by PETER OSBORNE & FATEEN OBAID in Turmusaya, occupied Palestine
The Abdul Aziz family, like many people in the Palestinian village of Turmusaya, are Palestinian Americans.
Though they have a long-established, happy and successful life in Chicago, they have never cut their roots in Palestine, and this summer Olfat Abdul Aziz decided it was time to take her children back to the village where she was brought up.
It was supposed to be the holiday of a lifetime.
It turned into a nightmare.
Olfat’s 20-year-old daughter Amal, a pharmacy student back in Chicago, told Middle East Eye how she was doing her homework on Wednesday afternoon when she heard loud noises in the street outside the house.
She and her older sister Noor went out onto the porch of their large detached home to see what was happening. It was a near-fatal mistake. Nothing in her American life had prepared her for what came next.
She saw a mob of approximately 50 Israeli settlers moving from house to house, many with guns in their hands and wearing black face masks, attacking everybody they saw, brutally setting on a Palestinian man tending his garden.
And then they saw her.
The mob zeroed in on her family.
‘Last day on earth’
In a panic, they ran to the basement for protection. “We truly thought that this was our last day on earth,” said Amal.
“I thought I wouldn’t reach my twentieth birthday,” which was the following day.
Meanwhile, her newly married sister Noor was texting her husband. The text read as follows: “If this is the last time I see you I love you and I hope to see you in the afterlife.”
More practically, they called the US consulate in Jerusalem in a desperate plea for help. No reply.
While they were still hiding in the basement the settlers were setting fire to their house above them.
“If it hadn’t been for some brave men in the village who came in and took out a burning couch the whole house would have burnt down,” said Noor.
The damage was everywhere to see: smashed windows and scorch marks on the grill separating the porch from the main house. The family’s Skoda, parked just outside, was burnt to a cinder.
Olfat Abdul Aziz, who works as a teacher in Chicago, told MEE: “It was an intentional attack. The scariest part is that the people who attacked us are originally American citizens. They are proud of being American Israelis.”
Back in the United States, she said, they could have been neighbours.
MEE is unable to verify the identities of the settlers responsible for the attack on the Abdul Aziz family’s home. But immigrants from the United States do make up a significant proportion of the settler population.
Last year, Haaretz quoted Central Bureau of Statistics data showing that about 40 percent of all immigrants moving to West Bank settlements in 2021 were from the US. According to an estimate from 2016, American citizens account for about 15 percent of the total settler population of 450,000.
The population of Turmusaya, located along the main road connecting the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Nablus, is about 4,000. But there are about 14,000 Palestinians originally from the village living abroad, most of them in the United States.
Wednesday’s attack followed overnight attacks by settlers in several West Bank towns after four Israeli settlers were killed in a shooting at a petrol station near the settlement of Eli, a few kilometres north of Turmusaya.
Turmusaya’s mayor, Lafi Adeeb, told MEE that about 400 armed settlers had attacked the village.
While the Abdul Aziz family were fortunate to escape harm, others in the village are now in mourning.
Middle East Eye for more