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In late June of last year, the sound of an alarm cut through the heat in Turmus Ayya. In this West Bank village, the siren did not indicate an incoming missile attack; Israel’s 12-day war with Iran had already ended. It was a warning that settlers were approaching.
On this particular day, about 15 masked settlers brandishing sticks and other weapons entered the village and set one of the fields on fire. Soldiers eventually arrived — but only to escort the settlers back to their homes, offering no assistance to the defenseless Palestinian residents. The attack did not escalate further largely because crowds of mourners and reporters were already nearby, returning from the funeral of three Palestinians murdered in a settler attack the day before.
Among those present trying to ward off the settlers was Local Call reporter and photojournalist Oren Ziv, who later described his initial confusion at the sound of the alarm — something most Jewish Israelis associate with incoming rockets. Ziv was not a typical Jewish Israeli bystander. For two decades, he has been a fixture in Palestinian communities across the West Bank, standing in solidarity with their struggle against forced displacement and faithfully documenting their efforts to resist.
What happened in Turmus Ayya reflected the daily reality for the roughly three million Palestinians living under Israeli military rule in the occupied West Bank: routine harassment, recurring bursts of violence, and virtually no recourse for protection or accountability. Yet Israeli media, like the police, tends to treat each incident as a discrete episode, obscuring the broader campaign of ethnic cleansing and support from Israeli state institutions that enables such violence.
In this episode of The +972 Podcast, Ziv unpacks the organized expulsion of Palestinian communities, showing how settler violence, state policy, and military coordination are reshaping Area C of the occupied West Bank (under full Israeli military control) and increasingly encroaching into Areas B and A (nominally under Palestinian administration).
He explains why the Israeli media is largely silent on these issues, drawing on years of reporting — all the way back to his early work documenting demonstrations against the separation wall in the West Bank and co-founding the Activestills photography collective — and reflects on what small measure of support Israeli and international activists can realistically provide today.
