Santa Barbara Activist Among Victims of Reported Attack in West Bank

Warning: This article includes graphic content, including mentions of sexual assault.

A Santa Barbara activist volunteering in the occupied West Bank was among a group of people reportedly attacked, zip-tied, and beaten by Israeli settlers in a violent incident in which one Palestinian man was allegedly sexually assaulted, according to detailed accounts of the attack provided to the Independent.

The 24-year-old activist, a Santa Barbara community member who asked to be identified only by her first name, Ava, had been volunteering with Palestinian families in a shepherding village in the northern Jordan Valley for nearly two months when the incident took place in the early-morning hours on March 13. 

Ava told the Independent that she and another international activist had been volunteering with the family of Qusai Abu al-Kebash in the village of Khirbet Humsa, where the family has lived off sheep dairy for generations. In recent months, she said, the family of shepherds has experienced increasing “harassment, theft, property destruction, assault” from Israeli settlers. 

Ava said she was startled awake around 1:20 a.m. to find a large group of Israeli settlers, armed with clubs and knives, surrounding the tent she shared to keep night watch with the Palestinian father and the other activist. “They immediately beat the three of us to the ground, smashing our faces with their fists and clubs,” Ava said. “They zip-tied our hands and feet and were yelling things like ‘We are going to kill you!’”

The Palestinian man and the activists were all zip-tied at the wrists and ankles, and the attackers confiscated all phones, wallets, passports, and one of the activists’ bags. Ava said she was hit in the face when she could not immediately locate her phone in the chaos. 

As this was happening, Ava said she saw the attackers aggressively strip Abu al-Kebash from the waist down before they zip-tied his genitals tightly, “poured water all over his naked bottom half,” and “brutally beat him into the dirt”with a club.

“All he could do was curl into the fetal position and scream,” Ava said.

Abu al-Kebash described the attack in a video interview with CNN, saying the settlers zip-tied his penis and dragged him around the village in an act of public humiliation.

Ava described fearing for her life as she was dragged out of the tent by her hair so forcefully that chunks were torn out. The activists and the father were hit with clubs and forced to the center of the property, where they saw the group of 30 Israeli settlers had let loose the family’s flock of more than 350 sheep. She said the settlers were “running around beating the rest of the Palestinian family,” and she could only hear shouting as she was whisked off into another tent.

In this tent, Ava and the other activists were forcefully shoved to the ground with the Palestinian men in the village. The children, she said, were huddled in the rear of the tent, whimpering and whispering prayers as the settlers beat and kicked the activists and men. Ava said the Palestinian men received the worst of the blows, with the patriarch curled up nearly unconscious with a “bleeding gash on his swollen cheek” from being hit with a rock.

Ava said a cloth was thrown over her face so she could no longer see. She said she heard the settlers taunting and threatening the family, telling them they would return if the family didn’t leave the land. The settlers forced the two activists to remove their rings, threatening to break their fingers and continuing to strike them in the face.

Ava said she was terrified of being sexually assaulted after seeing what the attackers did to the father of the family. “One settler messed with my belt, and I screamed because I thought they were going to rape me,” she said. “The whole time I thought we were going to be raped.”

Then suddenly, she said, the group of attackers cut off their zip-ties and retreated. Ava described the chaotic scenes following the attack, with family members scrambling to gather any remaining sheep from the surrounding hills while women tended to the injured men with the few available flashlights. The settlers had cut off the electricity, Ava learned, and they had stolen hundreds of the family’s sheep — their main source of income — worth the equivalent of hundreds of thousands in U.S. dollars.

When the family eventually was able to get access to a phone, Ava said it became apparent how limited the options were for Palestinians in need of emergency resources in the occupied West Bank. The family could call the Israeli forces and risk being detained, arrested, or imprisoned. The Palestinian Authority has limited jurisdiction and would have no ability to investigate or prosecute Israeli settlers. 

“All they could do was hope that the ambulance arrived soon, and pray that the sunrise would bring some fleeting semblance of security,” Ava said.

The family waited more than four hours before the Red Crescent ambulance arrived. Before that, two other international activists came to provide support, and the Israeli military came to question the men and speak with the injured.

Four of the men were transported to the hospital with major head injuries or other trauma wounds. The two activists were treated for minor injuries, with Ava sustaining bruises on her back and behind.

Ava said when the victims finally received medical treatment, she processed her emotions as the first light of dawn was just coming over the hills. She said the incident made her consider the impacts of Israel’s control over the land that the Abu al-Kebash family has tended for centuries.

“I cried for their land,” Ava said. “If they choose to remain, they are simply waiting for the next settler attack but the human body and nervous system can only take so much trauma. Yet they have no where else to go; they’ve lived on their land since before they can remember. And they may never return if they are forcibly displaced.”

The attacks on Palestinian families in the Jordan Valley have increased in number over the past several months, Ava said. And the lack of arrests or convictions in violence committed against Palestinians has forced many to consider leaving the region. At the end of February, Israeli forces issued demolition orders for at least 10 farms in the area, and multiple families in the surrounding villages have left out of fear in the past few weeks alone.

Activists in the region fear that Israeli forces have accelerated conflicts in the West Bank since the start of the war in Iran. A day before the attack at Khirbet Humsa, two other nearby families were attacked by settlers; that same week, another Palestinian family was gunned down in the village of Tammun, just 30 minutes away from the Abu al-Kebash family land. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, nine Palestinians in the region have been killed by either Israeli military or settlers since the start of the Iran war.

Israeli authorities told CNN they were investigating the alleged attack on the Abu al-Kebash family and the theft of hundreds of sheep. They could not provide details into the investigation due to a gag order.

Ava said she hopes that people back home in Santa Barbara will consider the impacts of the U.S. government’s involvement in foreign military aid. Israel is the largest recipient of military aid since WWII, with more than $300 billion in aid over the course of its history.

“It is easy to call this the worst fucking night of my life,” Ava said. “But for Palestinians, it was but another violent injustice imposed by Israel on an infinitely long list of human rights abuses. Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign must be stopped. It is one of the greatest evils of our time.”