The video leaves no room for doubt: Dozens of settlers attacked Palestinians harvesting olives, smashing their cars and beating a 53-year-old woman with a club.
She was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage. The Israeli police chief promised to arrest the assailant.
So far, nothing has happened.
By Gideon Levy & Alex Levac, Reposted from Haaretz, November 01, 2025
Hooded, wielding a metal-tipped club and wearing the traditional tasseled tzitzit worn by Orthodox men but no shirt, he hurls himself at the woman. One powerful blow to the head and she collapses to the ground, unconscious. Then he assaults a volunteer from abroad who had come to protect the woman and her family, and continues his indiscriminate rampage, smashing people in a fury. As for her, the story didn’t end there, however: The man’s settler-comrades continued to assault her as she lay on the ground, kicking and pummeling her all over, she told Haaretz this week.
The woman, Afaf Abu Alia, 53, a Palestinian mother of five and grandmother of nine, could also have been the grandmother of those who beat her almost to death with their murderous blows. She was wearing a traditional embroidered black dress; her only “crime” was apparently that she had joined her family in their grove for the olive harvest. Young olive-pickers in a nearby grove rushed to evacuate her as she lay on the ground groaning, by then semi-conscious, with blood oozing from her head.
The video clip showing this atrocity has been disseminated widely on social media. Quite unusually, excerpts of it were even broadcast on Israeli television: Inbar Twizer reported on Channel 12 News that the commander of the Israel Police’s Shay (Samaria and Judea) District, Maj. Gen. Moshe Pinchi wrote in an internal police WhatsApp group that he had “lost sleep” over the clip. “This cruel offender, who beats elderly women and wounds them seriously, will be arrested and will be brought to justice,” he vowed, to universal amazement. But the sleepiness of the high-ranking Pinchi soon overcame him.
שלושה פצועים, שני פלסטינים ואזרח זר, בתקיפת מתנחלים באזור תורמוסעיא הבוקר בזמן מסיק זיתים. בתיעוד שצילם @infinite_jaz נראה רעול פנים באלות מכים את האישה, אחת מהפצועים שפונתה אחר כך לבי”ח. מוקדם יותר הוצתו שני כלי רכב פלסטינים באותו מקום, לא היו נפגעים בשריפה. pic.twitter.com/SSn4FiZuM9
— Nurit Yohanan (@nurityohanan) October 19, 2025
It’s been almost two weeks since the incident, which took place in the West Bank village of Turmus Ayya, northeast of Ramallah, and nothing has happened, of course. The most intense investigation in the history of the Shay District is apparently still underway, and the police are already accusing the victim, Afaf, whom the police spokesperson’s unit refers to as “the Palestinian lady,” for not having arrived to give testimony at a police station. It’s because of her, the police are hinting, that the criminal is still at large.
But the truth is that if the police wanted to, they could have arrested him that same day. If he were a Palestinian, he would be sentenced to years in prison. But the woman is an innocent Palestinian, and her assailant is a vicious settler hooligan, so no harm will likely befall him or his cohorts, despite the commander’s sleeping problems. Unlike him, Afaf is still wracked by pain and suffering sleepless nights. Her brother-in-law, who drove her to the harvest on October 19, is waiting for us in his handsome stone house in the village of Mughayyir, not far from Afaf’s home.
Ayman Abu Alia, 47, has the rough, broad hands of a tiller of the soil. He’s the father of 10, two of whom have died. Ali was killed on December 4, 2020, by Israeli soldiers – shot to death at the age of 16 in a stone-throwing incident in the village; Wissam died from leukemia at the age of 10. Photographs of the dead children are on the walls, and their father immediately shows them to us. Another son, Bassem, was jailed for 12 months some three years ago for throwing stones.
Today, Ayman, who has a thick beard that evokes that of a settler, is a construction worker in Turmus Ayya, a relatively affluent village west of Mughayyir. He had been a farmer until the Israel Defense Forces uprooted his olive trees as part of a criminal, collective act of punishment for what Israeli authorities claimed was an attempted terror attack that originated in Mughayyir last August. The punishment included the army’s destruction of 3,100 olive trees, a gut-wrenching scene. In the absence of groves of his own, Ayman recently decided to help pick olives in a grove owned by a resident of Turmus Ayya.
תקיפת איימן אבו עאליה ב-19.10 באזור הכרם בתורמוס עיא
(שימוש לפי סעיף 27א לחוק זכויות יוצרים) pic.twitter.com/0a7S0gxysw— הארץ חדשות (@haaretznewsvid) October 30, 2025
On the Sunday in question, Ayman set out for the grove along with his brothers’ wives – Afaf and Watafa, 53, and his nephew, Salah, 32, Afaf’s son. It was 7:30 in the morning. They arrived at the plot, which lies in an area called A-Dalaja, not far from Turmus Ayya. A few families were already at work nearby; Ayman parked the car, and he and the other three joined them. They had been working for about half an hour when 10 to 15 masked settlers, armed with pistols and clubs, suddenly swooped down on them from a nearby hill. Metal heads were attached to their clubs to intensify the damage.
The first intruders set to work on Ayman’s old, silver-gray Mazda, smashing the windows, puncturing a couple of tires, and battering it with clubs. Ayman shouted to the other families for help: “The settlers are here! They’re killing us; they wrecked my car.” A group of local residents arrived and evacuated the women; the settlers retreated to the west in the face of a hail of stones thrown at them by some of the younger Palestinians.
About half a year ago, settlers established an outpost on the outskirts of this same grove, which looms over and intimidates the villagers. There are similar illegal communities on the surrounding hills, with violent inhabitants – among them Malachei Hashalom (“Angels of Peace”) and Or Nachman.
When the settlers pulled back, Ayman and two other men from Turmus Ayya tried to remove his car, but because of its punctured tires, they managed to move it only about 200 meters away. Meanwhile, IDF soldiers showed up in their vehicles. Some 15 troops emerged and detained Ayman for about 40 minutes, warning him that he was not permitted to be there, without giving any reasons.
The soldiers eventually left, but then a swarm of dozens of masked, armed settlers appeared. Ayman estimates that there were about 50 hooligans who started to attack him as he took refuge in his half-destroyed car. They tried to force the door open; he says he was frightened for his life. He protected his head from their clubs with his arms. Finally, he managed to jump out of the driver’s door and fled toward the olive trees, as the settlers pelted his back with stones.
Black smoke, visible in the above-mentioned video clip, shows that the settlers had set the car ablaze. Muhammad Rumana, a field researcher for B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, relates that settlers torched two other cars belonging to harvesters that day, not far from where Ayman had parked his Mazda.
Ayman hid among the trees before finally making his way to the nearby village of Abu Falah; it was there that he learned, from social media reports, that his sister-in-law Afaf had been attacked by the settlers. He rushed to the clinic in Turmus Ayya in the car of a villager to see Afaf, who was unconscious and whose face and clothes were covered in blood. Eyewitnesses told him that the settlers had fled immediately after beating her, possibly because they thought she was dead.
A Palestinian ambulance later evacuated Afaf, accompanied by Ayman, to Istishari Hospital, Ramallah, at about 11 A.M. The physicians told the family that she had likely suffered intracranial bleeding and blood clots, but that her condition would become clear only in about 12 hours. Hovering between life and death, Afaf, who needed 28 stitches in her head, was taken to intensive care.
Half a day later, she woke up fully, and her condition improved. She related to her relatives that the settlers had struck her with clubs in the stomach and on her arms and legs, and had kicked her after she fell to the ground. A few days later, she was transferred to a regular hospital ward for a few more days of observation and recovery before being released.
Afaf is a sickly woman who suffers from diabetes. The five-minute video, taken by a foreign volunteer who had come to help the Palestinian farmers from his car, shows how the events unfolded, accompanied by the volunteer’s shouts of disbelief at what he was witnessing. His cries crescendo as he watches and films the brutal blow to Afaf’s head. “Oh my God!” he repeats, breathing hard, incredulous.
Indeed, it’s hard to enter the twisted, sick mind of a person who’s capable of lifting a brutal hand against an innocent, helpless woman who’s trying to pick olives.
The Israel Police stated this week, in response to Haaretz’s query about the settler who assaulted Afaf: “The assailant has not yet been arrested. We are making every effort to get to him. Several attempts have been made to allow the Palestinian lady to arrive and give testimony and additional details that will help us move toward his arrest, but she didn’t come in. This, of course, is in addition to the effort to collect findings at the scene. The investigation is still continuing with the aim of getting to the suspect in order to bring him to justice.”
We went to Afaf’s house this week, accompanied by Ayman. She walks very heavily, is having a hard time sleeping, and her head and indeed her entire body still aches; there’s still a black bruise under one eye.
Why do you think they did it? Afaf: “They are our enemies. It happens regularly; they keep attacking us. It happens in all the villages around us.”
Will you return to the olive groves? A faint smile plays on her lips: “This is our land. We will not leave it.”
On our way out, the shacks of Or Nachman and Malachei Hashalom could be seen from above on the hillside. Down below, the entire route from Magayyir to Turmus Ayya was lined with olive groves dotted with hundreds upon hundreds of violently uprooted trees.
Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist for Haaretz.
Alex Levac is an Israeli photojournalist for Haaretz.
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