Key Developments (August 4 – 7)
- On August 4, Israeli forces shot and killed 18-year-old Mahmoud Abu
Saan in the head at “point-blank range” in Nour Shams refugee camp, east
of Tulkarem. Abu Saan was killed during a military raid on Tulkarem.
- On August 5, Israeli settlers attacked the village of Burqa near
Ramallah in a rampage, shooting and killing Qusai Jamal Ma’tan, 19, and
wounding two others. According to Middle East Eye,
the settler raid was from a nearby settler outpost that had been
established seven months earlier. The youth of Burqa’s village had
reportedly tried to repel the invading settlers by throwing stones at
them when they brought their sheep onto the village’s lands — a common
method of laying claim to Palestinian agricultural land as grazing
pastures that are then confiscated by the state — after which the
settlers shot at them with live ammunition. This is part of an
increasingly growing trend of settler attacks in the West Bank, which is
even on its way to surpassing the record high set by settler attacks back in 2022.
- On Sunday, August 6, Israeli forces carried out an extrajudicial
assassination mission on a road near the town of Arraba, outside Jenin,
ambushing and killing three Palestinians in a car after firing dozens of
bullets at them. At least one of the martyrs was a resistance fighter
with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The assassination is
reminiscent of several other attacks on Palestinian resistance fighters
throughout 2022 and 2023, especially the assassination of the three
proto-founders of the Lions’ Den in February 2022, and the assassination of three resistance fighters in the town of Jaba’ outside of Jenin last March.
- Also on Sunday, an Israeli settler ran over
a 4-year-old Palestinian child in the village of Kissan outside of
Bethlehem, before driving off in an apparent hit-and-run attack. The
child, Jabril Sawarka, was admitted to the hospital in critical
condition.
- On August 7, a Palestinian teen shot by an Israeli settler days
earlier succumbed to his wounds early Monday morning. Ramzi Fathi Hamed,
17, had been sitting in a car outside the illegal Israeli settlement of
Ofra near the town of Silwad, north of Ramallah, when an Israeli
settler opened fire on the youth twice, hitting him in the stomach and
the chest. He died of a severe pulmonary attack.
- The Israeli District Court ruled against granting early release to ailing Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqah on Monday, August 7. Daqqah’s family described the ruling
as a “death sentence” for the political prisoner, who has spent 37
years behind bars and contracted a rare and deadly form of bone marrow
cancer in 2018. Daqqah continues to be held at the Ramleh Prison clinic,
which is notorious for its willful and deliberate medical negligence of
Palestinian political prisoners, as in the case of the death of Sheikh Khader Adnan.
In-Depth
Last week, a series of Israeli settler and army attacks occurred in
the West Bank that only a year ago would have been considered major news
likely to send shockwaves in Palestinian society and perhaps even
instigate a localized strike. Three Palestinians assassinated in a
targeted operation by special forces, settlers rampaging in the
Palestinian countryside, settlers shooting and killing villagers,
settlers running over children — the collection of brutality has become a
normalized part of Palestinian existence. It’s also not particularly
new, but the contrast with how the Palestinian street would receive such
events in August 2022 — which was met with a rising tide of armed
resistance as friends vowed to avenge one another’s deaths at the hands of the colonizer — is striking.
But it wouldn’t be appropriate to imply that this means Palestinians have become complacent — the achievements of the Palestinian resistance
in Jenin are proof of that. What they have done is adapt to a
now-regularized tempo of Israeli attack, subsuming the uninterrupted
onslaught as part of the status quo and yet continuing to resist all the
same. In a sense, this is the meaning of sumud that should be
embraced — not to simply remain steadfast and exist on your land, but to
continue to exist in a way that preserves your capacity to actively
resist. This goes well beyond the often-abused aphorism of “existence is
resistance” (which runs the risk of reading resistance into everything,
even collaborationism) — rather, it is a reflection of what it means to
build a resistance society.
The point of building a resistance society is not only to continue to
escalate armed resistance against the colonial presence but to build
Palestinian society’s tolerance to the price that Israel tries to make it pay for resisting in the first place. Throughout the past year and a half, the armed resistance groups have constantly alluded to al-hadina al-sha’biyya,
the popular base within which resistance fighters operate. Without this
kind of popular protection, which the fighters in Jenin said was at
times crucial for their survival during the battle last July, resistance
would be relegated to atomized screams of protest. A part of that is
the knowledge that continuing to resist will lead to even more human
sacrifice and doing it anyway.
This doesn’t do anything to decrease the suffering and the heartache that comes with the loss of loved ones. But it means that this loss will not end with Palestinian resignation.
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