Only some toys and pictures are a reminder that a once happy family lived here. All that is left of the house of the Dawabsha home, firebombed early Friday, 31 July, is charred wall and ashes. But among the ashes there is a picture of Ali, the 18-month infant, who was burned beyond recognition in the attack. The picture is inscribed with the words “Good morning, Mother.” Nearby was Ali's milk bottle. The attack on the Dawabsha home, located in the village of Duma, southeast of Nablus in the West Bank, was carried out by two men in balaclavas, according to eyewitnesses. The men are believed to be settler extremists from a vigilante group that believes that Palestinians must be expelled from the West Bank. Inside the house, the modest furniture ashes, the walls and floors are blackened with soot. Before leaving, the attackers spray-painted the walls with graffiti. “Death to the Arabs” and “Revenge”, read their morbid message. Pictures of Ali, his brother Ahmed, aged four, his father Saad, aged 33, and his mother Riham, aged 29, were scattered amid the devastation. The Dawabsha family asked Palestinian officials to turn the firebombed house into a museum a “holocaust shrine,” as they put it for crimes against their people. Ali's uncle, Hassan Dawabsha, said that the family, with help from the Palestinian authorities, would build a new house for the surviving members. Ali's parents suffered third-degree burns over 80 per cent of their bodies. His brother, Ahmed, suffered third-degree burns over 60 per cent of his body. On social media, the anger was palpable. Activists circulated images of the burnt infant and his funeral. The crime brings back memories of earlier instances in which Palestinian children were killed by the Israelis. One was Mohamed Al-Durra, shot in his father's arms when he was 11-years-old in the early days of the Second Intifada in 2000. Another is Mohamed Abu Khodeir, 15, who was burned to death in Jerusalem on 2 July 2014 by extremist settlers. Three settlers were arrested in connection with the case, but they are yet to be sentenced. During its 51-day war on Gaza in 2014, Israel killed 2,200 Palestinians, including 530 children. Extremist settlers have been waging “Pricetag” attacks on the Palestinians, burning their cars, destroying their orchards, and desecrating their places of worship for many months now. Police, Palestinians say, rarely take action on reports of such attacks. According to Saeb Erekat, former chief Palestinian negotiator, settlers carried out 11,000 attacks on Palestinian targets in the West Bank since 2004. None was brought to justice. Ghassan Douglas, PA official in charge of monitoring settlement activities, said that the “Duma crime was a well-planned operation by the Pricetag terror group, and the house was carefully selected.” Douglas added that religious extremists who settled in the West Bank believe that it is their religious duty to attack the Palestinians, even kill them, to drive them away. Citing Shin Bet sources, the Hebrew language newspaper Haaretz on Monday, 3 August, said that the Pricetag extremist group includes several dozen activists living in various settlements, but also moving around the country. According to Shin Bet, Israeli general intelligence, the group is no longer satisfied with attacking Palestinians, but seeks to topple the government and create a religious state matching its strict interpretation of the Jewish faith. Yedioth Ahronoth military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai wrote that, “These are not hate crimes [but] religious-messianic terrorism, committed by people who view themselves as acting according to God's true will. In simpler words this is Jewish jihadism, identical in every detail to Islamic jihadism, except that, fortunately, this is not a mass phenomenon.” Warning of the consequences of such terror, Ben-Yishai said that the “Pricetag” vigilantes “may only be a handful, perhaps even 200 Jews, but in a small country like Israel which exists atop a volcanic crater such a handful is enough to tear Israeli society apart from within, and lead it to war with our neighbours the Palestinians, as well as the Muslim world at large”. The analyst urged Israeli authorities to take a tougher stand on the group: “Law enforcement authorities in Israel, the Knesset, and the courts cannot wash their hands of them. Had they treated Jewish terrorists the way they have been treating Arab terrorists, they could have prevented many of these acts of murder, arson and vandalism.” Arab Knesset member Ahmad Tibi noted that Ali was the second Palestinian child (after Mohamed Abu Khodeir) to be burned alive by settlers in less than a year. “One can say that there are Jewish dawaish (Islamic State-style vigilantes) who are wreaking havoc on Palestinian land and burning Palestinian children with impunity.” Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who visited the Dawabsha family in hospital, described the attack as an “act of terrorism”. “There is zero tolerance for terrorism wherever it comes from, whatever side of the fence it comes from. We have to fight it and fight it together,” Netanyahu said. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the attack a “war crime” that will be part of the Palestinian case against Israel at the International Criminal Court.
Third Intifada? The horrific torching of the Dawabsha family home in Duma village south of Nablus by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank ignited intense fury among Palestinians and aroused Israeli anxieties of an outbreak in mass disturbances after a period of relative calm. The infant son in the family, Ali Dawabsha (a year and a half old), was killed in the fire while his four-year-old sister and parents sustained serious burns. The crime sparked rioting and clashes with the occupation army in the West Bank that intensified to levels reminiscent of the first and second intifadas in 1987 and 2000. The confrontations led to the death of Leith Al-Khaledi from Jalzoun camp near Ramallah and another young man was killed by gunfire from occupation soldiers stationed in a military lookout post at the northern border of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. Palestinian factions in Gaza convened a press conference Saturday in which they called for an escalation of resistance in the West Bank. They held the occupation authorities responsible for the settlers' burning of the Dawabsha home as the authorities issued the orders and incited the murder of Palestinians, even infant children. They added that the Palestinian Authority's (PA) continuing security coordination with Israel in order to protect the settlers helped make that crime possible. Hamas, which controls Gaza, issued a statement declaring that the crime against the Dawabsha family “makes the soldiers and settlers of the occupation legitimate targets of the resistance in every place and in all cases.” Ismail Haniyeh, deputy head of the Hamas politburo, said that, “the tyrannising by West Bank settlers can only by stopped by halting security coordination with the occupation and removing the grip of security agencies from the resistance.” In remarks to the press during a visit to Rafah Saturday, Haniyeh added: “Our confidence in the people of the West Bank is great. Those who ignite fire will get burned in it.” In like manner, the Qassam Brigades, Hamas's military wing, warned that the Palestinian people and their resistance would not allow this crime to pass. Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida, said: “The Zionists burning of the infant, Ali, and his family in Nablus is a horrendous crime for which the enemy commanders bear responsibility. Our steadfast people and its resistance forces and fighting groups are free and have the full right to respond in any way possible in order to deter the usurpers and their supporters, to avenge the blood of martyrs, and to burn the ground beneath the feet of enemy soldiers and usurpers.” Abu Obeida added in this statement, which was posted on the Qassam Brigades website: “At this time last year, the missiles and airplanes of the enemy were burning dozens of children from our families and people in Gaza. Today, the Zionists are continuing the holocaust, confirming their bloody Nazi mentality and proving to the world that they only understand the language of resistance and force.” In spite of such statements, political analyst and Israeli affairs expert Akram Atallah rules out the possibility of a third Intifada. “The current Palestinian fragmentation, the failure to achieve unity, the mistrust between the factions, and Gaza's reliance on the West Bank to ignite the Intifada and the reverse combine to delay the eruption of the third Intifada,” he said. In his opinion, the most likely scenario is popular demonstrations and clashes with the occupation at flashpoints in the West Bank, or an individual act of vengeance, but nothing that would escalate to organised, systematic confrontations. The Hebrew press has also discussed possible scenarios in the wake of the torching of the Dawabsha home. Avi Issacharoff, Middle East affairs analyst for The Times of Israel, does not think that widescale Palestinian protests would escalate to an Intifada. He writes: “For years, the Palestinian masses have refrained from joining the Islamists' efforts at escalation against Israel, for several reasons: a lack of motivation given the scars of the Second Intifada; the desire to find employment and a better quality of life; and deep disappointment in both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Factors like these produced an indifference in the West Bank that even the murder last summer of East Jerusalem teenager Mohamed Abu Khodeir did not shatter.” He believes that there is another major reasons for the continuation of the relative calm in the West Bank: “The PA leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, the same leadership that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon insist is no partner for peace, has long been working as Israel's fire department. Time after time, the PA has managed to calm the Palestinian public, even in times of high tension such as during last summer's 50-day Operation Protective Edge, and to thwart dozens of planned attacks on Israelis.” Still, Israeli security agencies have declared a state of emergency and the army has gone on the alert and increased its forces in the West Bank in an anticipation of a possible flare-up. Also, the Israeli army Chief of Staffs Ghadi Eisenkot held a special meeting with general security (Shin Bet) chief Uram Cohen, the commander of the Central Zone, Boni Numa, and other officials in order to assess the situation and take measures to prevent a security breakdown, forestall friction and preserve stability in the West Bank. The Hebrew-language Walla news website quoted an Israeli security source as saying that a revenge attack was probably “just a matter of time” and that the Duma attack could precipitate an increase in the intensity of attacks in order to provoke Israel. The website added that both the PA and Hamas sought to change the status quo in the West Bank. The first wants to up the pressure against Israel through diplomatic action and filing cases against Israel in the International Criminal Court while Hamas seeks to create paramilitary groups to destabilise the West Bank and undermine both Israel and the PA. “The attack against the Dawabsha family is like a ripe fruit in the hands of Hamas which is looking for various means to attack the PA,” it wrote. Like other analysts, this website held that a mass uprising was less likely than a retaliatory attack already prepared in advance. It attributed this to the Israeli success at “defusing” the West Bank by reducing the restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, giving them more work permits, and generally sustaining a comfortable economic situation. According to the London-based Ray Al-Youm newspaper, PA President Abbas is fighting on several fronts in order to win cards without scoring a loss in the wake of the terrorist attack by settlers against the Dawabsha home. Citing an unnamed Palestinian source who attended the meeting of the Palestinian command Friday evening to discuss the repercussions of the crime, the newspaper reported that Abbas explicitly ordered security agencies to prevent any armed attack at this time and to ensure that the confrontation against the occupation remains at the level of popular resistance. The article noted that Abbas was keen to retain the card of “victim of the right wing Israeli government” that supports the settlers. With this card he hopes to build up pressure in the international community and in Europe in particular to strengthen its boycott of West Bank settlements and their economic activities and to intensify pressure on Netanyahu. Palestinians believe that the Israeli government's condemnation of the terrorist attack against the Dawabsha home and the murder of the infant Ali was mere “dust in the eyes”. They believe that the extremist right wing government led by Netanyahu encourages the crimes of settlers who benefit from the support of that government, its refusal to freeze settlement construction, and persistence in the process of settlement expansion. As Abbas said to the press in Ramallah Friday, “The crime in Nablus is another addition to the crimes perpetrated by the settlers. Frankly, it is the Israeli government that commits these crimes whenever it encourages settlement expansion, builds new settler housing units in every spot in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and encourages the flocks of settlers to do what they do.” He added: “We will not remain silent. We are preparing the file on this crime and the previous crimes, and we will send them to the International Criminal Court, and nothing will stop us from doing this.” The international community regards the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem as illegal and an obstacle to the peace process. According to Palestinian and Israeli figures, there are now approximately 600,000 settlers in these illegal settlements, of which 390,000 are in the West Bank and more than 200,000 in Jerusalem. In a subsequent meeting Sunday in Ramallah attended by the left wing Meretz Party the Palestinian president lashed out against the crimes encouraged by the occupation authorities. “I say this honestly — we will not be patient. Israel must choose between the Islamic State and peace, between Jewish terrorist organisations and peace,” he said, adding: “Our hands are still extended in peace. If the situation continues this month, we will change our stance … What peace is Netanyahu talking about when attacks by settlers on Palestinians are a daily threat? Does he think that the settlements, rather than negotiations, will bring peace?”
