‘Nothing has been done’: High Court judges said to pan police on settler attacks

High Court justices impatiently demanded answers for police’s failure to curb settler violence in the southern West Bank during a hearing on Monday, Ynet reported.

The court was reviewing a petition by residents of the Palestinian village of Khirbet Zanuta, who have accused the IDF, the Israel Police and the Defense Ministry of contempt of court for failing to fulfill court orders to protect them from violence.

The residents of Khirbet Zanuta fled the village at the end of October 2023 due to persistent attacks against them and the village’s infrastructure during that month by extremist Jews. They returned to their homes on August 21 after the High Court ordered the IDF and police to enable their return. But they allege that renewed attacks, the refusal of the security services to protect the villagers, and steps by security services that stop the villagers from making Khirbet Zanuta habitable again have led to the depopulation of the village.

In the request, the village’s lawyers provided photos of settlers from the nearby illegal settlement outpost of Meitarim Farm filming villagers inside their homes and harassing their livestock.

According to Ynet, Acting Supreme Court President Isaac Amit banged on the table at one point, telling a police representative: “Not a single indictment had been filed. We see settlers inside their homes. Nothing has been done.”

Chief Inspector Aviad Balmas, head investigator for the Hebron station, said police regularly “send a team” when complaints are made, “which searches and finds nothing. It happens all the time, with those filing the complaints not even at the scene.”

The official added: “You need to understand, there are dozens of complaints of trespassing…. There are no real [land] boundaries. So a flock goes through with the shepherd, in an area without anything, no crops, so the shepherd’s sheep go into the Palestinian land. What am I supposed to do now? A police car will come, take the shepherd, and the sheep will scatter?”

As for violence, he asserted again that “We send a car to every incident. The area is huge. We investigate and summon people for questioning. The fact that there are complaints does not mean all of them happened.”

Justice Daphne Barak-Erez retorted: “You’re presenting it as though everything is fine. People here were forced to leave their homes… in the end there are the results, and the results are not good.”

The motion also included pictures of IDF soldiers confiscating blankets used by the villagers to cover their ruined homes and removing fencing erected around the village, which it was argued demonstrated that the security services do not lack manpower in the region and are able to comply with the court order and protect the villagers if there is a will to do so.

The contempt of court request also appended a legal position paper authored by internationally respected Israeli legal scholars who told the court that the conduct of the IDF, police and Civil Administration constituted the forcible transfer of Khirbet Zanuta’s residents, which is illegal under international law and also possibly a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The residents of Khirbet Zanuta fled the village at the end of October following a massive spike in settler violence against Palestinians in Area C of the West Bank — where Israel has military and civil control — in the wake of the October 7 Hamas atrocities. These attacks led to the displacement of over 1,000 Palestinians from rural shepherding communities, particularly in the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.

In the residents’ absence, many of the stone houses in Zanuta were destroyed or damaged and an EU-built school in the village was bulldozed. Law enforcement authorities have failed to identify the perpetrators of the destruction.

On July 29, the High Court ordered the IDF and police to enable the residents to return to their homes, with some of the villagers taking up residence in Khirbet Zanuta on August 21.
But less than three weeks later, the Civil Administration informed the residents that it would enforce demolition orders from 2007 against their homes if they did not agree to relocate.

Due to the repeated settler attacks and the demolition threat, the last villagers left Zanuta by September 12.

The stone structures were built in Zanuta by its Palestinian residents in the 1980s after the caves in which they had previously lived began to collapse. These homes are illegal, however, since the village has no zoning masterplan or construction permits, which are in general extremely difficult for Palestinians living in Area C of the West Bank to obtain.

Following years of legal proceedings in the High Court, the state agreed in 2017 not to implement the demolition orders while it drew up new planning criteria.

In its request for a contempt of court order filed on September 18, the Haqel legal aid organization, which is representing the residents of Khirbet Zanuta, alleged that what it described as the “second transfer” of the village’s residents had been carried out “deliberately and with premeditation” by the authorities as well as some eight local settlers.

“During all the weeks in which the residents of Zanuta tried to return to their homes following the High Court ruling, they were persecuted without mercy by the settlers and the respondents, and ultimately were expelled for a second time,” Haqel wrote.

The organization said armed settlers trespassed onto Khirbet Zanuta’s land “and did not stop threatening the residents, attacking them and harming and killing their sheep” since they came back in the middle of August.

Haqel’s request also alleged that the police “totally refused” all requests by the villagers for the settlers to be removed from the village, despite the High Court’s order to police and IDF to protect the villagers.

Instead, it said, the police and IDF told the villagers that the settlers had a right to be present in the village, including in one incident that was caught on camera.

Written requests for assistance to the police were ignored, Haqel attorney and the organization’s co-director Quamar Mishirqi-Assad told The Times of Israel.

“Over 100 incidents of harassment were recorded” in the three weeks between the residents’ return to the village and second exit, “in real time as well as after the fact,” but police failed to respond to any of them, Haqel charged.

The organization also pointed out that the Civil Administration, an agency of the Defense Ministry that runs civilian affairs in the West Bank, repeatedly refused to allow residents of the village to repair homes that were damaged in apparent settlers attacks after they fled the village in October last year.