Ibrahim Abu Ahmed Abbyat next to the cameras installed to monitor Israeli settler attacks
Credit: Quique Kierszenbaum
For more than a decade, the villagers of Kisan say they have been harassed and beaten by marauding Israeli settlers in the West Bank — including one grim incident where a 12-year-old girl was mowed down with a car.
Now, the close-knit Palestinian community is taking matters into its own hands with a camera security system that will monitor settler attacks and may prove useful in prosecuting those responsible.
“They are attacking us day and night, in our houses, on our farms and on the roads,” said Ibrahim Abbyat, a 49-year-old ex-Palestinian National Security Forces officer and member of Kisan’s village council. “They have gone mad.”
Israeli settlements in the West Bank are widely regarded as illegal under international law, though the US and Israel strongly dispute this.
Many settlers claim a Biblical right to the West Bank, which is regarded by the Palestinians as their own land, and their 450,000-strong population is growing. Earlier this month, the Israeli government gave the green light for 2,100 more homes to be constructed.
Though the larger settlements are quiet, highly developed and could even be mistaken for a suburb of Jerusalem, the wilder and more rural outposts have frequently clashed with Palestinian communities.
In one high-profile case of violence that shocked both Israelis and Palestinians, an extremist settler murdered a Palestinian child and her parents in an arson attack in the village of Duma in 2015. He received three life sentences for the crime earlier this year.
The road crosing Kisan
Credit: Quique Kierszenbaum
There have also been numerous cases of Palestinian violence against settlers living in the West Bank, which Israel occupied in the defensive war of 1967.
The British government has urged Israel to halt the settlement programme as it is an “obstacle to peace” that threatens hopes of a two-state solution.
After some 400 incidents in Kisan and the surrounding area, the villagers say they have had enough and installed a camera system that can monitor clashes with the settlers and hopefully provide evidence for prosecutors.
A camera tower has been erected at the edge of the village to monitor the main highway, with a live feed beamed to the mobile phones of two village wardens, who did not wish to be identified.
“We recently found a worker who had been beaten in the streets and left there bleeding. He was almost dead. But the security forces are in denial,” said Mr Abbyat.
What finally spurred the village into action was a car-ramming incident where a female settler in a grey saloon ploughed into a 12-year-old girl, Yasmine, who was walking home from school.
She survived the incident but suffered several leg fractures and is now terrified of walking on the roads by the village, Kisan’s residents say.
“She was caught red-handed. A Palestinian ambulance took the girl to hospital but the police wrote it off as an accident,” Mr Abbyat said. “I was sitting over there [by the school entrance] I saw the driver speeding, fast. The girl was walking on the side of the road, and the car moved off the road and hit the girl.”
It remains unclear whether the collision was an accident, but Mr Abbyat claims it was deliberate.
“I think the settler tried to hit the girl and kill her, knowing that no one would find out what really happened,” he said.
In another recent incident, 70-year-old Mariam Abbyat said she was walking on a road outside the village with her grandchild when a settler almost knocked them over.
Miriam Abbayat
Credit: Quique Kierszenbaum
“When we jumped out the way we laughed at us,” she said.
The camera towers, which cost around £5000 each, were funded by the campaign group Al-Ard, which was funded by Palestinian-American entrepeneur Bashar Masri.
Ali Faraj, one of the project’s coordinators, said the cameras were recording constantly and the footage stored in online servers.
“Kisan is the beginning, and a budgeting plan for the second tower is being developed,” he said.
Mr Abbyat said the village, which is under full Israeli military control, has not received enough support from Israeli security forces in dealing with the settlers.
A spokesman for Israel’s border police said the villagers were entitled to set up cameras “for any reason” if they wished.
The villagers are hopeful that the cameras will act as a deterrent and, failing that, be used to prosecute aggressive settlers by capturing their faces and car licence plate numbers.
“Now we can identify them, we know what they look like. The next step will be distributing the images to the media and human rights groups,” said Mr Abbyat.
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