Roads between villages in the West Bank increasingly feel like front lines. Across the occupied territory, Palestinians say tensions are at their highest in decades, as fears for their homes, and lives, increase.
At the heart of the trouble is growing violence by extremist Israeli settlers, with attacks on Palestinian communities aimed at changing the geography of the land and undermining the prospect of a two-state solution.
What were once seen by some as separate attacks are now clearly part of a co-ordinated campaign.
In recent weeks, much of this violence has centred on the villages of Jalud and Qusra in the northern West Bank. The National visited the area to gather first-hand testimonies from residents and examine what they see as an increasingly organised movement.
This weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the latest violence by settlers in the two villages, calling those responsible a “handful of rioters” after dozens of masked settlers attacked Palestinian homes.
A'adah Ahmed says she has been in severe pain in her limbs since settlers seized two houses in Jalud that she and her husband of 36 years built together for two of their seven children to marry and settle down in.
“It's like I am in a nightmare that I want to wake up from,” she told The National at her home. “I have pain here and there and I don't know what to do,” she said pointing at her legs and arms.
A petite woman in a flowing brown coat, Ms Ahmed, 51, seemed constantly on the verge of breaking down in tears. The loss of the houses, the farmland and fruit trees around her has gone well beyond their material value. It had shattered the sense of relative security she and her family had built over decades.
For years, she and her husband worked tirelessly on the land, pruned the trees, harvested and sold olives and fruit, and nurtured a family that, through the couple's hard work, lived relatively well.
“I built those two houses with my husband stone by stone and fed our seven children from the land that we no longer have,” she said, as she sat next to her husband, Mahmoud Tobasi, 70, in their living room.
“My life and soul are in that land. Now, I pray every day for death to come and take me because what I have is a life of humiliation.”
While travelling through the West Bank, scores of small settler outposts can now be seen on hilltops overlooking Palestinian villages. Many are recognised by white or orange prefab structures that serve as temporary accommodation.
Planning attacks
Accounts given by Palestinian residents of how the land grabs and attacks are carried out by settlers are nearly identical, betraying a level of planning and co-ordination by the Israeli movement.
They tend to arrive in small numbers, perhaps as few as 10, but with at least one armed with an automatic rifle. In most cases, they bring a power generator and a small herd of sheep, or goats.
They soon make their presence felt by staging night-time raids on the Palestinian villages below, torching cars, chopping down trees and stealing livestock. They take turns standing guard on the hilltop, preventing villagers from approaching to tend their farmland and orchards.
Palestinian villagers routinely complain to a joint Palestinian-Israeli body that co-ordinates on security issues. Typically, Israeli army soldiers arrive at the scene and chase the settlers away, but they return a day or two later. The process continues for weeks before the soldiers disappear and the settlers dig in, building the nucleus of a new settlement.
After losing two homes to settlers, Mahmoud Tobasi fears more could follow. He spends most of his day watching a live feed from the security camera he installed on the roof of his family's home in Jalud.
On the screen, he sees the two houses seized by the settlers this summer. They stand 1,500 metres away on a small hill that faces the home in which he lives with his wife and the youngest of their seven children.
“I want to see what's happening there and document anything that can be helpful in the case my lawyer filed with the High Court to take back the houses,” Mr Tobasi told The National as he stood looking intensely at the large screen on which he monitors the two properties.
“There, you see him? He is one of them,” he said in a raised voice, pointing at a figure stepping out of one house and walking towards the other.
“There are seven or eight young settlers who live at the houses now,” he said as he stood next to the screen hung on a wall outside the kitchen, allowing him to watch from there as well as from the living room.
“The whole thing began in April when they erected a tent close to the houses before they began to pelt them with rocks. They later torched one of our cars and cut off water and electricity. My sons and their families ran out of food and had to leave when the settlers told them they had one of two choices: 'You die in the houses or leave'," he said.
On Saturday, about 10 settlers attacked Mr Tobasi and his wife when they attempted to approach the houses. “They beat us with sticks but our injuries are not serious, just bruises,” he said.
Mr Tobasi's lawyer sought to reassure him after the High Court held its first hearing on the case on Thursday. But Ms Ahmed was not taking much heart from the lawyer's upbeat message. “We will never take the houses back as long as this government is in office,” she said, alluding to Mr Netanyahu's administration, the most right-wing in Israel's history.
Haaretz reported this month that the government, settlers and the military have been introducing changes on the ground in the northern West Bank to pave the way for de facto annexation. It said an investigation found the military was building permanent infrastructure in areas supposedly under the full control of the Palestinian Authority. It has also found evidence of synchronised settler attacks and forced displacement.
While the settlers create new conditions on the ground, leaders of their movement no longer shy away from publicly declaring the annexation of the West Bank as their ultimate goal.
The situation in the West Bank must be “treated as an emergency”, the UN has said this month. Several European countries have imposed sanctions on leaders of the settlers' movement, and US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee described the settlers as “terrorists”.
Bigger scheme
Elements of the Israeli government, in the meantime, do their part to strengthen the settlers' stranglehold on the occupied West Bank. In its latest major action in support of settlements, the security cabinet in July approved 1.3 billion shekels ($434 million) for 34 new settlements in the territory.
Another government move that serves the annexation cause came in mid-August, when Defence Minister Israel Katz, a defender of the settlement movement, ordered the military to hand over responsibility for civilian law enforcement to the police in the West Bank.
The West Bank annexation goal openly embraced by the settler movement and less candidly by the Israeli government appears to be part of a grander scheme to crush any hope of establishing an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Evidence of that scheme being in the works abounds.
In Gaza, most of which lies in ruins from relentless bombing, Israel's military now controls about 70 per cent of the land. Mr Netanyahu and his government are showing no interest in withdrawing, and settlers are lobbying to be allowed to move in and build new communities there more than 20 years after Israel unilaterally left the territory it captured in 1967.
In East Jerusalem, Israeli authorities have been consistently seeking to change the demographics of the area. Building permits for new Palestinian homes, for example, are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, forcing many to seek housing in the West Bank, residents say. Palestinian homes that have stood in the area for decades have been demolished for “building violations” upheld by Israeli courts.
The last two years have also featured frequent incursions into the complex of Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, by settlers led by extremist right-wing members of Mr Netanyahu's government.
Many young Palestinian males are also denied access to Al Aqsa Mosque by the police deployed at all gates leading to the complex. Clerics are banned from the site, sometimes for up to six months, if their sermons touch on anything political, be it the occupation of the West Bank, or Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon.
No olives, no food
A short distance from Jalud is the village of Qusra, where recent events offer a clear example of a potential land grab by settlers, which has been playing out for nearly a month.
Settlers there have been laying siege to three houses on a mountain just outside the village called Ras Al Ein, cutting off water and power supplies and preventing food from reaching the 13 people trapped inside, including two children and an 83-year-old woman.
The settlers have also prohibited villagers from tending to their olive trees and farmland on the mountain. Construction crews have been denied access to the unfinished homes that dot the hillside.
Qusay Abu Reedah, one of the trapped Palestinians, told The National they had received small amounts of food sent by charities. “The food arrives two or three days after we had eaten everything that we have,” he said by telephone. “They live in tents set up just a couple of hundred metres away. We can see them wandering around the area, not allowing Palestinians to come close.”
Hany Auda, Qusra's local council chief for nearly five years before his retirement in May, said the village's predicament goes far beyond the siege of the three homes. Denying access to Ras Al Ein mountain will prevent the village from expanding to accommodate its growing population.
“It's a small village of 7,000 people, and its natural growth can only be in Ras Al Ein mountain and not in the areas around it that are fully controlled by the Israelis,” he told The National. “Our problem with the settlers began months ago, but the siege of the houses is what brought attention to the issue,” Mr Auda, 70, said as he stood on a hill facing the three besieged houses.
Qusra's suffering at the hands of the settlers continued on Saturday, when dozens of masked Israeli settlers attacked homes surrounding the village in the first major violence since the siege of the three houses began nearly a month ago.
“Let me just tell you that our problems with the settlers have increased twenty-fold since the Gaza war began,” said Mr Auda.
