in the hills.
The group of attackers is made up of residents of West Bank settlements, located in the central region of the occupied territory, between Ramallah and Nablus, where tensions are particularly high. They pile into cars made for rutted roads – SUVs, pick-ups. Many of them wear balaclavas or have tied a scarf over their heads to hide their faces. Their convoy of nearly fifty vehicles sets off and sets off to continue the punitive expedition further. Among them, the young radical settlers called “hill youth”, thin and lanky, tanned by the sun, the long locks of their peot floating in the wind.
The tension began with a tragedy affecting one of their own. For two days, they have been looking for Benjamin Achimeir, a 14-year-old shepherd who disappeared since Friday from the Malachei Shalom outpost, one of these small groups of makeshift buildings erected in order to gradually increase the space controlled by the settlements on Palestinian land. The young man had gone out early in the morning with a flock to graze his animals. Around noon, the sheep returned, alone, to the Gal Fram farm, where they are raised.
Immediately, searches were organized. In these hills where the settlers are like obsessive geographers, who weave their network of outposts, roads, colonies, with the aim of conquering space, it is rare that we get lost. There was reason to worry. The specter of a hostage-taking was immediately on everyone’s mind.
In a few hours, tension rose. The groups of settlers, soon supported by the army, tried to locate the teenager using his phone, says one of them, who was still participating in searches on Saturday morning. The last trace of the aircraft was not far away, near the village of Al-Moughaïr. Even before learning more, an expedition was organized on Friday afternoon, to ransack the small town. In a few hours, one death and twenty-five injuries were recorded.
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