‘A Life That Is Not a Life’

I was staying with my friend Awdah Hathaleen in the village of Umm al-Khair early this July when our conversation took an unusually somber turn. I had known Awdah—a thirty-one-year-old activist, organizer, and teacher—since February 2024, when I joined the Palestinian-led “protective presence” efforts he helped organize with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, a nonprofit that mobilizes Jews from across the diaspora to resist Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. He became an essential source and a close friend as I conducted research on the relationship between the settler movement and the Israeli state for my doctorate in sociology. Over the nine months I spent living at his guest house, we shared meals and stayed up late talking during all-night guard shifts; I got to know his wife, Hanadi, and their three children, who are seven months, two years, and four years old.

Despite the difficult realities that shaped daily life in Umm al-Khair, Awdah remained warm and lighthearted, a jokester who loved playful sparring, especially over my longtime vegetarianism. Early in our acquaintance he had agreed to sit for a formal interview for my research, but we didn’t find the time until July 5, my last day living in Umm al-Khair. I knew he had a deep faith in the village and its people, so I was taken aback when, in the middle of the interview, he looked directly at me and said, “There is no future here.”

Since Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, now widely deemed a genocide by rights groups in Palestine, Israel, and abroad, conditions in Masafer Yatta—the region of the West Bank that includes Umm al-Khair—have deteriorated alarmingly. Settler violence, propped up by the defensive support of the Israeli army, had been intensifying in the West Bank for years. But over the past twenty-three months, the distinctions between settlers and soldiers have collapsed. Most of the conscripts and commanders who once garrisoned the settlements were redeployed to Gaza and Lebanon, leaving in their place local settlers who serve in the military reserves. Described by Palestinians in the area as junūd-mustawtinīn (“settler-soldiers”), these armed, masked, and uniformed petty sovereigns have proven even more aggressive than their predecessors, requiring essentially no pretense to make arrests, hurl tear gas and stun grenades, or open fire. Israelis have killed 987 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, the vast majority by live ammunition.

In this period, settler violence has forcibly displaced forty agrarian Palestinian villages and ushered in the most rapid expansion of outposts ever. Whereas settlements require authorization from the state to be established, outposts are technically illegal even under Israeli law. Nevertheless, the state still provides basic infrastructure for outposts, as well as the soldiers to guard them. During the previous construction boom, from 2001 to 2003, settlers broke ground on forty-five outposts. Roughly 107 have been founded in the last twenty-three months. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—not only on land under Israeli control (“Area C”) but also in parts of the region jointly administered between the Palestinian Authority and Israel (“Area B”)—are subjected to further expulsion, invasion, razing of crops, arson, checkpoints, and live rounds. Two days after October 7, Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, directed the Firearms Licensing Division to radically relax its standards, a decision that flooded the West Bank with semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles. Armed Israeli civilians have organized militias to terrorize Palestinians into flight.

Facing these escalations all around his home, Awdah came to worry that Umm al-Khair was no longer safe for his family. Over the years many of the village’s men had given up shepherding, which had become too dangerous and expensive as settlers encroached on grazing lands or, worse, kidnapped or killed flocks of sheep. As a result, they began working across the Green Line as fruit pickers or construction workers. No sooner was the village’s coerced transition from shepherding to wage labor complete than, after October 7, each Palestinian man from the village—like most across the West Bank—had his entry permit for employment in Israel revoked. This cut off the last reliable source of income for Umm al-Khair.

For over a decade Awdah served informally as the village’s “connector,” welcoming visitors and activists from the West who wanted to help combat Israel’s violent occupation. He took it upon himself to find us beds to sleep in, and I know from personal experience that he was liable to overfeed his visitors. Above all he wanted to ensure that his three children grew up with more safety and freedom than he had. He worked toward this goal with determination. Yet in moments of candor, he admitted how exhausting it was to keep up his persistence. “We are really tired from all of this,” Awdah told me during our conversation in July. “We are living a life that is not a life anymore.… There is no human in the world ready to live their life in a situation like this, [who] will accept it. Because it is crazy, it is not human.”

Twenty-three days later Awdah was killed in broad daylight. Eyewitness testimony and multiple videos taken at the scene seem to leave little doubt that the shooter was a settler named Yinon Levy, who is already under international sanctions for participating in violent attacks on Palestinian communities. Awdah lived an exceptional life of conviction and dignity. But his death was exceptional only because his killing’s extensive documentation and his acclaim as an activist—including for consulting on the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land—inspired widespread coverage in the international press. Most Palestinians who die as a result of Israel’s control will never be mourned as widely. His killing is just the latest example of the settler impunity that has cost so many Palestinians their lives—an impunity borne of the alliance, now closer than ever, between the settlement movement and the state.

*

Umm al-Khair is less than ten miles from Hebron. Its Palestinian Bedouin founders, displaced from the Arad desert during the Nakba of 1948, bought the land for thirteen camels from a Palestinian Arab in the city of Yatta. The village’s land tenure documents theoretically guarantee private property rights, including protection against expropriation, but they went unheeded when the community came under Israeli military occupation in 1967. Thirteen years later, Israeli soldiers confiscated nearly half the village’s land to establish a base directly abutting Umm al-Khair. They called it Carmel.

In 1981, like many settlements during this period, Carmel transitioned from military to civilian status. Quickly Umm al-Khair’s residents found their access to traditional grazing lands severely reduced and their mobility across the area curtailed. After 1995, when the Oslo II Accord placed 60 percent of the West Bank—including Umm al-Khair—under full Israeli control as Area C, the state ratcheted up its use of bureaucratic euphemisms like “survey” or “state” land to seize more and more Palestinian territory in the region. Now all but two structures in Umm al-Khair carry demolition orders for having been built without a permit; many have already been reduced to rubble. Those still standing are makeshift tin buildings vulnerable to the elements and steady decay.

Next door Carmel has paved roads, connection to Israeli electricity and water sources, and sturdy homes. Its 632 residents enjoy Israeli citizenship and live in a large residential bloc adjacent to a set of industrial chicken coops. Both are fenced in. The settlement is illegal under international humanitarian and human rights law, but that has not prevented it from expanding steadily, especially in the months since October 7. One morning in March 2024 I watched as preteen settler shepherds invaded Umm al-Khair’s central valley, which the Israeli Civil Administration then seized as “state land” the same day. Nearly a year later I filmed as Carmel residents joined officials from the Har Hebron Regional Council to plant a new olive grove presided over by a pole bearing the Israeli flag and surveillance cameras. The field borders Awdah’s brother Salim’s home and the village community center. Carmel has designated this land for a new neighborhood that would not be contiguous with the rest of the settlement, and if construction continues as planned, Salim and two hundred other Palestinians will be sandwiched between the existing settler neighborhood and the new one.

Awdah was born and raised within the hierarchies of the occupation. He witnessed the village’s first home demolitions at age thirteen. As a teenage shepherd he suffered numerous settler assaults and arbitrary military detentions. After completing high school, he decided to study English at Hebron University because he hoped to teach the language. Once he realized how much power the US and Europe could wield to end the misery of the Palestinian people, he told me, he wanted the youth of Umm al-Khair to be able to share what they had experienced with listeners and readers abroad.  

Awdah taught for five years at the local Al-Saray‘a Secondary School, built and hosted a network of thousands of activists in Umm al-Khair, and reported about life there. In late June and early July 2024 an especially violent sequence of settler assaults and home demolitions left nearly forty of the village’s inhabitants homeless and injured several others, including Awdah’s elderly mother, Umm Salim. “Since the attacks, my son has started stuttering,” he wrote last summer for the magazine +972. “The doctor told us that the best treatment…is a safe environment. But this is what we cannot guarantee for our children: in Umm al-Khair, no one is in a safe place.”

*

July 28, 2025 began like most recent days in the village. An Israeli excavator rumbled in to clear former grazing land for Carmel’s use. Awdah observed the new construction with distress, not least because he recognized the man directing the work, and at times driving the excavator, as the thirty-two-year-old settler Yinon Levy, the founder of an illegal agricultural outpost called Meitarim Farm.

Levy has a reputation in Masafer Yatta for violent assaults on Palestinians, most notably during the permanent displacement, in the weeks after October 7, of the residents of Zanuta village thirty minutes southwest of Umm al-Khair. A legal complaint filed on behalf of the village’s residents alleges that, as +972 summarized it, Levy “headed a group of settlers who, accompanied by two soldiers, came to the village on October 12, beat village residents,” and “threatened to kill them.” Then, the petition alleges, he personally demolished their homes, bulldozed the village school, and destroyed crops. For such “serious and widespread human rights violations,” as the Council of the European Union wrote last year, he was placed on the no-travel or assets freeze lists of the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Japan, Australia, the EU, and the United States (until President Trump removed him in January).

Awdah, preemptively concerned about what Levy might do on the grounds of Umm al-Khair, started mobilizing protective presence activists. He sent live updates and photos to his WhatsApp broadcast list, which I was on:

11:21 AM

The settlers excavator is behind Salim house as we expected,  it seems they will work there , they brought an engineer to put signs on the land

Will see what will happen

Four hours after the first update, Awdah sent a more impassioned plea:

3:08 PM

URGENT CALL

the settlers are working behind our houses and the worst that they tried to cut the main water pipe for the community,  they will build caravans .we need everyone who can make something to act , if you can reach people like the congress , courts , whatever, please do everything,  if they cut the pipe the community here will literally will be without any drop of water

This would be Awdah’s last message.

At the end of the workday, rather than return to Carmel via the paved road bisecting Umm al-Khair, Levy’s employee drove the armored excavator through private village land. Levy himself accompanied on foot. The heavy machine tore up the ground, crushing plants, trees, and fencing, before ramming into Awdah’s cousin Ahmad, knocking him unconscious and severely injuring his shoulder. Then it arrived on the paved road, where a dozen villagers gathered in front of Levy and demanded he leave the village. Other members of the Hathaleen family, including women and children, protested from a few yards away.

In a widely shared video, Levy then confronts the crowd of Palestinians from outside the excavator, yelling at them, shoving them, brandishing his gun, and, within seconds, firing two shots. Awdah was not among those close to Levy; he stood filming the scene over a hundred feet away. Footage released days later—the final video that Awdah captured on his phone—shows Levy pointing his gun directly at Awdah and firing. Instantly, the camera drops to the ground as Awdah is heard grunting. He bled out beside his two-year-old son.

Awdah lost his pulse within minutes, activists who treated him told me. His relatives carried him to Carmel’s gate and pleaded for medical attention, but by then he was likely dead. An Israeli Magen David Adom ambulance arrived in Carmel before a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance could arrive from Yatta, and presumably only because of the gravity of his condition was he brought over the Green Line to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, where he was pronounced dead.

*

After the ambulance whisked Awdah’s body away, some two dozen Israeli soldiers arrived. They cordoned off the community and, at Levy’s direction, arrested six Hathaleen men. The men were blindfolded, zip-tied at their hands and ankles, and taken to the nearby Susiya military base. A settler group wrote on Facebook that evening that Levy had survived an “attempted lynching in broad daylight.”

One of Awdah’s cousins later told me that the soldiers dumped them on the concrete ground, where they lay for hours. At one point a group of soldiers brought in a dog and commanded it to attack the restrained men, but the dog refused. Patriotic Israeli music blasted from a speaker, including “Am Yisrael Chai”(“The nation of Israel lives”), followed by Quranic verses. As the music continued, Awdah’s cousin recounted, the soldiers started up a chant in Hebrew: “Awdah met, Awdah met” (“Awdah’s dead, Awdah’s dead”). None of the prisoners had heard until then that Awdah had been killed. It took eleven days for all six to be freed.

At the scene, police also arrested Levy himself for alleged homicide. But he spent less than twenty-four hours in custody before a judge released him on house arrest. Four days later the judge refused to renew the order on the grounds that the bullet was never located and she “did not find that the danger is of such magnitude that it justifies continued house arrest.” Levy returned to his outpost with no pending legal charges. His lawyer insists both that Levy acted in self-defense and that, since no bullet was found, no evidence directly links Levy’s gunshot to Awdah’s death. Haaretz and The Times of Israel have both reported that Mattan Berner-Kadish, an American Israeli protective presence activist who was at the scene that day, confronted Levy immediately after the shooting. “You just killed someone,” Berner-Kadish said he told him. “And I’m happy about it,” Levy reportedly replied.

I arrived at Umm al-Khair a few hours later, thirty minutes after Awdah’s family had learned that he had not survived. Most men I saw were weeping, too pained to speak. Tariq Hathaleen, another of Awdah’s cousins, cried into my ear, “They have taken everything from me.”

On July 29, the next morning, the village erected mourning tents for the ‘azza ritual, where visitors come to offer condolences to the family of the deceased. The Israeli Civil Administration phoned Awdah’s brother Khalil, the head of the village council, and demanded he dismantle the tents. If he refused, they warned, the army would do so by force. They also demanded the family restrict the entry of journalists and foreign visitors—by which they meant left-wing activists, some of whom are Jewish Israelis. Defiant, the family decided to keep the tent up and welcome all calls. I, along with other activists, hid in homes around the village.

In the late morning, Israeli soldiers in balaclavas arrived and blocked journalists and mourners from entering Umm al-Khair. By afternoon more masked soldiers had joined them, declared the village a “closed military zone,” and started clearing people from the tent. Activists like me who had come to pay condolences were physically dragged to our cars; soldiers fired stun grenades at us and arrested two members of our group.

Over the next four nights Israeli soldiers raided the village and arrested a combined thirteen more Hathaleen boys and men, accusing them of participating in an attack against Levy, even though many were not present at the incident. The Israeli police and military, meanwhile, continued to withhold Awdah’s body—of which they had taken custody to conduct an autopsy—and, following a common and longstanding practice, put stringent conditions on its release. He would, they insisted, need to be buried outside Umm al-Khair in a ceremony capped at fifteen attendees, at a late-night hour decided by the military; the family would also have to agree to a ban on using amplification equipment and submit a deposit to ensure that all conditions were met.  

The Hathaleen family refused. “Awdah was not a criminal, and he will not be buried like one,” Khalil told me. Three days following his death, more than seventy women and girls from the village declared a hunger strike, demanding both the return of Awdah’s body and that his family members being held at Ofer military prison be freed. All the while settlers continued their encroachment; barely a week later, they fractured the pipe supplying water to the southern half of the village, leaving residents without running water.

It took eight days and a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court for the state to release Awdah’s body after the autopsy. Even after the military agreed to a funeral without constraints on attendees, it blockaded the village and prevented hundreds of mourners, myself included, from attending. As I stood outside with other activists on the morning of August 7, soldiers announced that they intended to arrest us for putatively violating the closed military zone, which forbade civilians from entering the road leading to the village.

A week after Awdah’s death, I sat again with his brothers and cousins in the men’s mourning tent. From less than two hundred feet away we could hear the sounds of excavation—hydraulic hisses, rocks clanking against a steel bucket, back-up beeps. The family looked outside and saw Yinon Levy. He had returned to survey the land and resume his earthworks.

It seems his hard work has paid off. In the middle of the night on August 27, settlers moved four caravans to the plot Levy had leveled. “Now we are imprisoned by the settlers,” Tariq Hathaleen told me. “They can attack us from any direction.” More caravans are expected in the coming weeks, bringing with them families of settlers to live on the confiscated lands of Umm al-Khair.