A ceasefire has brought some respite for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip this month, amid fears that the Trump administration is signalling greater impunity for violence and intimidation by Israeli military and settlers in the West Bank. Andrew Rigby calls for urgent protection of Palestinians in the Masafer Yatta area, already experiencing a ‘frontier genocide’ by Israeli settlers.
One year ago, on 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague ordered Israel to refrain from any acts that could fall under the Genocide Convention and to ensure that its troops committed no genocidal acts in Gaza. It also affirmed that it was plausible to claim that certain acts committed by Israel in its war in Gaza fell within the provisions of the Genocide Convention.
Israel’s war on Gaza certainly seems to have fulfilled all the criteria of a classic genocidal crime, with the infliction of mass civilian casualties and the intentional imposition of life-threatening conditions on Palestinian citizens of Gaza, including the restriction of humanitarian aid. This was certainly the view of the UN Special Committee tasked with investigating Israeli war-methods, whose report was published in November 2024.
But whilst the mass killing of civilians in Gaza can be construed as falling within the parameters of ‘classic genocide’, the genocide convention also included in its five categories of genocidal action the deliberate infliction of “conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the targeted group in whole or in part”. Such a process has been ongoing for several years in 60 percent of the occupied West Bank designated as Area C, where Israel retains near exclusive control, including over law enforcement, planning and construction.
Over the past three years I have been a member of a research team studying the role of Palestinian, Israeli and international volunteers/activists who have sought to establish a protective presence to enhance the security of the Palestinian communities living in the South Hebron Hills, a region designated to be part of Area C and known as Masafer Yatta by locals.[i]
Masafer Yatta, 2022-2023 – the weaponisation of sheep
In October 2022 we interviewed one shepherd and his response was typical of the level of appreciation voiced by locals for the extra layer of protection provided by the unarmed accompaniers: ”I felt safe when the volunteers were with me. The settlers were unable to use violence even if they came close to me. I was making tea in front the settlers, I didn’t have a fear.”
Shortly after our first field visit, on 01 November 2022, Israeli voters went to the polls and the result was victory for the extreme right-wing coalition headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. The government was characterised as ‘ultra-conservative, transparently ethno-nationalist and expressly anti-Arab’, championing formal annexation of the West Bank.
The elevation of their own political leaders to senior cabinet posts within the new coalition acted as a powerful catalyst for Israeli settlers in areas such as the South Hebron Hills. They intensified their harassment of Palestinian communities in their state-sponsored efforts to cleanse the territory. When we returned to the Masafer Yatta in June 2023 for our second period of fieldwork all our contacts told us that the level of harassment from settlers had intensified. In addition to the threat of their homes being demolished, the residents of Masafer Yatta were facing an escalating level of violence from settlers, often assisted by the Israeli occupation forces. In the words of a UN report, this regime was ”undermining their physical security, negatively affecting mental and psycho-social health, lowering their standard of living, and increasing the dependence on humanitarian aid.“
In the semi-arid South Hebron Hills the grazing of sheep and goats is central to the local economy. If people are denied access to their grazing land, they have to find alternative means of economic survival, which invariably entails moving to urban centres for work in construction. We discovered a new weapon of dispossession being used – sheep. As one of our interviewees explained, ”The settlers have dogs and guns. They claim they are grazing on state land, but their flocks enter private land. … The settler-shepherds trespass, locals throw stones, the army comes and arrests the locals. … People will leave. The communities will be dissolved. … How can Palestinians protect themselves?”
Masafer Yatta after 7 October 2023 – a case of frontier genocide
On 07 October 2023, Hamas launched what it called Operation al-Aqsa Deluge, a multipronged attack on Israel, including Israeli border towns ringing the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Hamas militants broke through Israeli military posts and the security fence around Gaza, or flew over the barrier in motorised hang gliders, penetrating urban areas and killing over a thousand soldiers and civilians and taking over 250 as hostages. In response to the attack, Israel declared a state of war, initiating a relentless barrage of airstrikes on Gaza.
This declaration of war also heralded the intensification of violence in the West Bank. What we discovered was that Palestinians in Masafer Yatta were now focused not so much on defending their grazing land but on protecting their own family dwellings from attack. It was then that we realised, rather belatedly, that what we had been witnessing was an unfolding process of what Benjamin Madley has termed ‘frontier genocide’.
Madley is an American historian who has made a comparative study of ‘frontier genocide’ involving case studies of the Tasmanian Aboriginals, the Herero of Namibia, and the Yuki of Northern California. He identified a pattern which he divided into three phases.
i) Colonists start an invasion of land they claim to be ‘empty’, with resulting economic and political friction as the invaders and the indigenous struggle for limited resources and political power. Unable to compete with the invader’s technology, wealth and power the indigenes find their economy threatened and their political rights eroded under the settler regime. This has been the experience of Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank since 1967, and decades longer for those living within Israel
ii) In the second phase the original inhabitants resort to attacking the settlers in an attempt to reclaim lost land, restore political rights and exact revenge, in response to which settlers retaliate violently, whilst denying any legal redress to the ‘natives’ defined as ‘non-citizens’ by the dominant power. This is the phase that became most apparent after 07 October 2023, with settlers claiming their right for revenge, with their new mantra of ‘Get out or we shall kill you’.
iii) The final phase in Madley’s model is characterised by the settler-colonial state seeking a final solution by incarcerating the indigenous people in reservations, In the case of Palestine, this phase has been implemented under the cover of war since October 2023.
On 26 January 2025, the anniversary of the ICJ ruling, it was reported that President Trump recommended ‘cleansing’ Gaza by displacing more than a million Palestinians from Gaza to neighbouring countries. He has yet to pronounce on the fate of Palestinians in the West Bank. But it has become clear that in regions like Masafer Yatta there is a coordinated state project to create the conditions necessary to displace local Palestinian communities. For the Palestinians, their most likely destination would be the pockets of the West Bank designated as Area A that are under the nominal control of the Palestinian Authority. There they would add to the ranks of the unemployed and destitute.
According to a UN report of September 2024 the surge in violence, the destruction of Palestinian assets, the confiscation of land accompanied by the expansion of settlements, and the restrictions on the movement of people and goods – all this has overwhelmed the Palestinian economy in the West Bank, with surging levels of impoverishment and socio-economic hardship.
How to protect without provocation?
This is the fate that the Palestinians of Masafer Yatta are struggling to avoid. Their resilience is absolutely remarkable, but the challenges mount every day. They are still accompanied by unarmed solidarity activists and volunteers from around the world who have returned to act as a protective presence. But since the war in Gaza their presence has, at times, seemed to act as a provocation to the settler-soldiers. The challenge has become how to maintain a protective presence without bringing about an escalation of the violence? How to protect without provocation?
The need to internationalise the resistance
For the members of the research team we have no doubt that without significant internationalisation of support for the unarmed efforts to create a safer space for the Palestinians of Masafer Yatta, and Area C in general, these areas will be ‘cleansed’ of Palestinians within the foreseeable future. What we have witnessed and documented in our research has been very much a ‘holding operation’ – concerted efforts by local people supported by solidarity activists and volunteers to resist the ongoing expropriation of their land, the destruction of their way of life, and the dispossession of their homes. Within the three-year time-span of this research project we have seen a depressing and disheartening transformation of the conflict.
At times, as researchers and as human beings, we have felt that what we have witnessed and documented are the pre-conditions for a second Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of homes, villages and whole tracts of land such as the South Hebron Hills. This genocidal project will have been carried out by the Israeli state and its agents, but those states that failed to exercise effective leverage on Israel to put a stop to its barbarism will be complicit in what is an ongoing crime against humanity.
[i] Other members of the research team are Marwan Darweish (team leader) and Mahmoud Soleiman. This work was supported by the Network Plus “Creating Safer Space”, financed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Global Challenges Research Fund [grant number AH/T008024/1]
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Woman sitting on the ruins of her house destroyed by Israel in Masafer Yatta, January 2023, via Wikipedia.
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