On July 2, Khaled Azem was pulled from his car at a checkpoint in the northern occupied West Bank, he tells Al Jazeera.
Israeli soldiers beat and humiliated him, forcing him to say: “I love Israel”, while filming him on his phone, then posting it to his social media.
Azem, 25, and his brother-in-law had just left the Azem home in Sebastia, a village to the northwest of Nablus, to work on a construction site.
That’s when he fell victim to one of the increasing attacks that villagers say are part of Israel’s plan to drive Palestinians out.
Israel has been eyeing Sebastia’s significant archaeological site, which dates back to the Iron Age, since 2023, wanting to turn the area into a national park and tourism hub.
The baby of the family
On a hot afternoon in late July, Azem is sitting on his front porch, framed by his mother and grandmother. He smiles shyly and, at one point, puts his arms around both of the women.
He’s the baby of the family, the youngest of four siblings, and he and the two women share sloped hazel eyes. They also share the same anxieties over Israel’s increasingly violent military presence in and around their town.
“I used to go out often with my family,” Azem told Al Jazeera. “But now, due to the occupation forces, I hardly go out at all.”
The family has lived in this yellow-plastered house for 40 years – longer than Azem has been alive. Before the violence escalated, his days were quiet and calm.
He worked as a builder in Tel Aviv and enjoyed going into town in the evening to meet friends. Sometimes, he’d walk alone to the ruins overlooking the dry hills around Sebastia, past the ancient Roman columns and stone amphitheatre, enjoying the peaceful solitude and beautiful landscape.
That peace has now disappeared.
First came the job losses. Israel revoked nearly all border permits for Palestinians after October 7, 2023, and barred Palestinian workers from the construction industry.
Unemployment soared over 30 percent, leaving Azem and his two brothers without regular work, and the family now relying solely on the income of Azem’s father, Wael, a taxi driver.
Then came the Israeli military incursions, which ramped up since late 2023, with soldiers now storming through the village nearly every night. One evening, on January 19, an Israeli army sniper shot and killed a 14-year-old child, Ahmad Rashid Rushdi Jazar, near Sebastia’s kindergarten.
Now, many families, including Azem’s, no longer venture outside their homes, especially in the evenings.
‘A message for Sebastia’
Azem recalls his attack as he drove to a construction gig before dawn with his brother-in-law.
Three Israeli soldiers stopped his car at a checkpoint in the adjoining town of Deir Sharaf. The Israelis demanded their names and identity cards and began to interrogate them, asking what they were doing and where they were from.
Azem told them he was from Sebastia, at which point the soldiers made him get out of the car and kicked his legs out from under him, forcing him to his knees.
Azem says the soldiers tried to frame him as an armed fighter, yelling questions at him like: “Why are you attacking us with Molotov cocktails?” The questions didn’t make sense to Azem, who says he has never engaged in violence.
He told them he doesn’t do much of anything, except occasionally look for work.
Azem repeated that he was only on his way to work and told them he didn’t know anything. He says the soldiers then pushed him face-first into the ground, and one of them stepped on his head and asked: “Do you love Iran?”
Azem said no, that he wasn’t political and that he doesn’t support Iran.
For the next 40 minutes, as his brother-in-law sat in the car, the soldiers kicked and beat Azem with their weapons as he lay on the ground. One soldier sat on his legs to ensure he couldn’t escape. Then they demanded his phone.
The soldiers filmed a video in which they commanded Azem to repeat after them, in Hebrew: “I love Israel” and “I will do everything they ask of me”.
Azem still has the video the soldiers shot on his phone. Filmed above the muzzle of a gun, Azem’s worried face is turned towards the lens, repeating the Hebrew words one by one as he lies on his belly.
The soldiers then uploaded the video to Azem’s Facebook account. They waited 15 to 20 minutes to ensure that some of Azem’s friends and family saw the video before giving back the phone.
As Azem recounts the story, his voice is strong and clear, but he anxiously bounces his heels on the floor.
When the soldiers finally let him go, his brother-in-law had to turn around and drive home. Azem, too injured to work, spent the rest of the day trying to sleep and heal.
Humiliated by the video and afraid that he will be attacked again, Azem no longer leaves his house. When friends call and invite him out, he declines.
“I am extremely embarrassed,” Azem says. “The video mocks us, the people of Palestine.”
Though he took the video down quickly, others saw it, including Sebastia’s Mayor Mohammed Azem (no relation), who saved a copy as evidence of the soldiers’ mistreatment.
“If I leave home again … I don’t want to think what they could do to me next time,” Azem says.
Maha, Azem’s mother, speaks up: “When the Israeli soldier learned he was from Sebastia, they wanted to make this video to send a message to all of Sebastia, to say: ‘I’m here, and I control your village, and I do what I want to do here.’”
“If he hadn’t said [what they commanded him to say], they could have hurt him worse, or killed him,” she adds.
Humiliation by design
Israel has been accused of deliberately and systematically humiliating Palestinians, particularly civilians detained in Gaza. There, human rights organisations say soldiers have forced men to strip while being filmed. Israel has also been accused of using sexual assault, rape, and the threat of rape as a way of humiliating prisoners.
In the West Bank, soldiers near Hebron have allegedly drawn the Star of David on a Palestinian child’s book and branded the symbol on a man’s face in occupied East Jerusalem.
“Israel employs a systematic strategy of humiliation to psychologically impact and break down Palestinian individuals and communities,” writes Ramy Abdu, chairman of the Swiss nonprofit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, comparing such acts of humiliation to those witnessed during World War II’s Kristallnacht.
Israel has purportedly set its sights on Sebastia because it’s an important archaeological site believed to be among the oldest continuously inhabited places in the occupied West Bank.
It was an important centre under Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman rule. Israeli politicians say it was the historical capital of the Biblical Kingdom of Israel, while Christians and Muslims believe it is the burial site of John the Baptist.
In 2012, Palestine applied for Sebastia to become a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site, an application that is still pending.
The town remains under civilian Palestinian control, but the acropolis has been under Israeli control since the 1995 signing of the Oslo Accords. Increasingly, and especially since 2019, Jewish settlers have “attempted to impose a separation between the acropolis of the ancient site of Sebastia … and the village”, according to a report from Emek Shaveh, an Israeli archaeological NGO.
In May 2023, the Israeli government approved a massive $8m plan to turn Sebastia into a tourist hub and national park. Last summer, Israel’s military issued an order to seize 1.3 dunums (1,300 square metres) of land at the summit of the archaeological site.
Since then, Israel has put more checkpoints around Sebastia. And this May, it began excavations there, transporting sacks of soil with ancient artefacts to the nearby illegal settlement, named Shavei Shomron.
Emek Shaveh says taking artefacts and material from Sebastia is considered illegal under international law. Last month, it released a paper addressed to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, stating: “Israel’s attempt to appropriate the acropolis and sever it from the town undermines the historical integrity of the site … and violates the cultural rights of the town residents.”
In response to Emek Shaveh’s objections, the Israeli military confirmed last year that establishing a military facility at the summit of the Sebastia archaeological site would involve frequent military incursions through the Palestinian town below.
In May 2025, a UN report revealed that Israel plans to build a fence and bypass road through Sebastia. The report said this will “not only cut off Palestinians from the site, it will also develop the site to focus exclusively on Jewish history”.
In June, Israel’s Civil Administration also issued a permit for its army to set up a “defence station” at the nearby historical Massoudieh Ottoman train station.
Locals fear the worst
Palestinian residents and leaders fear that Israel’s plans are leading towards the annexation of Sebastia. They see it as similar to moves made in Tulkarem and Jenin, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced by Israeli military raids this year.
Sebastia’s Mayor Azem told Al Jazeera that Israeli military incursions have escalated in recent weeks. While soldiers used to come to the village once a week, over the last three months, they’ve arrived every night, paralysing the villagers’ freedom of movement.
“They even attack the electricity,” he says. “The municipal employees, when they’re working in the street, they attack them.”
There is no presence of Palestinian resistance fighters in Sebastia, and locals don’t have weapons to defend themselves, the mayor says.
Groups of Israeli settlers also regularly visit the Sebastia archaeological site under the protection of Israeli soldiers. This has led to frequent incidents of settler violence against Palestinian residents.
Mayor Azem pointed to an incident in June in which soldiers stormed into a Sebastia home and beat a family, sending a daughter to the hospital.
“They attacked the house of a family who have small daughters,” said Azem. “When they pushed and attacked the girls, the Red Crescent came and took them to the hospital,” because locals can’t use their own cars for transportation to the hospital, for fear of Israeli military violence.
Israeli authorities did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on the attacks.
These incursions and the intended bifurcation of the village are happening even though Israel is signatory to the First Protocol of the Hague Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from retaining cultural property in an occupied territory.
On May 13, UNESCO approved funds to prepare a preliminary assessment of Palestine’s application for Sebastia to become a World Heritage site. This gives villagers a glimmer of hope of some limited protection from annexation.
But Mayor Azem believes UNESCO has been slow to move forward partly because it doesn’t want to agitate the administration of US President Donald Trump, which has already put UNESCO participation under review due to so-called “anti-Israel sentiment”.
Meanwhile, back on the porch with Azem and his family, his mother notes that while things were bad before October 7, 2023, “now it’s 10 times worse”.
She says her village no longer holds events after dark – they even worry that weddings that go past dusk will bring violence.
“There are no reasons for attacking us, but they don’t want us to be happy,” Maha says.
“If they hear that there is a wedding or something we can celebrate here, in the night, they come to the village to cancel our happiness.”
