Bedouin women recounts violent assault by illegal Jewish settlers

Lamis al-Jaar says she can hardly sleep at night after illegal Jewish settlers violently assaulted her and four other members of her Israeli Bedouin family, sparking outcry across the country.

On August 9, the 22-year-old got lost while driving with her young daughter, two sisters and a niece from the Bedouin city of Rahat in southern Israel towards Nablus, a large Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank.

The women say that when they asked a man for directions, they unwittingly set in motion what Israeli police would later describe as a "serious attack" — one that heightened concerns about rising illegal Jewish settler violence and spurred an outpouring of support for the family.

The man they approached sent them down the wrong road, then blocked their car when they tried to turn around, allowing a dozen assailants to descend on the vehicle, throwing stones and brandishing weapons.

Lamis, a teacher's aide in a kindergarten, was certain she was going to die. She said one of the men threatened her daughter Elaf, just two and a half years old, "with the barrel" of his firearm.

Her sister Raghda al-Jaar, a 29-year-old assistant in a dentist's office, said the men shattered the car windows and sprayed its occupants with tear gas.

"I said... that we were Israeli citizens," Raghda recounted, but when one of the men realised she was calling the police he threw a rock at her and shouted: "You will not leave here alive!"

Despite being outnumbered, the group managed to flee and were eventually rescued by Israeli police and soldiers.

Jewish nationalists

Police said they had "accidentally entered" Givat Ronen, an outpost of the illegal Jewish settlement of Har Bracha, south of Nablus.

The area is run by members of the so-called hilltop youth, religious nationalists who sometimes also clash with Israeli security forces.

Israel's Bedouins are descendants of Muslim shepherds who once roamed freely across desert expanses far beyond the country's current borders.

Like other minorities in Israel, they often face severe discrimination.

Rahat, where the al-Jaar family lives, is home to one of the biggest concentrations of Bedouins.

Two days after the attack, Israeli President Isaac Herzog called their father Adnan al-Jaar to tell him he was "shocked" by the violence and that "all citizens of Israel deserve equal and decent treatment", his office said.

The police have so far announced the arrest of five suspects, four of whom remain in custody while the fifth is under house arrest.

'Blind hatred'

The attack against the al-Jaars occurred against the backdrop of worsening violence in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli settlements in the territory are illegal under international law, and the United Nations considers them an obstacle to peace with Palestinians.

But settlements have grown under all governments, both left and right after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, and they have increased significantly since the formation in December 2022 of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's current government.

The violence meted out to the al-Jaars nevertheless appears to have shaken Israel, and myriad voices have denounced it.

Noa Epstein Tennenhaus, 41, recently drove an hour and a half with her husband and their four children to present a toy to young Elaf.

"I imagined being in the position of Lamis in the car and being attacked by these monsters," Tennenhaus said.

"Blind hatred is going to get us all killed in the end if we don't stand up to it," she added.