Davide Bonaldo
Ahmed tends to his sheep in al-Farisiya.
“The settlers are the law here.”
Ahmed’s voice trembles as he recounts his terrible experience. This past October, the settlers from the hill opposite the al-Farsiya village in the West Bank had called Israeli soldiers, who took him to the military base. His only fault: transporting some heavily regulated metal pieces in his car to repair his sheep fence. Four military officers arrived at Ahmed’s village and, without providing any explanation, ordered Ahmed (a pseudonym to protect his safety) to follow them with his car to the a-Sakut base, a few miles away.
The soldiers blindfolded, handcuffed, and stripped Ahmed, taking turns beating him for more than four hours. Then they put him in a military vehicle, gave him one last kick to the ribs, burned him with a cigarette, and abandoned him on the side of the road as if nothing had happened. He still doesn’t know what happened to his car.
“The wounds heal,” Ahmed says, “but the feeling of humiliation and helplessness—that remains. Every day, I wake up not knowing what might happen to me.”
Davide Bonaldo
The wound from a cigarette extinguished by Israeli soldiers on Ahmed’s skin.
For generations, Ahmed’s family has been raising sheep on this land in al-Farisiya, among the arid hills of the Jordan Valley in the northeast of the West Bank. He was born and raised here, as were his eight cousins with whom he shares the small camp made of tents, shacks, and livestock pens. This is the only world he has ever known. But everything began to change five years ago with the arrival of Gilad, an Israeli settler who established an outpost nearby.
For decades, Palestinian villages throughout the West Bank have faced violent encroachment by Israeli settlers, who often use similar strategies to establish outposts on their land. First, a small group of settlers sets up a caravan or a tent on the top of a hill—usually near an existing, or “mother,” settlement—at night to avoid inspections by Israeli officials. In the following weeks, they connect to the water and electricity of the mother settlement, establish a dirt road to and from the existing outpost using bulldozers and farm machines, and begin building permanent structures. They call on other settlers to join them and help keep watch twenty-four hours a day. This allows them to prove that the outpost is inhabited, confronting the Israeli government with a fait accompli, meaning the construction is now irreversible, thus preventing demolition. To expand his territorial control in al-Farisiya, Gilad brings a flock of sheep, another proven method for settlers to establish their presence and seize Palestinian land.
These settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But according to the European External Action Service, the West Bank is currently home to more than 200 illegal outposts, which are often funded by Zionist organizations such as the Jewish National Fund and openly supported with infrastructure and army protection by Israel. In 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government allocated $20 million dollars to support the outposts with infrastructure improvements and enhanced security measures.
In the religious worldview of Israeli settlers, there is no place for Arabs or Bedouins in what they call Judea and Samaria—an area they consider Greater Israel, territory they see as promised to biblical Israel in Genesis. In 2025, there were more than 1,000 instances of settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Davide Bonaldo
Omar, Ahmed’s father, among the hills of al-Farisiya.
In al-Farisiya, Ahmed and his family have endured countless instances of settler violence aimed at making their lives so difficult that they’re forced to leave. Settlers have run over the family’s tents with a tractor in the middle of the night, thrown stones at their tents, and destroyed their solar panels, which are their only source of electricity. Since October 7, 2023, Ahmed says the attacks have become an almost daily, and increasingly violent, occurrence. It’s at its worst, he says, when he or his fourteen-year-old son Mohamad (a pseudonym to protect his safety) are herding their flock—moments when they are alone and far away from their home, making them especially vulnerable.
In early October, a group of four settlers attacked Mohamad while he was out with their sheep. After throwing him to the ground, insulting and beating him, and stealing his phone when he tried to record them, the group stole some of his sheep.
“We can’t call the police; they never come, and if they come, they blame us,” Ahmed says. “Settlers and soldiers are the same. Here we are left to our fate.”
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Mohamad, Ahmed’s son, takes the sheep out to graze.
Mohamad says his attackers were only a few years older than him. Agricultural outposts like Gilad’s, where one must work the land and care for livestock for hours every day, are often populated by what Michal Shamai, a sociologist at the University of Haifa, called “child soldiers,” in an interview with Haaretz. Young people are recruited by a network of NGOs such as Hashomer Yosh and Artzenu, which often present work on settlements as social reintegration programs for families experiencing financial hardship or social exclusion, or those wanting to get rid of problematic sons. Troubled and easily manipulated youth are sent to do the dirty work of colonization in exchange for shelter and a warm meal.
“This is not what a rehabilitation process of at-risk youth should look like,” Shamai told Haaretz in October 2024. “Places like those are fertile ground for the development of hate. And hate is not rehabilitation.”
Since the assault, Mohamad has returned to herd the sheep.
“Of course I’m afraid, but what can I do?” he says. “We have no alternative. This is our life—the sheep are all we have.”
Kadri, one of Ahmed’s cousins who lives a few miles south, has experienced similar attacks. In the same month settlers attacked Ahmed and Mohamad, the Israeli army showed up to Kadri’s settlement with a demolition order, despite Israeli documents recognizing the family’s ownership of the lands.
“They came here together,” Kadri says, “settlers and soldiers, with bulldozers. They tore everything down.”
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Kadri takes the few cows he has left out to graze.
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The ruins of Kadri’s camp. In the background, the settlers’ outpost can be seen.
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Youssef, Kadri’s cousin, herding with his son.
All that remained after the attack was a refrigerator and a heap of scrap metal and debris, all surrounded by Israeli flags. Now, Kadri and his family are forced to sleep in tents erected among the rubble of their home, without electricity.
Another time, he says, the settlers broke Kadri’s arm while he was herding, threatening to kill him if he reported them. Kadri was beaten so badly that he spent a week in the hospital. The settlers stole almost all of the family’s cows, demanding a ransom they cannot afford. Now, they only have a few thin cows left with nowhere left to graze.
“I would leave even tomorrow,” Kadri says. “We have no life here, we have nothing, we are exhausted. But I have no other place to go. Our life is here. We only want to take our cows to pasture and live peacefully.”
NGOs like Jordan Valley Activists try to protect Palestinian communities from settler attacks through protective presence, using their phones to document attacks by settlers and soldiers. Paul Fish, a retired Jew from Canada who came to the West Bank with Jordan Valley Activists, says he used to be a convinced supporter of Israel. But after the 1994 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who championed the Oslo Accords, he began to change his mind about the country. He now spends his days as a protector in Duma in the northern West Bank, where an entire community was displaced by settlers. He stays in what remains of the community’s goat barns, living with no running water or utilities, ready to confront settlers when they show up on their quad bikes.
“I’m old, but I’m alive. I can still feel, I can still get angry!” Paul says during a scorching afternoon of guard duty, a GoPro fixed to his chest.
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Davide Bonaldo
Settlers pass by to inspect the shepherds’ huts in the village of Duma, whose residents have been forced to put up barbed wire to defend themselves.
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Paul, an activist with Jordan Valley Activists, while carrying out protective presence in the village of Duma.
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Young settlers on their quad bikes point their headlights at the Palestinians’ huts in the village of Duma.
Paul is part of a small but growing number of people with Israeli passports who come to the West Bank each year to accompany Palestinian farmers and shepherds in their daily activities like taking sheep to pasture, harvesting olives, and reaching water springs. Others, like seventy-year-old Israeli rabbi Arik Ascherman, go further, helping Palestinians navigate the inaccessible Israeli legal system. According to Ascherman, who founded the human rights organization Torah of Justice, the system must be changed from within. Since 1995, he’s made defending Palestinians rights his life mission.
In March 2024, Torah of Justice, along with five Palestinian landowners in the West Bank village of Wadi as-Seeq, filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court seeking the demolition of a nearby illegal outpost. The villagers had fled their community due to settler violence and harassment, and hoped to return home with protection from Israeli forces.The outpost had been established by Neriya Ben Pazi, a violent settler who was at the time sanctioned by the United States. Ben Pazi and other settlers were known for harassing and attacking local Palestinians. In late October 2023, the settlers and Israeli soldiers beat, stripped, urinated on, sexually assaulted, and photographed Palestinians in Wadi as-Seeq.
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Rabbi Arik Ascherman outside the Israeli Supreme Court shortly before the hearing on the future of al-Hadidiya.
In May 2025, the Israeli court urged Israeli military and police forces to ensure the Palestinian residents could return home, but declined to order the outpost be demolished. In response, the villagers—who had refused to return to their homes out of fear of new attacks—petitioned for ongoing protection from settlers. Ascherman was in the courtroom in Jerusalem in August 2025 when, after an hour of debate, the court decided there was no evidence proving that settlers posed a danger to the shepherds, as no attacks had been recorded in the past two years; the lawyer representing Torah of Justice and the villagers pointed out that there had been no attacks because the shepherds of that village had not been able to live there. The ruling was paradoxical: the community may return to the village, and only once attacked by settlers will they be able to request protection again.
Ascherman says he left the courtroom heartbroken; he had to then bring the news from the aseptic courtroom back to the refugee camp where the shepherds were living. The decision left the shepherds to make an impossible decision: return to their homes, with the certainty of experiencing settler violence but the remote possibility of receiving protection, or stay safe—for now—but renounce their village forever.
Between one cup of chai and another, the shepherds’ discussion about whether or not to return home became heated until they decided to resume it the following day. Outside the tent, the children play and laugh together. They can still afford not to worry about the future ahead of them. A future that, once again, will be decided just a few unreachable miles away.
The villagers plan to return to their homes in May, accepting the risk of once again facing the violence of nearby settlers.
Davide Bonaldo
Omar takes the goats out to graze in al-Farisiya.