In the Palestinian village of Saer each young man’s death at the hands of Israel’s security forces has set the stage for yet another death, 13 now in the space of a few months.
Less than two weeks ago four of its men and youths were killed in a single day in what Israelis say were two separate attacks by those who died. One was on the outskirts of Hebron, the second at the Gush Etzion junction where three young men – Muhanad, Ahmad and Alaa Kawasbeh – were killed, all of them cousins. Since then three more have died.
As remarkable as the over-representation of this one village in the Palestinian death toll of about 150 since the beginning of October are the close relationships between those killed.
The dead are brothers, cousins and friends from a place some locals are now calling the “capital of the martyrs”. Almost half of the deaths have occurred at a single location – the Beit Einun junction, where a settler bypass leads to the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba.
The deaths have taken place one after the other, a number during attempted attacks, in a seemingly unstoppable cycle of anger and revenge, which can be traced back to a single event – the killing of 27-year-old Abdallah Shalaldeh last year during an arrest raid by undercover Israeli soldiers on a Hebron hospital, when he was shot leaving a toilet on a ward.
Abdallah’s cousin Mahmoud Shalaldeh, aged 17, was next to die. He was shot on the day of Abdallah’s funeral during a stone-throwing clash with Israeli soldiers. Mahmoud’s brother Khalil was killed two months later during an attempted knife attack on a nearby Israeli checkpoint.
It is hard to see at first what makes Saer, with a population of 25,000, different from other large West Bank communities. Located five miles from the flashpoint southern West Bank city of Hebron, the village and its satellites sprawl along road 60, the the territory’s main thoroughfare.
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