Five years after 13-year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel was stabbed to death in her bed in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, the area still sees terror attacks regularly.
The attack that killed Ariel was carried out by another teenager, Muhammad Nasser who was 17 years old at the time, from the Palestinian village of Bani Naim, adjacent to Kiryat Arba. Nasser jumped the fence surrounding the community and broke into her bedroom where she was sleeping.
The area around Hebron has been a hotbed of violence during the wave of stabbing, shooting, and car-ramming attacks that broke out in 2015. And while the number of deadly attacks has decreased, the overall amount of attacks and attempted attacks has remained high.
“It’s a very challenging sector,” Lt.-Col. Omri Mashiach, Commander of the “Shaked” Battalion told The Jerusalem Post as we stood on a hill overlooking the city of some 300,000 Palestinians and 800 Jewish settlers.
From rock-throwing by kids or teenagers against Israeli vehicles to stabbing, vehicular ramming, and shooting attacks, the area near the flashpoint city has challenged IDF forces who have nevertheless been able to thwart all recent attacks with no injuries or deaths to Israelis.
The attacks are carried out by lone wolves or by cells with or without the backing of groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and others.
The commander told the Post that in addition to protecting the settlers, the 200 troops stationed in the city are there to prevent violence between the two sides living in the city.
B’Tselem has also reported a rise in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in recent months and has accused the IDF of turning a blind eye to it.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in 2020 there was “771 incidents of settler violence causing injury to 133 Palestinians and damaging 9,646 trees and 184 vehicles, ‘mostly in the areas of Hebron, Jerusalem, Nablus, and Ramallah.’”
One such incident documented by OCHA was on March 13 when a Palestinian family with eight children was attacked by 10 Israeli settlers, some of whom were armed.
Speaking to +972 Magazine, the father Said Abu Aliyan, a resident of Umm Lasfa, a village in the South Hebron Hills, said that he recognized one of the settlers who attacked him for always attacking Palestinian homes.
“They charged at us with bats, pipes, and rocks. I stood in front of my vehicle, terrified, trying my best to protect my young children who were standing nearby. Some of them ran inside to hide,” he was quoted as saying.
“The settlers mercilessly hurled rocks at us from every direction,” he continued. “My kids were screaming. A stone hit my hand and I started to bleed. I barely realized what was happening when a settler grabbed me and bashed my face with a metal pipe, then hit me in the head over and over. I fell to the ground, lost consciousness, and everything went dark. I fainted. I cannot remember anything beyond that point. But this fear, for my children — this horror — it continued.”
Mashiach and his troops arrived in the sector shortly before the outbreak of fighting with the Gaza Strip broke out in May and they thwarted several attacks during their operational duty.
“On May 10 we felt a big change in the sector. In one night everything changed,” Mashiach said, adding that “for two weeks Palestinians watched Gaza being bombed, and attacks happened.”
And, he stressed, “that there wasn’t an attack that took place, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an attack planned.”
With Operation Guardian of the Walls going on in Gaza as well as rioting in Israeli cities, Mashiach and his troops had to contend daily with numerous violent riots as some of the worst violence in the region in years raged.
The violent riots injured dozens of Palestinians and IDF troops, including an officer whose helmet got hit by a bullet fired by a rioter.
Pointing to a Jewish apartment complex in Hebron known as "Avraham Avinu", the commander also discussed the attack that happened on June 16th where 32-year-old Islam Ghayad Muhammad Zahdeh was shot by troops after he planted explosives and tried to shoot IDF troops.
The attack, he said, was “planned militarily.”
Palestinian Islamic Jihad later confirmed that Zahdeh, who tried to attack troops with explosives, a submachine gun, and a knife, was affiliated with the group.
“That attack showed the main reason that we are here, and for troops to always be alert,” he said.
As we drove towards the settlement of Kiryat Arba, Mashiach pointed out several spots where other attempted attacks took place during his time as the commander of the sector.
On May 19, a day after the attack by Zahdeh, a Palestinian woman opened fire at Israelis waiting at a bus stop outside the settlement before she was shot dead by troops. The woman was armed with an M-16 and emptied the magazine before she was shot. There were no injuries or fatalities in the attack.
Mashiach and his soldiers have now moved to the Golan Heights for four months of exercise where they will drill on going up against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And while he and his troops were constantly working to foil and stop attacks while in the West Bank, Mashiach told the Post that there were a lot of opportunities to train there as well.
“There is no other sector where temperatures can rise to 200 degrees,” he said.