Israel Scours Palestinian Village in Hunt for Killers
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
A Palestinian girl, Rabah Abd al-Karim, 6, with members of her family at the doorway to her house in Awarta, West Bank, that was searched repeatedly by Israeli soldiers during a door to door hunt for the killers of a family in neighboring Itamar.
By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: April 4, 2011
AWARTA, West Bank — In the rolling hills of the northern West Bank, Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements exist in a geographical intimacy that belies decades of mutual hostility, suspicion and fear.
Here neighbors are also enemies, and the brutal killing of five members of the Fogel family in the settlement of Itamar three weeks ago has done nothing but harden that division.
The Israeli military and security services have focused their search for the suspected killers in Awarta, the Palestinian village next door. The army has repeatedly raided the village, searching homes, forcing doors and breaking furniture, residents said. Hundreds have been arrested, they said, and about two dozen remain in custody.
Awarta lies a few hundred yards across a valley from Itamar, and the villagers say the settlement and its satellite outposts are built on their confiscated lands, in territory that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war. Itamar is surrounded by a security fence that the assailants apparently scaled that Friday night.
Contact between the two communities is limited to occasional confrontations in the fields, and residents said that settlers stoned houses on the edge of the village the day after the murders. Yet residents of Awarta, who denounced the killings, said they did not believe that anyone from their village could be responsible for such an act.
Standing outside his house on the edge of the village, across from the distant row of houses where the Fogels lived, Asad Abd al-Karim Lolah, 70, said it was “impossible for any Palestinian Muslim Arab to have committed that crime.”
The March 11 killings, which occurred late on the Sabbath eve, were reviled by all Israelis, regardless of their politics. The victims included parents in their 30s, two young children and a baby who were stabbed and slashed to death in their beds.
The Israeli authorities have not revealed any details of their investigation, other than to say it is continuing. But the night after the killings the Israeli military’s regional brigade commander, Col. Nimrod Aloni, told reporters that the event seemed to be “something local.”
About 2 a.m. on March 12, some two hours after the bodies were found, Israeli troops “invaded” Awarta, according to the deputy mayor, Hassan Awad. The village, a few miles south of the city of Nablus, was put under curfew for the next four days and was divided into four sections, with soldiers taking over a house in each quarter as a military post. All men and boys over age 15 had to report to the posts, where they were questioned, fingerprinted and given mouth swabs for DNA testing, Mr. Awad said.
Residents said at least half of the 1,500 homes have been searched. Of the 7,000 people in the village about 300 have been arrested, Mr. Awad said, adding that while most were released within days, some 25 males between the ages of about 18 and 45 remained in detention on Monday.
Mr. Awad said he did not know of any arrests or raids in villages other than Awarta. No charges have been filed.
The Palestinian Government Media Center took reporters to Awarta last week, primarily to highlight the damage wrought by the Israeli Army. Children cried and ran away in fright at the sight of strangers. Mr. Lolah, who had two sons aged 30 and 33 in detention, said the soldiers had raided his house four times and “left nothing untouched.”
According to the Islamic calendar the Itamar killings took place a year almost to the day after two 19-year-old cousins from Awarta, Muhammad Qawariq and Salah Qawariq, were shot dead by Israeli soldiers on the village lands. At the time the Israeli military said the cousins had tried to attack a soldier with a pitchfork and an ax. After an investigation the military admitted that the shooting was unnecessary, and that if the soldiers had operated in a more professional manner they could have avoided the need to open fire.
Muhammad Qawariq’s father, Faisal Mahmoud Masar Qawariq, said his house had been raided seven times since the killings at Itamar. Four of his sons were rounded up and two of them, aged 21 and 24, were still in detention.
“My son was murdered while he was working the land,” Mr. Qawariq said. “We have a lawsuit against the Israeli Army in the Israeli courts. This is why they are targeting us.”
The dingy, sparsely furnished interior of the house, with bare cement-block walls and a bare cement floor, attests to the family’s poverty. Mr. Qawariq, who has seven surviving children and is unemployed, said the soldiers broke all the closets and the family’s first, newly acquired washing machine.
Even so, he said, “Whoever committed the crime” in Itamar “deserves the harshest punishment.”
Echoing other Palestinians residents here he said it was not in their culture or tradition to kill children, but settler leaders have circulated what they say is a partial list detailing nearly a dozen Palestinian terrorist attacks over the past decade in which a score of Israeli children have been killed, including two, aged 12 and 15, who were shot in their home in Itamar in 2002.
Although none of the residents of Awarta who were interviewed had ever set foot in Itamar, some settlers are familiar with Awarta. Some have visited at night, under the protection of the army, to pray at shrines traditionally believed to be the burial sites of the family of the biblical prophet Aaron.
Mr. Awad, the deputy mayor, said Israeli peace groups had come to the village last year to show solidarity after the two youths were killed. But he said no settlers from Itamar had made contact, nor would they have been welcomed if they had.
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