‘Exterminate the beasts’: How Israeli settlers took revenge for a murder in the West Bank

 

Torched cars in the West Bank village of al-Mughayyir - settlers burned more than 20 homes and 100 cars during a weekend of attack

At dawn on Friday 12 April, Israeli teenager Benjamin Achimeir walked out from his settler outpost in the occupied West Bank, with a flock of sheep, and disappeared.

Achimeir, 14, had been living and working on a tiny farm outpost near his family's settlement, Malachei HaShalom - one of nearly 150 Israeli settlements in the West Bank regarded as illegal under international law.

The young teenager was murdered that morning out on the pasture, according to Israeli police, but it would be 24 hours before his body was found. When the flock of sheep returned to the farm without him, a massive search began, involving the Israeli police, military, air force, intelligence services and thousands of volunteers from the settler community.

For some, it was not enough. At 08:30 on Saturday, Elisha Yered, a former spokesman for MP Limor Son Har-Melech and extremist settler suspected in the murder of a Palestinian man last August, posted in a WhatsApp group for settlers.

"Shabbat Shalom, it's been nearly 24 hours of heavy suspicion that Benjamin was kidnapped from the pasture and still the obvious measures have not been taken," Yered wrote

The same message was being posted in various settler WhatsApp groups that morning. It called on the settlers to take matters into their own hands - "crowning" of nearby Palestinian villages (a term for blocking residents from leaving or entering), "home to home searches", and "collective punishment against the murderous Arab population".

The message also contained a list of meeting points. Hours later, a similar message would circulate in the settler groups but with fire emojis attached to each location, as well as calls from individual settlers to "eliminate the enemy", "exterminate the beasts", and - referring to a nearby Palestinian village - "let all of Duma burn"

Fourteen-year-old Benjamin Achimeir was found dead after disappearing from his settler outpost last mont

nullWhat followed was a wave of shooting and arson attacks across 11 Palestinian villages in which a dozen homes and more than 100 cars were torched, thousands of animals were slaughtered, four people were shot dead and scores of others were seriously wounded. In the weeks since, five Israeli settlers have been arrested in connection with the reprisal violence, and one Palestinian is being held in connection with the murder of Benjamin Achimeir.

Achimeir's body was found very close to his outpost. But in their rampage the settlers would attack Palestinian villages up to 7km (4.3 miles) away. Records of some of their WhatsApp group chats that day, as well as testimony from Palestinian officials and families in the villages that came under attack, paint a picture of an organised campaign of revenge that was incited in part using WhatsApp, carried out by co-ordinated groups on the ground, and targeted against ordinary Palestinians with no apparent connection to the murder of Benjamin Achimeir other than the bad luck of living nearby

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