Muhammad Matar, 56, a father of five, described his assault by settlers during the expulsion of the Wadi a-Siq community by settlers and soldiers and the abuse he endured, including sexual abuse
I work as a director in the Jerusalem, Ramallah, Jericho and Central Jordan Valley districts of the Colonization & Wall Resistance Commission. Muhammad Nada, 27, and I were staying, on behalf of the Commission, at the Bedouin community of Wadi a-Siq, which is located on land belonging to Deir Dobwan, east of the city of Ramallah. We were helping residents document settler attacks and also call in the Palestinian DCO, which then involves the Israeli DCO.
In February 2023, settlers established the Ben Baz Farm outpost on the hill opposite the Wadi a-Siq school, which is located in the center of the community. Several settlers live there, and they keep about 200 sheep. Since they set up the outpost, they have attacked the residents of the Wadi a-Siq community several times, blocked their way to their grazing area, harmed their sheep and damaged property.
One of the masked settlers shouted at us in Arabic, with an accent that people in Nablus, and ordered us to empty our pockets. I had 1,800 ILS in my pocket and another 370 ILS in my wallet. They took all the money from both of us and threatened us. They said: “We’ll kill you and won’t leave a single Arab here! [...]”
On Wednesday afternoon, 11 October 2023, Muhammad Nada, 27, and I were in the community with five Israeli and two foreign activists. The settlers posted on social media that day that they were coming to the community the next day to attack the residents. They wrote: “Liberation of Wadi a-Siq from the Palestinians.”
At night, four settlers arrived in the community in a pickup truck. They were armed with rifles and handguns and entered several homes in the part overlooking their outpost. They stayed there for more than three hours, and Muhammad and I watched those homes with the activists all night. The homes are tents and metal-sheeting structures, and the people who lived in them were no longer there. They left the community before the settlers arrived. In the morning, we went to the homes and saw that solar panels and eight batteries from the solar system had been stolen. Members of the Ka’abneh family, who lived in the homes that were broken into, also arrived and said that a bag they had left there containing documents, personal photos and a gold bracelet had been stolen. That same morning, the rest of the community’s residents, 28 families numbering about 200 people, also left. They all left their residential tents and agricultural structures as they were, and took the sheep and some of the furniture. We were going to stay there with the activists until the last resident left.
Frightening the residents and forcing them to leave was not enough for the settlers. They stood at the intersection with Alon Route and attacked the residents every time they entered or left the community’s land. Among other things, they assaulted one of the young men, beat him and stole his phone. At around 8:30 A.M., the activists drove to the intersection with Alon Route to document the attacks on the residents by settlers there, and Muhammad and I called the Palestinian DCO so they would contact the Israeli DCO and help remove the settlers standing at the intersection, so that the residents could leave safely.
At around 10:30 A.M., most of the residents had already left, and Muhammad and I decided to leave as well. We took the Commission’s car and drove toward the intersection. As we approached, we saw three vehicles with Israeli license plates driving toward the community. A car in front, followed by two pickup trucks. Suddenly, we noticed three of the activists in the first car, shouting to us to run away and saying they were trying to hold up the two pickup trucks behind them, which were carrying settlers who were planning to attack us. I drove back about two kilometers and then turned around and headed back toward the community, until we reached a house where several women and children were still packing.
In the meantime, the settlers caught up to us. Ten to twelve of them got out of the pickup trucks, all armed, and two or three of them were masked. They were all wearing military uniforms with regular clothes, but I’m sure they were settlers because they arrived in settler vehicles, and we recognized some of them. These are settlers coming from farm outposts in the area. They ordered Muhammad and me to lie face down on the ground and threatened us with their rifles. We did as they said, and then they kicked us in the back and ribs. I took several hard kicks to the head, too. Some of them were wearing boots, and others wore sneakers. One of the masked settlers shouted at us in Arabic, with an accent that people in Nablus, and ordered us to empty our pockets. I had 1,800 ILS (~ 590 USD) in my pocket and another 370 ILS (~ 120 USD) in my wallet. They took all the money from both of us and threatened us. They said: “We’ll kill you and won’t leave a single Arab here! We’ll drive the rest of the Arabs out to Jordan.”
They also took our phones. One of them, who was masked, ordered me to unlock it with the passcode, and when I refused, he hit me at least five times with the barrel of his rifle on my hands and shoulders. I had no choice but to ask him to give me the phone so I could unlock it with my facial recognition. He handed it to me, but it didn’t recognize me, maybe because my face was covered in dirt. He hit me on the head again with the barrel of his rifle, and my head started bleeding heavily. Blood ran down my face and into my eyes. I tried again to unlock the phone with the code, and the settler snatched it from my hand. The other settlers kept kicking me while I lay face down on the ground. Muhammad was a few meters away from me. I could hear the settlers beating him.
Every once in a while, I tried lifting my head to wipe the blood from my face. Each time I did that, the settlers trod on my head and rubbed my face in the dirt. Suddenly one of them shouted: “He has a knife!” At that moment, I thought they would kill me and then claim I’d been planning to stab them. I shouted at them in Hebrew that I didn’t have a knife and that it was a kitchen knife, because there were kitchen utensils there. It was part of the residents’ household items that we’d packed earlier and had stayed in the community’s tents, which included kitchenware. The settler said again: “No! You were going to stab us with this knife.” I raised my head again and saw that they had opened the doors of our car and taken out everything that was inside. One of the settlers said: “He also has a stick to beat us.” I remembered there was a shovel in the car. The settlers brought it and started hitting Muhammad and me with it all over our bodies. While they were hitting us, two Israeli DCO vehicles arrived. Another vehicle drove up and the settlement’ security guard got out. Four men in military uniforms got out of the DCO vehicle, and as soon as they arrived, the settlers backed off us.
Our hands were still tied behind our backs. Then one of the settlers trod on my head and rubbed it into the ground, while saying to me: “Eat, eat!” He treated me like an animal and ordered me to eat the barley and the sheep fodder.
One of the DCO men came closer to me and ordered me to give him my ID card. I told him the settlers had taken it, as well as our phones and our money. One of the settlers told them we had a knife. The DCO man checked our ID numbers on his phone and apparently saw on it that we had both been arrested and sent to prison in the past, and then he said to the settlers: “They were security prisoners! They’re terrorists!” I asked him whether they were soldiers or settlers, and he said they were soldiers. Suddenly, the settlers tied my hands and Muhammad’s hands behind our backs with ropes. The DCO man handed our ID cards to one of the masked settlers, and I heard the settler tell him we were wanted by the Shin Bet, which was on its way there. The DCO men left, and then we understood they had given the settlers a green light to do whatever they wanted. After a few moments, the settlers went back to beating Muhammad and me. That went on for at least two hours. I saw on my watch that it was already 12:30 P.M.
Meanwhile, several military jeeps and several pickup trucks arrived. Someone in uniform came over to me, kicked me in the left hip, then trod on my head and rubbed my face in the dirt, and then kicked me again, this time in my right ear. My hands were still tied behind my back. He grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me backwards, and then ordered me to sit and said: “Do you remember me?” I told him I didn’t, and he said he was the cattle herder who roams near Bidya. He said that a while ago I had blocked his way, and called me “Abu ‘Ali.” I told him it wasn’t me and that I’m not in that area, that I work only in the Ramallah area, and then he kicked me hard in the chest. He pulled out a knife and cut open my shirt and undershirt, then also my trousers. He did the same thing to Muhammad, and then he took off both our shoes and blindfolded me with a piece of cloth he tore from my clothes. I could still see under the blindfold.
Afterwards, he led both of us to a sheep pen at the other end of the community, relatively far from the residents who were still there. At that moment, I thought to myself that the settlers were going to kill us both – their pretext was already prepared, that they would simply claim we had a knife. They forced us to lie face down on the ground, which was covered with sheep dung and leftover food. Our hands were still tied behind our backs. Then one of the settlers trod on my head and rubbed it into the ground, while saying to me: “Eat, eat!” He treated me like an animal and ordered me to eat the barley and the sheep fodder. I think he did the same to Muhammad.
One of the settlers peed on my head and then all over my body, and while he was doing it, he said: “You have to die!” Then he left for ten minutes. At that point, I was already screaming in pain. I felt I had lost circulation in my hands, that they were completely swollen and would be cut off at any moment.
By then, I was terribly exhausted. I began to feel sharp pain in my chest. It was frightening because I’ve had heart trouble in the past. I told the settler in Hebrew that I have heart problems and have had heart surgery, and then he lifted me up and asked where, so I pointed to my heart. He kicked me in the chest and said: “Die, die!” He slammed my head into the ground, and then jumped on my back with his whole body at least three times. I felt my spine breaking and that the settler wanted to make me permanently disabled. He kept kicking me in the waist, where the kidneys are, and said: “Do you know the Jews have gone crazy? We’ll kill you all and send you to Jordan!”
He went out of the pen, and then I heard they had brought in another young man. I heard them talking about him, saying: “Look at these terrorists... this is a Bedouin guy.” I heard him screaming and howling in pain, but I couldn’t see him. Later, I realized it was Majed Ka’abneh. After a few minutes, someone suddenly poured cold water on me and hit me all over my body with some kind of stick. I also heard Muhammad and Majed crying out in pain and understood that they were being beaten, too. The settlers hit me with the stick for at least an hour, while shouting at us: “What are you doing here?” We told them we had come to help people leave, and then the settlers shouted several times: “You’re terrorists! You’re terrorists!” We told them we weren’t terrorists, that we were with the Palestinian Authority and were against the war, and then they said to us: “All you Arabs are garbage! You should die! You should go to Gaza!” and kept beating us in rounds. Each round took an hour, and between rounds there was a break of a few minutes.
In the last round, one of the settlers peed on my head and then all over my body, and while he was doing it, he said: “You have to die!” Then he left for ten minutes. At that point, I was already screaming in pain. I felt I had lost circulation in my hands, that they were completely swollen and would be cut off at any moment. One of the settlers came and took the ropes off my hands. I thought maybe he was doing me a favor, but instead, he tied my hands again behind my back with metal wire that’s used in construction. That was even more painful. After he finished tying the wire, he hit me hard several times with a stick made of wood or plastic, I’m not sure which. That went on for ten minutes straight. Then, he tried to push the stick into my anus without taking off my underwear. He pushed the stick, and I tried to stop it from going in and clenched, and then the settler pushed it with all his weight and strength. He kicked me in the back so that my body would relax, but I kept resisting, and he still kept on trying. After two minutes, I managed to shift to the side, and he kept on beating me like crazy. I broke down and said to him, sobbing: ‘Shoot me in the head.’ I was shattered.”
All the while, I could hear Muhammad and Majed screaming.
It was getting late. I think it was about 7:00 P.M. Someone else arrived, and I thought it was probably another settler coming to start another round of beatings, but he untied the wire from my hands and took off the blindfold, and then I saw that he was apparently an army doctor. He freed Muhammad and Majed too, and gave us water to drink. I saw him inject Majed with a syringe of glucose. Then he stepped out of the pen and spoke with the settlers, and I heard the sentence: “They will be released.” I thought maybe it was finally over.
Then several officers from the Israeli DCO came and asked what happened. We told them what happened and that the DCO officer had left us with the settlers. The DCO officers called a military ambulance to take us to Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem, but we told them we were afraid the settlers would attack us again, so they called in a military jeep. When the jeep arrived, the DCO officer told them we were not under arrest and had been beaten by mistake. In the end, the Israeli ambulance didn’t come. In the meantime, a Palestinian ambulance we had called arrived and took us to the hospital in Ramallah.
We went to the ER, and all three of us were admitted. They did X-rays and CT scans. I had bruises all over my body, and for all three of us they found high enzyme levels in the muscles, which was the result of the blows we had taken, and we had damage to the kidneys and liver. We received fluids and painkillers, and they stitched the wound in my head with four stitches. I was discharged the next day, Muhammad only after three days, and Majed was discharged after four days. Several days after I was released from the hospital, I still felt I was losing my balance when I stood and walked. I went to a doctor, and it turned out that I had a perforation in the eardrum of my right ear from the beating.
I filed a complaint with the Palestinian police, and I’m planning to file a complaint with the Israeli police too. Everything that happened to us is like a dark fantasy. If you’ve ever heard of Abu Ghraib Prison, the American prison where Iraqis were tortured, then what happened to me is similar. All sorts of Israeli authorities, like the army, the Shin Bet and even the Israeli DCO, were involved in my torture.
- Testimony given to the late B’Tselem field researcher Iyad Hadad on 16 October 2023