What Israeli settler encroachment, intimidation look like in the West Bank

Every time Yinon Levi returns to Umm al-Khair, where videos and witness testimonies implicate him in the murder of Awdah Hathaleen, anger stirs within the community.

Seeking to prevent further arrests or violence, village leaders urge people to hide in their homes.
But Levi’s appearance leaves villagers, who have long faced home demolitions by Israeli authorities and attacks from Israeli settlers that have intensified since the war in Gaza started, afraid and seething.

Tariq Hathaleen, 31, is a community leader whose eyes are still bloodshot and glossy in grief over his best friend’s murder two months ago.

“Seeing [Levi] makes me sick,” he said with disgust. “Really, it makes me deeply sick.”
A violent settler
The residents of Umm al-Khair are a Bedouin shepherding community who were expelled from the Naqab Desert during the Nakba, when Zionist gangs ethnically cleansed hundreds of Palestinian villages to make way for the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948.

The community fled north to the South Hebron Hills, in the southern occupied West Bank, where they bought land to establish a new home across the arid land in clusters of buildings interspersed with wide grazing lands for their livestock.

In 1980, a hilltop was seized from Umm al-Khair. In its place the illegal Israeli settlement of al-Karmil, also known as Carmel, was built, looming over Umm al-Khair, especially its northernmost cluster, where Levi and other settlers are now focusing their attention.

Levi is a notorious Israeli settler sanctioned by the European Union and several governments for violent attacks on Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills, including spearheading the expulsion of Palestinians from Khirbet Zanuta village.
He runs an earthworks company that for years has facilitated setting up settler outposts – small, illegal clusters of caravans or tents settlers put on Palestinian land in hopes of getting Israeli government approval to remain. These outposts are illegal even under Israeli law.