Daily Briefing June 7: Masked settlers clashed with Palestinians on Shabbat. Where was the IDF?

Welcome to The Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what’s happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.

US bureau chief Jacob Magid joins host Jessica Steinberg for today’s episode.

WATCH the full episode here:

As images emerge of masked settlers riding in on white pickup trucks on Shabbat to attack Palestinians in the village of Huwara, Magid describes reactions from opposition politicians who called for the IDF to take a far harder line in controlling the situation in the West Bank.

And after an IDF soldier shot at a Bethlehem family in their car Friday evening, killing a seven-month-old baby and critically injuring his mother, Magid discusses the army’s reaction and its hesitation in taking disciplinary action. He points to the current political climate, following a recent coalition uproar over similar incidents involving soldiers’ questionable actions.

Magid also reports on his experience observing the activists taking part in Protective Presence, an Israeli initiative to protect Palestinians in the West Bank, as they joined a Bedouin community that has been repeatedly expelled from their homes and attacked by Jewish settlers.

Check out The Times of Israel’s ongoing liveblog for more updates.

For further reading:

IDF soldier fires at vehicle in Hebron, killing 7-month-old baby and wounding his parents

9 Palestinians wounded in settler rampage in Huwara; IDF soldier seen beating man

1 lightly hurt as Palestinian car hits settlers who blocked West Bank road and hurled stones

Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Yitzhak Ledee.

Check out yesterday’s episode here:

Today’s Transcript:

Jessica Steinberg:  Hi, welcome to The Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing. It is Sunday, June 7, and I’m Jessica Steinberg here with Jacob Magid, our US Bureau Chief, who is in Jerusalem this week. Hey, Jacob.

Jacob Magid: Good to be with you, Jessica.

Steinberg: Very nice to be with you at a normal time.

Magid: Yes, I agree.

Steinberg: Very nice. Let me go through some of the headlines of the last 24 hours. We’re coming off a very difficult weekend, a difficult Shabbat. Besides a series of ultra-Orthodox rioters who tried to break into the Beit Shemesh and Jerusalem police stations over Shabbat, this morning, a suspected Hezbollah drone triggered sirens in Metula and Misgav Am. Last night, we also received the names of two IDF soldiers. Their names were released. They were killed in southern Lebanon over the weekend. Captain Shachar Gamla and Sergeant Ohad Ya’ari. Also, four reservists were injured in southern Lebanon yesterday. There was also a very serious series of settler attacks on Palestinians. We’re going to talk about that. And on Saturday night, last night, settler rioters blocked Palestinian cars at the Efrat Junction, a very major intersection on the way toward the city of Efrat in the West Bank. And we will discuss settlers attacking Palestinians in the village of Huwara yesterday, and another killing on Friday. We will just talk about all of that in just a moment. Stay with us.

Steinberg: Okay, so besides all those other headlines, Jacob, we are going to focus first on Friday when an Israeli soldier opened fire on a car with a family in the West Bank city of Hebron, killing a 7-month-old baby, reportedly lightly wounding his parents. And it seemed to be, in a sense, starting off this weekend that we’ve just had, but everything’s related, and what is related. So why don’t you take us through what we know, and we’ll see where that brings us.

IDF soldier fired at car in Hebron, killing 7-month-old baby

Magid: Yeah, just quite a horrific event on Friday night. A family from Bethlehem was driving back to their hometown, but in Hebron, after visiting family, they had reached some sort of checkpoint where soldiers were based. And according to the IDF, the car was perceived to have accelerated toward them. Pretty hesitant language. I wouldn’t say very definitive whether it actually did accelerate. Soldiers were on edge, either poorly trained, given that this had happened. There was another family, the [Bani] Odeh family, where the parents and the two kids were killed in March. This is not the first time that this kind of incident has happened, where civilians have just been mowed down in these kinds of shootings. But in this case, the soldiers opened fire and struck a 7-month-old baby, Sam Fahed Abu Haykal, who was killed on site. And then you had his father being lightly injured. But actually, the bullet pierced his head, the baby’s head, and went and hit the mother’s cheek.

Steinberg: Right.

Magid: And she’s actually in critical condition right now. She wasn’t seen at the funeral that was held on Saturday for this 7-month-old baby. And she’s still in the hospital recovering. The IDF, in addition to saying that their troops were perceived to be in danger, did express deep regret for this incident. I think they understood right away that this is not the kind of thing that they wanted to try and spin as something that wasn’t necessarily horrible, but still trying to argue that the soldiers could have acted in a manner that was within protocol. However, the father was interviewed shortly after the incident and told the Haaretz Daily that, actually, no, he stopped when he was asked to stop. The soldiers saw who was inside the car because he said it was— this was at 7:30 at night. So a little bit darker, but not pitch black. Right.

Steinberg: Saw a family in the car.

Magid: That’s what he says. But I would hope to say that the soldiers would not say the same thing. But the fact that it was a little bit light out does raise questions of why the soldiers didn’t take additional steps before opening. And it wasn’t just one bullet. It was several that were shot into the car. And the IDF has said an investigation has been launched. But like we’ve seen in other cases like this, that doesn’t likely mean that there will be significant disciplinary action taken, that the IDF is very hesitant, given the current climate, especially the political climate. If it’s seen as punishing soldiers, there was an example where the IDF Chief of Staff [Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir] reprimanded, I think even jailed someone for having a patch that said the Mashiach on it.

Steinberg: Right. Messiah.

Magid: Correct. He was sent to jail for a short amount of time. A massive amount of uproar from coalition and government governing lawmakers. So there’s a lot of pressure not to take those kinds of steps, even in a case like this where it’s so severe. But it’s really a beyond unfortunate incident. It doesn’t seem like there have been steps taken to actually learn from them, given that this has happened relatively recently. But obviously, a horrible way to enter the weekend.

Steinberg: What followed was yesterday’s situation, incident, whatever we want to call it, in Huwara, which is a Palestinian village where, and this is also not the first time this has happened, where Jewish settlers, masked, entered the village and began attacking Palestinians. You see, there has been lots of footage of them on the back of pickup trucks. Clearly, they were planning on going to this village and carrying out this action.

Israeli settler attack on Palestinians in Huwara

Magid: Correct. This was not something spontaneous by any means. And that’s been the case for many of the attacks that take place on a near-daily basis. And what we saw was nine people injured, some of them pretty severely. We saw footage of a couple of them lying on the road, unable to move, with severe head injuries. In one clip, there wasn’t just Israeli settlers taking part, but actually an IDF soldier in uniform beating up one of the Palestinians in this clip, with the assistance of settlers who are on site. So clearly a real breach of protocol right there that the IDF says right away in a statement afterwards, this is against our values. That phrase that they use, unfortunately, these statements have been issued over and over, over the past few weeks and months, and even beyond that, where it starts to call into question whether, obviously, the IDF has a set of values that it wants to uphold. But clearly, there’ve been disciplinary issues mainly since October 7, and we’re seeing it again in Huwara, with this soldier actually actively participating in this attack. What I would note also is that you had the statement again, where it calls into further question about how the IDF is handling these issues, because the first thing it says is that the IDF received reports of the theft of livestock by Palestinians in the village, as if to explain that was why these settlers were entering Huwara.

Except that what we saw was that they were entering on a pickup truck, masked and with clubs, ready to carry out this attack. This wasn’t about retrieving, allegedly, some stolen livestock, which is, by the way, often something that they will say is explaining why these settlers went into the village. And so that was a little questionable start to this statement. And you have this, which I would think is like passive language, where the statement talks about a clash developing, like out of thin air, not who instigated this clash, because there’s never active language used. If you ever take a look at the difference between a statement where it’s about Palestinian terror versus Israeli settler violence, there’s always much more active language used in the case of the former. And then the statement talks about that they’re aware of violence that was committed against Palestinians, nothing really beyond that. And then it says what the settlers did, it takes away the IDF’s attention from trying to combat Palestinian terror. And that is obviously a top agenda item for the IDF in the West Bank, but it’s also just to prevent terror in general.

And what we saw, I would say, I don’t think it’s fair to describe it otherwise, as terrorism in the West Bank against this community in Huwara. So I think that was an unfortunate way that the IDF went about trying to explain it. But it does seem like it’s caused some uproar. We haven’t heard anything from the government. We did hear somewhat of a condemnation from the IDF, and we did hear from [former chief of the general staff of Israel] Gadi Eisenkot, who’s trying to replace [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu as prime minister, issue a pretty fierce condemnation. But you also had [MK] Gilad Kariv from the Democrats Party who argued that this is not just obviously calling out the government for not taking this issue seriously and allowing it to get as bad as it has. But also the IDF, he takes issue with the ravshatzim, they’re called, the security coordinators that the IDF is allowing to run amok in the West Bank. And these Hagmar units, the regional areas that are oftentimes run by settlers for securing their communities, are armed by the IDF and oftentimes involved in settler violence. In this case, that wasn’t our understanding, but Gilad Kari makes a point of highlighting that and just saying the IDF and the Central Command need to take a much harder line on this issue and fast.

Steinberg: Also, just to note, and we have this in the article about the incident, that these were Jewish settlers on Shabbat, on Sabbath, on Saturday. You see their ritual garments, you see their tzitzit, hanging out of their black shirts, black pants, and masks. And that’s another piece of this, that they did this very specifically on Saturday, on Shabbat.

Magid: Saturday, I think, is always one of the worst days for settler violence. And one of the reasons is that you have people who are living in these illegal outposts that are oftentimes the hotbed for these attacks. And then you have people joining them from yeshivot who are coming in for the weekend. They might live elsewhere during the rest of the week, but during the weekend they like to spend time in the West Bank, and I guess in between meals, and that is actually what happens, in between meals, you see the uptick of attacks, and it is incredibly ironic given how they’re perceived, they come across as religious, they identify as religious, but there’s this concept of “pikuach nefesh docheh Shabbat,” that something that is a matter of life and death can, you’re allowed to violate the laws of Shabbat, but in this case, I don’t know, that terrorism or attacking Palestinians, docheh Shabbat — the laws of Shabbat don’t apply. You’re allowed to get in a car with your tzitzit on and head out and carry out this attack. There are often fires that are lit and homes that are torched.

In this case, that happened as well. A Palestinian shop was set on fire during the attack. So, really a puzzling understanding of how these people view their Judaism. And the last thing I would note is that they came in on a white pickup truck. And I saw just on reading on X, a lot of people who were noticing the similarities between the masked assailants in this attack in Huwara, coming in on a white pickup truck, and what we saw on October 7. And people will want to differentiate between Hamas and what happened here. But the imagery was almost identical. The only difference was that these people had tzitzit on.

Steinberg: It was jarring when I saw the footage. And then we don’t know much about the Saturday night blocking of the Efrat Junction. But if you know anything to add about that, because it really basically followed a few hours later, it’s in a different location, but essentially, we’re talking about the same neighborhood, so to speak.

Blocking of Efrat Junction

Magid: Yeah, just another attack by settlers. They started throwing stones at Palestinian cars. You’ll sometimes see the opposite take place, but this was targeting Palestinians. And what happened was because they were throwing stones, which is obviously incredibly dangerous, and when Palestinians are found to be doing it, they’re actually shot dead. And that happened in recent days. It’s not the same approach the IDF takes when it’s Israelis. But in this case, a car was apparently hit by a rock or was trying to avoid a rock and swerved and accidentally bumped into or ran into an Israeli settler, possibly one who was throwing the rock. The settler was lightly injured, taken, and treated, and he’s okay. But that shows just how volatile the situation is and how dangerous this can be. And it can obviously backfire on those who are trying to carry out these attacks.

Steinberg: Right. Okay, let’s take a break. When we’re back, we’re going to talk about, since you’ve been here, you’ve been accompanying some of the activist groups that try to protect the Palestinians, just to get a sense of the situation out there. So stay with us for that.

“Protective presence” of West Bank villages by Israelis

Steinberg: Okay, so tell us — when did you do this? Where was it?

Magid: So I arrived on Friday night and spent the night on the outskirts of a village called Taybeh. It’s known to be a Christian-majority village

Steinberg: Which Taybeh?

Magid: In the central West Bank. And they have a Bedouin community that was basically expelled after coming under repeated attacks in recent years, since October 7. There are hundreds of these families who have been forced, effectively, given how they just simply can’t take coming under these attacks every day, and they move elsewhere. And this family found a new spot, basically a hilltop adjacent to Taybeh, and they set up basically shacks that are makeshift homes, I wouldn’t even call it anything beyond that, and they’re living there under much less protection than they were before because they don’t have really the infrastructure that they’ve been able to create. And they’re one of the, dozen or so, if not more, communities that have asked Israeli left-wing activists to help stand between them or just offer some sort of level of security, even though the activists are not armed, but they feel that if you have someone who is Israeli and Jewish there, because if the Palestinians try to fight back in any way, they really risk their lives. So if you have an Israeli civilian there, there’s the feeling that they can provide a layer of protection.

And what it’s called is protective presence, not anything beyond that. None of the activists are armed, but they are there, and they take shifts throughout the night. And this is something that’s been happening, my understanding, since around 2019, if not earlier. But really intensified since October 7, when we’ve seen a real uptick in attacks that have become, we used to say, on a near-daily basis. At this point, it’s on a daily basis in different ways. Some are much more violent attacks than others. Some of it is more intimidation. And that’s what I ended up seeing a lot of in Taybeh. This was what I was told was a very quiet weekend at this hamlet on the outskirts of the village. But I was told before I got there on Friday, there were very young settlers who were bringing their flock into the confines of this.

Steinberg: How young?

Magid: There was someone earlier this week as young as seven, and that makes you wonder where these kids’ parents are. But they’re older, into the teenage years for the most part, who are kind of shepherding these flocks.

The concept is camels that we’re now seeing from settlers. It’s unclear exactly how they’re getting them, but that’s something that’s also used. They’ll sometimes — this happened over the past weekend, I believe — they tied the donkey to the fence of the village in order that when the donkey moves, the fence falls down. So that’s the kind of less violent intimidation tactics that we saw. But basically, the idea is that, if things are testy, you take shifts and the activists, some will stay up just like guard duty throughout the night. And then you have people coming throughout the day, some of them stay for the entire weekend, which is definitely a time commitment. And others will come for as little as three hours at a time, maybe cycling between different villages in the vicinity.

Steinberg: How many people are we talking about here?

Magid: In Taybeh, it was about half a dozen at most. Sometimes it went down to three, but basically the idea is never to have activists alone. It is a little bit nerve-wracking to be there. I mean, even driving there after Shabbat dinner on Friday night, it was quite late. There’s definitely not a lot of signage. There’s not a lot of lighting on the roads. Getting there was a little bit edgy. And then just being there at night when it’s not like you’re very protected. The village is very thin barbed wire — that’s a new concept.

Steinberg: How many people do you think are living in this village?

Magid: Just a handful of families. Because they’ve kind of had to be scattered, because there isn’t just simply another large place for them to be. They were in another location for decades, and then they were forced to leave. So now this is just a couple families, and I accompanied these activists that split up into two homes where the family gives you a room in the home to basically sleep on the floor and very thin mattresses, and then one of the houses was a little bit more protected, but the other one down below, the father was very nervous about potentially coming under attack, and he asked that more of the activists stay with him. And that’s kind of the interesting thing that you’re realizing when you’re there is that there’s this real, A) fear, but B) appreciation and the desire to have these people there. Some villages don’t, and they feel that it actually causes more problems than not, because some of these settlers are then targeting them because the activists are there. But in other villages, that’s not the case. And that was kind of what we saw outside of Taybeh. So there wasn’t a lot that happened.

It was pretty quiet, and that gave a lot of time. We wanted to give the families space. So it was a lot of time for conversation between the activists. It was very fascinating to hear what brought them there.

Steinberg: Who are they?

Magid: Right. So there were five or six that I thought it would be interesting to highlight. One was an American olah chadasha. She’s been living here for a few years and has been doing this for most of that time. She’s definitely a pretty hardcore leftist and feels that this is almost in some ways what’s keeping her here, actually trying to feel like she’s of use, has a hard time living simply in Jerusalem, and allowing what’s happening in the West Bank to continue without any intervention. And we’re talking about a young woman, and she’s not the only one, but just even imagine the dynamic that that’s a play right there. And she comes every weekend for all of Shabbat, coming in early Friday afternoon and finishing on Friday night. And that’s her experience. There were a couple of friends from the army. They’re IDF officers who are in their 50s at this point, so they stopped reserve duty pretty recently. It was interesting. One of them was identified as a centrist, adamant that he voted for, for example, [MK] Yair Lapid.

He’s not what he called a leftist, as opposed to his buddy, who was with him and talked about voting for the Arab parties and said that the main problem in Israel is the occupation. That’s how he sees it. The centrist was like, “No, the problem is actually the social cohesion. And yes, this issue has gotten so horrible since October 7, and that’s why I’m here.” But he didn’t really use a lot more left-wing language, I would say. And it was interesting that there wasn’t this homogeneity amongst everyone there, which you might have thought would have been the case. And it was interesting to hear these two friends kind of argue about what brings them there. The leftist was arguing that if he were in the IDF still today, he would make sure to prevent any of these attacks by the involvement of soldiers, or if soldiers were at the site, that he would make sure that they reprimanded settlers who were attacking Palestinians. But the more centrist buddy, said, no, if you tried to do that, you wouldn’t be advanced, you wouldn’t be promoted for a job in the IDF, you would be sidelined. That’s simply not the atmosphere now under the current leadership in the IDF, and the government doesn’t allow you to take a stand to protect Palestinians, is how he felt it. So an interesting dynamic between the two of them.

Steinberg: Interesting, fascinating, just to think about who shows up there. Last thing, as we wrap this up, is there anything else that you want to add as we get to the end of today’s Daily Briefing?

Magid: There was a couple from Pisgat Ze’ev, beyond the Green Line, in their 70s, not an issue that they were at all familiar with. They had a friend who did this kind of activist work and said and talked about how horrible the dynamic is in the West Bank. And the woman said, “Okay, how bad could it be?” And she said, “Well, come look.” And so she did come, and she was really disturbed by what she saw. And they’ve been coming ever since. And she’s stressing, “I’m the most fearful person there is. I need my husband by my side whenever we’re doing this, but I still feel, despite that, that it’s so important — we might be even in favor of settlements in the West Bank, but that doesn’t mean that we’re okay with violence.” And that’s what we’re here to stress. And she was really disturbed by, there are a lot of much younger activists who are taking part in this, and those are more hardcore, some often identify as anti-Zionist. And she was disturbed by that because she feels that it’s important to have people who are Zionist and from that part of this political spectrum who are doing this kind of work to demonstrate that Zionism doesn’t have to mean what’s happening in the West Bank as well.

And she really lamented, I think, what she saw as a lot of people who don’t want to touch on this issue and instead are just leaving the country because they’re so disillusioned, rather than getting their hands dirty and showing up in the West Bank, which is very difficult work. But she even said, “My daughter left and moved to the US, and I look at it as a real betrayal. It took me a while to even speak to her again. I think it’s so important that rather than leaving, we stay and try to do the work here.” So, depending on what your politics are, you might not think these people are inspiring. I think it was very interesting to hear their perspectives and know that this exists.

I wouldn’t say it’s a majority, and actually, that more centrist person did insist that most Israelis do agree with him, that this is really horrible, and we shouldn’t be allowing this to happen. This is just a much smaller minority that’s willing to take the risk and come out. Towards the middle of the afternoon, as we saw things that were going on in Huwara with the attack, the news came in, the activists started getting messages from Burin, which is a village nearby, begging these activists here to come there because they were worried they were going to be next. So some of the people in Taybeh did head over there, and I headed back to Jerusalem to start trying to put some notes together and hopefully try to write about this. But it was definitely an interesting experience that I think opened my eyes to a little bit more of what’s happening. I mean, I covered the West Bank and the settlements several years back. But this is a new dynamic that I hadn’t seen then. Very troubling. Hopefully, maybe there’ll be more in Israel to take it a little bit more seriously, like these people who are doing protective presence.

Steinberg: Right. And it really sort of wraps up the whole of how we started this and how you’re showing us sort of the inside view of it. So thanks, Jacob.

Magid: Thanks for having me, Jessica. Good to be with you.

Steinberg: It’s good to be with you in person. And thanks to you for listening to The Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment. This episode is produced by Yitzchak Ledee. Until next time, take care. Be well. Have yourselves a good week.