Eli terror attack and extremist riots leave recriminations and tension in their wake

“This is where Elisha was shot dead,” said Aviad Gizbar, pointing to a picnic bench at the hummus joint he operates behind a gas station next to the West Bank settlement of Eli.

“Here is where Harel was killed,” he continued, pointing to another picnic bench on the other side of the restaurant’s entrance, detailing step by step last week’s murderous terror attack by a pair of Hamas gunmen from the village of Urif some 20 kilometers up the road.

Nachman Mordoff and Elisha Anteman, both 17, and 21-year-old Harel Masood were slain while eating at Hummus Eliyahu, and 64-year-old Ofer Fayerman was killed while pumping gas. Four others were injured, including two of Gizbar’s employees. One terrorist was shot and killed at the scene and a second was killed in a shootout after a several-hour manhunt.

Bullet holes from the M-16 assault rifle used in the attack were still visible around the restaurant. A window had a hole clean through it, a lemonade machine was hit, a ceramic tile was smashed with a gaping hole in the wall behind it, and the bar itself was peppered with bullet holes too.

Amid the signs of death and violence, though, patrons were ordering food, eating and relaxing in the remains of the day’s sunshine outside the eatery.

This might have been a show of life returning to routine, were it not for the presence of numerous IDF soldiers either guarding the site or passing through in the aftermath of the attack.

The Eli attack left in its wake not only four devastated families and grief across the nation, with settlers saying it showed that the army and the government were failing to adequately protect them from Palestinian terror. It also spawned a wave of revenge attacks by extremists in which hundreds of young Jewish men went on rampages in the nearby Palestinian villages including Turmus Ayya, Umm Safa and Urif, setting ablaze homes, cars, and agricultural fields, and in some cases shooting at residents.

The deadly shooting and its aftermath were not unprecedented. But they have further intensified the animosity and tension within the contested territory of the West Bank.

Gizbar was not in his restaurant when the attack happened; he was doing IDF reserve duty training in the north. But, he said, he happened to be watching security cameras there remotely through his mobile device when the attack unfolded, live, in front of his eyes.

“I’ve never felt like I did when I opened up the footage of the attack. The saliva just dried up in my throat, I’ve never felt like that before in my life,” he said, speaking outside his restaurant earlier this week.

“But we mourn, we adjust ourselves, we lift our heads up, and at the end of the day we win. We win by being here,” he declared. “There is no other option but to win.”

The attack was not his first experience with terror. Besides the hummus eatery, Gizbar runs a yeshiva in south Tel Aviv founded by Rabbi Ahiad Ettinger, who lived in Eli and was killed in a terror attack in Ariel in 2019.

“If we won’t be here, it [terror attacks] will happen there and everywhere. The whole country is a front,” he said. “No one is going anywhere.”

Gizbar defines the conflict in stark terms as enemies waging a “religious war” against Jews and denies that there are any nationalistic roots behind the decades-old struggle.

He also contends that the conflict is not complex and simply has “good people and bad people,” although he insists he is “not talking about all Arabs.”

“We will win. They want to harm us because we are Jews. Period.”

’30 homes set ablaze’

Down the road in Turmus Ayya, residents, agricultural workers, and the mayor do not see things the same way.

Sitting behind his desk, Lafi Adeeb Shalabi said there had been repeated attacks by extremists against the town and its surrounding land since the first major assault on Wednesday.

The largest riot occurred just after the funeral in the nearby Shiloh settlement for Mordoff, who lived in the illegal outpost of Achiya a few kilometers east of Shiloh.

“People are scared, they feel a lack of safety, they don’t have any weapons. People have little children in their homes and feel under attack from the settlements,” said Shalabi via a translator.

During the rampage, hundreds of masked settlers descended on Turmus Ayya, set fires, lobbed stones and rocks at residents, and even opened fire with assault rifles.

Young Palestinian men headed toward the rioters to confront them inside the town and skirmishes ensued, with stone-throwing by both sides.

One Palestinian man, Omar Qattin, 27, was killed during the attack, although it is unclear if he was shot by the police who turned up during the riot or by one of the armed settlers.

The Palestinian Authority said 12 people were wounded, including at least four who were injured by gunfire. The Israel Police issued a statement saying that riot police shot and struck a man who had fired on them, but did not state whether that individual had died.

“When the Israeli police came I told all the young men to stop throwing rocks because we were safe. But we saw the Israeli police standing and watching while the Israeli settlers were shooting and they didn’t stop the settlers,” said Shalabi.

A video posted to Facebook with a message in Arabic praising Qattin purported to show him and other young men rushing to confront the rioters as they marched into Turmus Ayya, and throwing stones at them. It is impossible, however, to see his face or identify him.

The mayor has said that some 60 vehicles were torched during the attack and 30 homes set ablaze, and noted that the rioters came from the direction of Shiloh.

Jihad Shalabi, who owns a house in Turmus Ayya but mostly lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, said he had just arrived back home after praying when the Jewish extremists started surrounding houses in the town and setting some ablaze.

“They were throwing stones, demolishing everything,” related Jihad, who said he was with his wife, two children, and two grandchildren aged 3 and 1 inside the house.

“We all froze and then panicked. It was a nightmare,” he continued, saying that the extremists were rioting near his home for about 25 minutes before moving on.

Speaking at his home in the town during a mourning event, Hisham Qattin, Omar’s father, described his slain son as “an innocent person, a normal guy, always helping others, and he had a good heart.”

Omar was a married father of two young children, aged 3 and 1, and had just come back from an anniversary trip with his wife to Jordan.

According to Qattin, Omar had rushed to the homes that had been set on fire to help evacuate the residents and was shot and killed while trying to rescue them.

Routine violence?

The attack on Turmus Ayya last Wednesday was not the only incident of violence the town residents have experienced, something Hisham highlighted.

“The problem is not just what happened to Omar, it is a problem for the whole Palestinian population. Every day there are things happening. We are mistreated,” he said.

Nadal Abu Aliya, an agricultural laborer, said that on Sunday he was harassed and threatened by residents of a tiny illegal outpost a few hundred meters away from the outer reaches of Palestinian-owned fields outside of Turmus Ayya.

The settlers came out of the outpost, chased him away and set fire to the fields, he said, pointing to the blackened, scorched areas of the land where he was working.

In July 2022, landowners in Turmus Ayya reported dozens of olive trees had been cut down on their land, with a similar incident recorded in November later that year.

Indeed, violence by extremist settlers, often from illegal outposts, has become a routine problem for the Palestinian population in the area.

Palestinians and human rights organizations have frequently alleged that extremists from illegal settlement outposts such as Esh Kodesh, Ahiya, Adei Ad and Geulat Tzion have attacked, beaten and harassed residents and workers in the area, and caused severe damage to their property and land.

On May 30 this year, the Haaretz daily reported that assailants had come out of Ahiya, entered the village of Jalud some 10 kilometers east of Eli, threw rocks and tried to start fires.

The Wafa Palestinian news service reported that the people who chopped down olive trees on Turmus Ayya land in July 2022 had come from Adei Ad east of Shiloh.

And an April 2021 attack against Palestinians near Jalud was carried out by extremist settlers who came from the direction of Esh Kodesh, several kilometers east of Eli, according to the Yesh Din organization, which monitors settlement activity and violence.

Yesh Din has tracked settler violence since 2005, and says it has monitored 1,597 police investigations into cases of violence by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank as of December 2022.

The organization says that in the 1,531 investigations completed by the police, only 107 indictments were filed, representing a rate of seven percent, and in just 46 cases convictions were secured.

‘We have a mission here’

Back in Eli, the residents remain defiant, insistent that it is the settlers who face the brunt of violent attacks in the region.

Hemdah Hadi, a 35-year-old mother of three, has lived in the settlement almost all her life.

She notes in particular that traveling by car on the roads is a “terrifying” and highly dangerous undertaking, particularly when driving with her children.

Hadi says her brother-in-law was driving in the area recently with his young child in the car when a stone was hurled at the vehicle, smashing through the window and narrowly missing the child’s head.

According to Eliana Passentin, the spokesperson to the foreign press for the Binyamin Regional Council and a resident of Eli for the past 28 years, there were over 200 terror attacks, including rock throwing, Molotov cocktail attacks and shootings, in the Binyamin region in the six days following the Eli attack alone.

During Tuesday’s attack, Hadi recalled, loud alarms announcing a possible infiltration of the Eli settlement sounded after one of the terrorists fled the gas station and his whereabouts were still unclear.

Hadi said she hurried to find her children, brought them indoors and waited with them for two hours until the all-clear was sounded.

“Alarms were going off that a terrorist had entered the settlement, helicopters were flying over my balcony. That was the situation here,” she said.

“We are all heroes here,” Hadi said when asked about living with a young family in such circumstances. “We love our country, and we know that if we are not here in Judea and Samaria then there would be terrible consequences for the rest of the country. We feel like we have a mission here.

“That’s how I was educated, that’s how all kids here were educated, and how we are educating the next generation,” she added.

Passentin said that she was not home during the attack but had called one of her sons as soon as she began hearing reports of a shooting at the Hummus Eliyahu restaurant, where her son works as a waiter.

“It took a minute and a half to get through to my son. My heart was pounding, my palms were sweating, but finally he answered and said he wasn’t there since he hadn’t had a shift that day, although he had had one the day before at the exact same time,” she said.

“But when he said he was okay, I realized that someone else’s son is not okay and it must be someone I know.”

Passentin said she was firmly opposed to violence against Palestinians, but insisted that the greatest proportion of violence, and the most severe attacks, are carried out by Palestinians.

“I absolutely condemn anyone doing anything against the law. If you have a group of teenagers that are extreme vandals and are burning cars, that’s wrong, it’s absolutely wrong, but to compare that in the same sentence to what happened here? There’s no comparison. And that pains me more than anything,” she said.