Pogrom in Beit Furik EN FR ES IT DE

 

Gideon Levy & Alex Levac (photos), Haaretz, August 15, 2026

Beit Furik: Israel Called It a Terror Attack. But Is That Really What Happened?
Scenes from Daily Life in the Occupied West Bank

Beit Furik : Israël a qualifié l’incident d’ATH (“Activité terroriste hostile”). Mais est-ce vraiment ce qui s’est passé ?
Scènes de la vie quotidienne en Cisjordanie occupée

Beit Furik: Israel lo calificó de “ATH” (Actividad terrorista hostil). Pero ¿es realmente eso lo que ocurrió?
Escenas de la vida cotidiana en Cisjordania ocupada

Beit Furik: Israele lo ha definito un’ “ATO” (Attività terroristica ostile). Ma è davvero questo ciò che è accaduto?
Scene di vita quotidiana nella Cisgiordania occupata

Beit Furik: Israel bezeichnete es als „FTA“ (Feindselige terroristische Aktivität). Aber ist das wirklich so passiert?
Alltagsszenen aus dem besetzten Westjordanland

Statement from Birzeit University on the Israeli military invasion of its campus and shooting of students

As part of its ongoing assault on Palestinian life and institutions, the Israeli occupying army carried out a military invasion of Birzeit University during official working hours, at a time when the campus was filled with students, faculty members, and staff. The invasion was premeditated and coincided with a student union protest against the settler-colonial army’s violence against our people and its policy of mass political imprisonment.

Turning the university campus into a site of military aggression, the occupying forces destroyed the University’s main gate, stormed the campus with a large number of soldiers and military vehicles, and fired live ammunition, stun grenades, and tear gas directly at students and members of the university community. As a result, several students sustained gunshot injuries and remain hospitalized.

This daytime military invasion of Birzeit University constitutes part of a systematic policy pursued by the Zionist settler-colonial regime to intimidate students and undermine their right to education, with the aim of suppressing Palestinian consciousness and targeting national institutions. The University affirms that these repressive practices will not break the will of its students or staff, nor will they deter it from continuing its academic and national mission.

In flagrant violation of international norms and conventions that guarantee the protection of students and workers in academic institutions, including the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law, the Zionist state continues to criminalize Palestinian education. Birzeit University reiterates its call on international organizations, human rights institutions, and media outlets to assume their moral and legal responsibilities by taking immediate action to expose these ongoing violations against Palestinian higher education, to exert effective pressure to halt them, and to hold those responsible accountable.

Birzeit University affirms that education will remain an act of anti-colonial resistance, and that the University will continue to be a space for knowledge and freedom, despite all attempts at repression and aggression.

Birzeit University, January 6, 2026

In Netanyahu’s Folktale, Only 70 Young Men Are Responsible for All the West Bank Pogroms

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 4/1/2026

The state is behind the pogroms. It is responsible for them – they serve the government’s interests. Its soldiers are always present, but not a single IDF commander has carried out what international law requires – protecting Palestinian residents

 
A Palestinian man uses a mobile phone to record a burning truck after an Israeli settler attack in a village east of Tulkarm in the West Bank in November. Photo Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP

These are two common folktales: In heaven, 72 virgins await shahids, or martyrs; in the West Bank, 70 young men from broken homes are behind all riots. It’s hard to know which of the two folktales is more far-fetched.

The second is a figment of the prime minister’s imagination: Benjamin Netanyahu even told Fox News that the youths "are not from the West Bank."

Let’s put aside the arguments that broke out over his use of the forbidden term "West Bank," and ask: Are there actually any settlers from the West Bank? They all moved there in recent decades. None of them belong there, uninvited guests in a foreign land whose time there, one hopes, will be short, and their end will be like that of crusaders, inshallah.

Nonetheless, Netanyahu’s concern for the handful of youths’ mental health is touching – and fitting for a man leading a government that has always prioritized mental health. Settler activists were quick to offer them treatment – the hostels and rehab centers are already being set up. But we’re not talking about 70 people, 700 or 7,000.

Haut du formulaire

The more accurate figure is 70,000, or in fact, seven million. Netanyahu’s attempt to minimize the phenomenon and attribute it to a handful of rioters is a total lie, just like the 72 virgins who are waiting for no one. It’s doubtful that even Fox News bought it.

The state is behind the pogroms. It is responsible for them, it wants them to happen – they serve the government’s interests and satisfy its residents’ wishes. Just look at the fact that they continue, unopposed.

The blame is shared by the army, the settlers and law enforcement. All settlers take part, whether actively or passively, and the riots’ evil and sadism – from mercilessly beating up the elderly to slaughtering sheep – are unpleasant to many Israelis, but make up a much broader web of violence which everyone quietly accepts.

Settlers slit the throats of lambs in the southern Hebron Hills, elite paratrooper soldiers carry out a pogrom in Deir Dibwan that would make the rioting youths proud. Running over a Palestinian who lay a prayer carpet by the side of the road is no more serious an act than soldiers shooting children throwing stones. The second is just more lethal, but no one is horrified.

Behind every pogrom – I have seen the devastating results of many of them – stand the Israel Defense Forces.

Its soldiers are always present. Sometimes they arrive late, sometimes on time, but they never perform their duty to protect the helpless victims. It has not yet occurred to a single commander in the IDF to carry out what international law requires – protecting residents.

The pogroms could be contained within a few days far more easily than Palestinian terrorism, but Israel doesn’t want to contain Jewish terrorism. It pleases all settlers and most Israelis, even if secretly, because it advances the ultimate goal – cleansing the land of its Palestinian inhabitants.

Have armed settlers ever gone out to defend their neighbors against the terrorism? Don’t make them laugh.

They see the flames rising from their fields and hear the bleating sheep slaughtered in their pens. They see the uprooted olive trees on the side of the road and hear the off-road vehicles that MK Orit Strock gifted them, precisely so that they would commit these pogroms.

Why do they need the vehicles, if not to trample fields and run over old men? Since when has the government equipped farmers with free ORVs? Would a farmer in the moshav of Avivim be entitled to one? No, because he does not commit pogroms against Arabs.

Another pogrom by around 50 rioters was reported on Saturday night, this time in Kafr Farkha. According to Netanyahu, they are almost all the existing rioters in the West Bank. Most Israelis probably believed that. How convenient and comforting.

Jaafar Ashtiyeh: This Palestinian Photojournalist Has Long Documented Israeli Violence. This Time, It Nearly Killed Him

 

Ashtiyeh. "I'm the most active and veteran photographer in the West Bank and I've never faced dangers like this." Photo Alex Levac

Jaafar Ashtiyeh, an acclaimed West Bank press photographer, has been wounded frequently in the course of his work. But nothing prepared him for what settlers did to him

Gideon Levy & Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP (photos), Haaretz, 8/11/2025

 

Jaafar Ashtiyeh has seen and photographed the final expressions of innumerable people drawing their last breath. He will never forget them. In the course of nearly 30 years of work as a photographer for the French news agency AFP in the West Bank, he has captured thousands of images of sadness, of human suffering, of death, of peace, of hope, of victory, even of happiness.

 

It's hard for him to choose which of them best encapsulates his life's work. But when pressed, he finally chooses choose one – of an elderly woman hugging the trunk of an olive tree – which he took in 2006 and has since become iconic.

 

This veteran war photographer has documented virtually everything that has happened in the occupied and suffocated West Bank in recent decades. About a month ago, while documenting Palestinians harvesting their olive crop, he was attacked by a gang of violent settlers. They set his car afire before his eyes, and if he hadn't run for his life he's certain they would have killed him.

 

We met last week in a café in the town of Huwara, near Nablus, not far from the scene of the crime: groves owned by inhabitants of the village of Beita. Ashtiyeh doesn't have a new car yet and he's barely gone back to work since the assault. Signs of shock, of the consequences of the attack and above all of helplessness he feels are still visible even on this warhorse.

Jaafar Ashtiyeh's car burns in the village of Beita on October 10. He's "not for or against anyone," he says. His job, he explains, has always been simply to take pictures. "Some soldiers understood that – others called us terrorists." 

 

He was born 57 years ago in the village of Salem, not far from Nablus, and still lives there with his family. For a few years he served as deputy head of the local council on a volunteer basis. Since coming of age, he has never been arrested or gotten into trouble with the Israeli security forces. As a photographer for an international news agency, he says, he maintains neutrality.

 

Ashtiyeh never studied photography – he studied economics in a Nablus college – but in 1996 started to work for AFP. He had rented a camera and photographed scenes at Joseph's Tomb. The prestigious agency published the shots and he has been employed there ever since. The BBC once chose one of his pictures as photograph of the year.

 

JONATHAN POLLAK“I saw that the floor was covered with blood. I felt fear run like electricity through my body. I knew exactly what was about to come”Testimonies from the Zionist gulag

Rape. Starvation. Fatal beatings. Mistreatment. Something fundamental has changed in Israeli prisons. None of my Palestinian friends who have recently been released are the same people they used to be

Jonathan Pollak, Haaretz  , 9/1/2025
Translated by Shofty Shmaha, Tlaxcala

Tlaxcala's Note: Haaretz finally translated this article from Hebrew into English, allaying our fears that they wouldn't. You can read their version here 

Jonathan Pollak (1982) was one of the founders of the Israeli group Anarchists Against the Wall in 2003. Wounded and imprisoned on several occasions, he contributes to the daily Haaretz. In particular, he refused to appear before a civilian court, demanding to be tried by a military tribunal, like a common Palestinian, which he was obviously refused.

 

Jonathan Pollak facing an Israeli soldier during a protest against the closure of the main road in the Palestinian village of Beit Dajan, near Nablus, occupied West Bank, Friday, March 9, 2012. (Anne Paq/Activestills)



Jonathan Pollak at the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court, arrested as part of an unprecedented legal campaign by the Zionist organization Ad Kan, January 15, 2020. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)



Activists hold up posters in support of Jonathan Pollak during the weekly demonstration in the Palestinian town of Beita, in the occupied West Bank, February 3, 2023. (Wahaj Banimoufleh)

Jonathan Pollak alongside his lawyer Riham Nasra at the Petah Tikva court during his trial for throwing stones during a demonstration against the Jewish settler outpost of Eviatar in Beita, occupied West Bank, September 28, 2023. (Oren Ziv)

When I returned to the territories [occupied since 1967] after a long detention following a demonstration in the village of Beita, the West Bank was very different from what I knew. Here too, Israel has lost its nerve. Murders of civilians, attacks by settlers acting with the army, mass arrests. Fear and terror around every corner. And this silence, a crushing silence. Even before my release, it was clear that something fundamental had changed. A few days after October 7, Ibrahim Alwadi, a friend from the village of Qusra, was killed along with his son Ahmad. They were shot as they accompanied four Palestinians who had been shot the day before - three by settlers who had invaded the village, the fourth by soldiers who were accompanying them.

After my release, I realized that something very bad was happening in the prisons. Over the past year, as I regained my freedom, thousands of Palestinians - including many friends and acquaintances - were arrested en masse by Israel. As they began to be released, their testimonies painted a systematic picture of torture. Fatal beatings are a recurring motif in every account. It happens in prisoner counts, during cell searches, at every movement from one place to another. The situation is so serious that some inmates ask their lawyers to hold hearings without their presence, because the path from the cell to the room where the camera is installed is a path of pain and humiliation.

I hesitated for a long time about how to share the testimonies I heard from my friends who had returned from detention. After all, I'm not revealing any new details here. Everything, down to the smallest detail, already fills volume upon volume in the reports of human rights organizations. But for me, these are not the stories of faraway people. These are people I have known and who have survived hell. None of them is the same person they once were. I seek to tell what I’ve heard from my friends, an experience shared by countless others, even while changing their names and obscuring identifiable details. After all, the fear of reprisals recurred in every conversation.

Blows and blood

I visited Malek a few days after his release. A yellow gate and guard tower blocked the path that once led to the village from the main road. Most of the other roads passing through the neighboring villages were all blocked. Only one winding road, near the Byzantine church that Israel blew up in 2002, remained open. For years, this village had been like a second home to me, and this is the first time I’ve been back there since my release. 

Malek was detained for 18 days. He was interrogated three times, and during all the interrogations, he was asked trivial questions. He was therefore convinced that he would be transferred to administrative detention - that is, without trial and without evidence, without being charged with anything, under a veneer of secret suspicion and with no time limit. This is indeed the fate of most Palestinian detainees now. 

After the first interrogation, he was taken to the Garden of Torment. During the day, the guards would remove mattresses and blankets from the cells and return them in the evening when they were barely dry, and sometimes still wet. Malek describes the cold of winter nights in Jerusalem as arrows penetrating flesh to the bones. He tells how they beat him and the other inmates at every opportunity. At every count, every search, every movement from one place to another, everything was an opportunity to hit and humiliate.

“Once, during the morning count,” he told me, ”we were all on our knees, our faces turned towards the beds. One of the guards grabbed me from behind, handcuffed my hands and feet, and said in Hebrew, 'Come on, move'. He lifted me up by the handcuffs, behind my back, and led me bent over across the courtyard next to the cells. To get out, there's a sort of small room you must go through, between two doors with a small window”. I know exactly which little room he’s talking about, I’ve passed through it dozens of times. It's a security passage where, at a given moment, only one of the doors can be opened. “So we got there,” Malek continues, “and they slammed me against the door, my face against the window. I looked inside and saw that the floor was covered in clotted blood. I felt fear run through my body like electricity. I knew exactly what was going to happen. They opened the door, one came in and stood by the window at the back, blocked it, and the other threw me inside onto the floor. They kicked me. I tried to protect my head, but my hands were handcuffed, so I didn’t really have any way of doing that. They were murderous blows. I really thought they might kill me. I don’t know how long it lasted. At some point, I remembered that the night before, someone had said to me, “When they hit you, scream at the top of your lungs. What do you care? It can’t get any worse, and maybe someone will hear and come.” So I started shouting really loud, and indeed, someone did come. I don't understand Hebrew, but there was some shouting between him and them. Then they left and he took me away. I had blood coming out of my mouth and nose”.

Khaled, one of my closest friends, also suffered from the violence of the guards. When he was released from prison after eight months’ administrative detention, his son didn’t recognize him from afar. He ran the distance between Ofer prison and his home in Beitunia. Later, he said that he hadn’t been told that the administrative detention was over, and he was afraid that there had been a mistake and that they would soon arrest him again. This had already happened to someone who was with him in the cell. In the photo his son sent me a few minutes after their meeting, he looks like a human shadow. All over his body - his shoulders, arms, back, face, legs - were signs of violence. When I came to visit him, he stood up to kiss me, but when I took him in my arms, he groaned in pain. A few days later, examinations showed edema around the spine and a rib that had healed.

In the Megiddo prison

Every action is an opportunity to hit and humiliate

Another testimony I heard from Nizar, who was already in administrative detention before October 7, and has since been transferred to several prisons, including Megiddo. One evening, the guards entered the cell next door and he could hear the blows and cries of pain from his cell. After a while, the guards picked up an inmate and threw him alone into the isolation cell. During the night and the following day, he moaned in pain and never stopped shouting “my belly” and calling for help. No one came. This continued the following night. Towards morning, the cries stopped. The next day, when a nurse came to take a look around the ward, they understood from the tumult and the screams of the guards that the inmate was dead. To this day, Nizar doesn't know who it was. It was forbidden to speak between cells, and he doesn't know what day it was. 

After his release, he realized that during the time he was detained, this detainee had not been the only one to die in Megiddo. Tawfik, who was released in winter from Gilboa prison, told me that during a check of the area by prison officers, one of the inmates complained that he wasn’t allowed out into the yard. In response, one of the officers said to him: “You want the yard? Say thank you for not being in the Hamas tunnels in Gaza”. Then, for two weeks, every day during the noon count, they took them out into the yard and ordered them to lie on the cold ground for two hours. Even in the rain. While they lay there, the guards walked around the yard with dogs. Sometimes the dogs would pass between them, and sometimes they’d actually step on the inmates lying down; they’d walk all over them.

According to Tawfik, every time an inmate met a lawyer, it came at a price. “I knew every time that the way back, between the visiting room and the ward, would add at least three more volleys of blows. But I never refused to go. You were in a five-star prison. You don’t understand what it’s like to be 12 people in a cell where even six are cramped. It’s like living in a closed circle. I didn’t mind at all what they were going to do to me. Just seeing someone else talking to you like a human being, maybe seeing something in the corridor on the way, that was worth everything to me”.

Munther Amira   - the only one here to appear under his real name - was released from prison by surprise before the end of his period of administrative detention. Even today, no one knows why. Unlike many others who have been warned and fear reprisals, Amira told the cameras about the catastrophe in the prisons, calling them cemeteries for the living. He told me that one night, a Kt’ar unit burst into their cell at Ofer prison, accompanied by two dogs. They ordered the inmates to strip down to their underwear and lie on the floor, then ordered the dogs to sniff their bodies and faces. Then they ordered the prisoners to get dressed, led them to the showers and rinsed them with cold water while clothed. On another occasion, he tried to call a nurse for help after an inmate attempted suicide. The punishment for calling for help was another raid by the Kt’ar unit. This time, they ordered the inmates to lie on top of each other and beat them with truncheons. At one point, one of the guards spread their legs and hit them in the testicles with a truncheon. 

 Hunger and disease

Munther lost 33 kilos during his detention. I don't know how many kilos Khaled lost, having always been a slim man, but in the photo sent to me, I saw a human skeleton. In the living room of his house, the light from the lamp then revealed two deep depressions where his cheeks used to be. His eyes were surrounded by a red outline, that of someone who hadn't slept in weeks. On his skinny arms hung loose skin that looked as if it had been artificially attached, like plastic wrap. Blood tests on both showed severe deficiencies. Everyone I spoke to, regardless of the prison they passed through, repeated almost exactly the same menu, which is sometimes updated, or rather reduced. The last version I heard, from Ofer prison, was: for breakfast, one and a half boxes of cheese for a cell of 12 people, three slices of bread per person, 2 or 3 vegetables, usually a cucumber or a tomato, for the whole cell. Once every four days, 250 grams of jam for the whole cell. For lunch, one disposable plastic cup with rice per person, two spoonfuls of lentils, a few vegetables, three slices of bread. At dinner, two spoonfuls (coffee, not soup spoons) of hummus and tahini per person, a few vegetables, three slices of bread per person. Sometimes another cup of rice, sometimes a falafel ball (just one!) or an egg, which is usually a bit spoiled, sometimes with red dots, sometimes blue. And that’s it. Nazar told me: “It’s not just the quantity. Even what's already been brought in isn’t edible. The rice is barely cooked, almost everything is spoiled. And you know, there are even real children there, the ones who have never been in prison. We've tried to take care of them, to give them our rotten food. But if you give a little of your food away, it's like committing suicide. In the prison there is now a famine (maja'a مَجَاعَة), and it's not a natural disaster, it’s the policy of the prison service.”

Recently, hunger has even increased. Because of the cramped conditions, the prison service is finding ways to make the cells even tighter. Public areas, canteens - every place has become an extra cell. The number of prisoners in the cells, which were already overcrowded before, has increased still further. There are sections where 50 extra prisoners have been added, but the amount of food has remained the same. Not surprisingly, prisoners are losing a third or more of their body weight in just a few months.

Food is not the only thing lacking in prison, and inmates are in fact not allowed to own anything other than a single set of clothes. A shirt, a pair of underwear, a pair of socks, a pair of pants, a sweatshirt. That's it. For the duration of their detention. I remember once, when Munther's lawyer Riham Nasra visited him, he came into the visiting room barefoot. It was winter and freezing cold in Ofer. When she asked him why, he simply said: “There aren't any”. A quarter of all Palestinian prisoners suffer from scabies, according to a statement by the prison service itself in court. Nizar was released when his skin was healing. The lesions on his skin no longer bled, but scabs still covered large parts of his body. “The smell in the cell was something you can't even describe. Like decomposition, we were there and we were decomposing, our skin, our flesh. We’re not human beings there, we’re decomposing flesh,” he says. “Now, how could we not be? Most of the time there's no water at all, often only an hour a day, and sometimes we had no hot water for days. There were whole weeks when I didn't have a shower. It took me over a month to get soap. And there we are, in the same clothes, because nobody has a change of clothes, and they’re full of blood and pus and there’s a stench, not of dirt, but of death. Our clothes were soaked with our decomposing bodies”.

Tawfik recounted that “there was only running water for an hour a day. Not just for showers, but in general, even for toilets. So, during that hour, 12 people in the cell had to do everything that required water, including natural needs. Obviously, this was unbearable. And also, because most of the food was spoiled, we all had digestive problems almost all the time. You can't imagine how bad our cell stank”.

In such conditions, the health of the prisoners obviously deteriorates. Such rapid weight loss, for example, forces the body to consume its own muscle tissue. When Munther was released, he told his wife Sana, who is a nurse, that he was so dirty that his sweat had dyed his clothes orange. She looked at him and asked, “What about the urine?” He replied, “Yes, I peed blood too.” “You idiot,” she yelled at him, ”that wasn't dirt, that was your body rejecting the muscles it had eaten”.

Blood tests on almost everyone I knew showed that they suffered from malnutrition and severe deficiencies of iron, essential minerals and vitamins. But even medical care is a luxury. We don't know what goes on in the prison infirmaries, but for the prisoners, they don’t exist. Regular treatment has simply ceased. From time to time, a nurse makes a tour of the cells, but no treatment is administered, and the “examination” amounts to a conversation through the cell door. The medical response, at best, is paracetamol and, more often, something along the lines of “drink some water”. Needless to say, there's not enough water in the cells, as there's no running water most of the time. Sometimes a week or more goes by without even the nurse visiting the block.

And if there’s little talk of rape, there’s no need to mention sexual humiliation - videos of prisoners being led around completely naked by the prison service have been posted on social networks. These acts could not have been documented other than by the guards themselves, who sought to brag about their actions. The use of the search as an opportunity for sexual assault, often by hitting the groin with the hand or metal detector, is an almost constant experience, regularly described by prisoners who have been in different prisons.

I didn’t hear about assaults on women first hand, obviously. What I have heard, and not once, is the lack of hygienic material during menstruation and its use to humiliate. After the first beating on the day of her arrest, Mounira was taken to Sharon prison. On entering the prison, everyone goes through a body search, but a strip search is not the norm and requires reasonable cause to suspect that the inmate is hiding a prohibited object. A strip search also requires the approval of the officer in charge. During the search, no officer was there for Mounira, and certainly no organized procedure to verify reasonable suspicion. Mounira was pushed by two female guards into a small search room, where they forced her to remove all her clothes, including her underwear and bra, and get down on her knees. After leaving her alone for a few minutes, one of the guards came back, hit her and left. In the end, her clothes were returned to her, and she was allowed to get dressed. The next day was the first day of her period. She was given a sanitary pad and had to make do with it for the whole of her period. And it was the same for all of them. By the time she was released, she was suffering from an infection and severe inflammation of the urinary tract.

Epilogue

Sde Teiman was the most terrible place of detention, and this is supposedly why they closed it down. Indeed, it’s hard to think of the descriptions of horror and atrocity that came out of this torture camp without thinking of the place as one of the circles of hell. But it was not without reason that the state agreed to transfer those held there to other locations - principally Nitzan and Ofer. Sde Teiman or not, Israel is holding thousands of people in torture camps, and at least 68 of them have lost their lives. Since the beginning of December alone, the deaths of four more detainees have been reported. One of them, Mahmad Walid Ali, 45, from the Nour Shams camp near Tulkarm, died just one week after his arrest. Torture in all its forms - hunger, humiliation, sexual assault, promiscuity, beatings and death - does not happen by chance. Together, they constitute Israeli policy. This is the reality.

 

Statement by Spokespersons of the Foreign Ministries of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom on Har Homa settlement in occupied West Bank

 Source

We urge the Government of Israel to reverse its decision to advance the construction of 540 settlement units in the Har Homa E area of the occupied West Bank, and to cease its policy of settlement expansion across the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Settlements are illegal under international law, and threaten prospects for a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If implemented, the decision to advance settlements in Har Homa, between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, will cause further damage to the prospects for a viable Palestinian State, with Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and a Palestinian State. This move, alongside settlement advancement in Givat HaMatos and continued evictions in East Jerusalem, including in Sheikh Jarrah, also undermines efforts to rebuild trust between the parties, following the positive resumption of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation.

We call on both sides to refrain from any unilateral action and resume a credible and meaningful dialogue, to advance efforts for the two state solution and an end to the conflict.