Palestinian School Shields Its Children from Rising Settler Threats
On the first day of the new school year the head‑teacher of al‑Mughayyir boys’ school arrived before dawn, passing freshly installed barbed‑wire fencing and reinforced gates that frame the main gate as the sun creeps over olive trees. On the stem of each fence a line of concrete pillars and a spike‑new wire mesh offers a jagged parlor of security for the only public building in the village.
"We are scared," Bassam al‑Assaf, head‑teacher, said. "The students are afraid, and their parents are afraid." He recounts six deaths in the village this year, including 14‑year‑old Aws al‑Naasan, shot outside the school in April. The boy’s brief, desperate life appears in mobile footage of Al‑Naasan’s blood‑streaked face.
The Israeli forces responded when stones were hurled at a car in that incident, describing the victim as a reservist who then opened fire, and they later suspended the reservist for investigation. Meanwhile, casualties have risen to an average of three injuries per day, a trend tied to the rapid growth of illegal outposts along the West Bank’s fringes.
In order to reassure the community, the school installed a long barbed‑wire fence, reinforced gates, stationed ambulance crews outside the main road, and several parents volunteer to stand near the gate all day. “They stand outside the gates to give children the sense that their parents are watching them,” says Haroon Bishara of the town’s first‑ and second‑ grade teachers.
The UN Commission of Inquiry, published in June, documented a pattern of settler attacks that "instrumentalise children as part of a coercive strategy to drive Palestinians off their land" – labeling a deliberate attack on a nine‑year‑old boy Salim during a June farming session where he was shot twice by a settler from a newly built illegal outpost next to his hayfield.
Sami Abu Rahma, sheep farmer whose son remains with a bullet lodged in his arm, said the settler had repeatedly told the family to abandon their land. The incident underscores the fatal shift in Israeli soldiers’ beyond‑guard policy, where they now protect settlers during incursions, reducing both the immediate risk to Palestinian civilians and the likelihood of arrests.
With elections fast approaching, Israeli plans to annex land registration in the West Bank and East Jerusalem appear to provide a political shortcut to the pace of outpost expansions. The violence zones have spread from grazing fields to built‑up villages, affecting women and children and shifting the dynamic of fear from “dry, familiar territory” to the entire village.
The local ambulance crew, Hadi al‑Naasan, warns that the scottish soldiers now flip between occupying & threselling the action, and parents speak of not being able to stay in their homes any longer. Fear for children has become an irreversible part of the village’s self‑birth, as the community tries to stay united in the face of a systematic policy of violence.
