At dawn on Friday 12 April, Israeli teenager Benjamin Achimeir walked out from his settler outpost in the occupied West Bank, with a flock of sheep, and disappeared.
Achimeir, 14, had been living and working on a tiny farm outpost near his family’s settlement, Malachei HaShalom – one of nearly 150 Israeli settlements in the West Bank regarded as illegal under international law.
The young teenager was murdered that morning out on the pasture, according to Israeli police, but it would be 24 hours before his body was found. When the flock of sheep returned to the farm without him, a massive search began, involving the Israeli police, military, air force, intelligence services and thousands of volunteers from the settler community.
For some, it was not enough. At 08:30 on Saturday, Elisha Yered, a former spokesman for MP Limor Son Har-Melech and extremist settler suspected in the murder of a Palestinian man last August, posted in a WhatsApp group for settlers.
“Shabbat Shalom, it’s been nearly 24 hours of heavy suspicion that Benjamin was kidnapped from the pasture and still the obvious measures have not been taken,” Yered wrote.
The same message was being posted in various settler WhatsApp groups that morning. It called on them to take matters into their own hands – “crowning” of nearby Palestinian villages (a term for blocking residents from leaving or entering), “home to home searches”, and “collective punishment against the murderous Arab population”.
The message also contained a list of meeting points. Hours later, a similar message would circulate in the settler groups but with fire emojis attached to each location, as well as calls from individual settlers to “eliminate the enemy”, “exterminate the beasts”, and – referring to a nearby Palestinian village – “let all of Duma burn”.
What followed was a wave of shooting and arson attacks across 11 Palestinian villages in which a dozen homes and more than 100 cars were torched, thousands of animals were slaughtered, four people were shot dead and scores of others were seriously wounded. In the weeks since, five Israeli settlers have been arrested in connection with the reprisal violence, and one Palestinian is being held in connection with the murder of Benjamin Achimeir.
Achimeir’s body was found very close to his outpost. But in their rampage the settlers would attack Palestinian villages up to 7km (4.3 miles) away. Records of some of their WhatsApp group chats that day, as well as testimony from Palestinian officials and families in the villages that came under attack, paint a picture of an organised campaign of revenge that was incited in part using WhatsApp, carried out by co-ordinated groups on the ground, and targeted against ordinary Palestinians with no apparent connection to the murder other than the bad luck of living nearby.
Religious West Bank settlers would not normally communicate via WhatsApp on a Saturday, because of the laws of the Sabbath. But messages posted by Yered as well as Eitan Rabinovich – the founder of an organisation which advocates for not buying from or employing Palestinians in the West Bank – and others, stressed that Achimeir’s disappearance was the “true Pikuach Nefesh”, a Hebrew term which states that the preservation of human life overrides all religious law.
Excerpts from the WhatsApp groups, some collected by the Israeli media monitoring group FakeReporter and shared with the BBC, show that many settlers believed the disappearance also overrode any adherence to actual law. The description text for one of the most active groups used that day, named “Investigating Fear of Kidnapping”, and containing 306 people, called on settlers to establish checkpoints at key locations around Palestinian villages and stop and search cars and passengers – actions that settlers have no legal authority to take.
The admins of “Investigating Fear of Kidnapping” were David-Zvi Atia, Yedidya Asis and Israel Itzkovitz. Asis, a member of the far-right settler organisation Hilltop Youth, has previously served a ban from the West Bank. Itzkovitz is also a member of the WhatsApp group “Honor Guard of the Nablus Area”, which was used to organise a rampage of violence against the Palestinian town of Huwara and three other villages in February last year.
That rampage was among the most intense and systematic settler attacks in the West Bank for decades. In the months since the Hamas attack last October, according to Israeli human rights groups, violence against West Bank Palestinians has surged dramatically and the settlers have acted with near-impunity.
Within hours of Benjamin Achimeir’s disappearance, messages had begun spreading on settler WhatsApp groups calling openly for revenge attacks against Palestinian villagers. Some contained a poster image of Achimeir with the word “REVENGE” emblazoned across it in capital letters – an image that was also physically posted around the occupied West Bank that weekend. Some messages contained a new list of places to meet, with fire emojis attached.
The first location on the list spread on WhatsApp by Yered, Rabinovich and others on Saturday morning – in the same message that called for “collective punishment of the murderous Arab population” – was Duma Junction, where the main road exits towards the town. A few hours after the messages circulated, at one of the first houses past the junction, Murad Dawbsheh, a 52-year-old construction worker and father of three, was hand-pumping water up from his well when he heard a woman screaming, he said, followed by the sight of black smoke rising nearby.
Dawbsheh ran to his driveway and saw a large group of settlers gathered about 100m away in the trees. The settlers split into two groups – the first heading for his neighbour’s property and the second for his. The second group then split again – some heading for the main house and others towards his outbuildings.
Dawbsheh corralled his family into a small safe room in the house with metal grates on the windows. The settlers smashed all of the home’s windows and set fire to the doorway but were not able to break in. His three sons, all hearing-impaired, were terrified, he said.
The settlers torched a new house on the property that Dawbsheh had built for his son, along with Dawbsheh’s tools, his garage, both his cars, his timber shed and his entire collection of timber. Worse, he said, they burned down his “sanctuary” – a small two-room outbuilding which contained all of his books, his own poetry, his late mother’s possessions and his family’s identity documents, records, heirlooms and photographs.
“Every piece of paper concerning my past, present and future was there,” Dawbsheh said, under a fierce sun, tears mixing with beads of sweat on his cheeks. “It is a loss that cannot be compensated. Like losing a limb. You keep looking and finding it missing anew.”
At the same time that the home was under attack, the WhatsApp group “Investigating Fears of Kidnapping” shows the settlers co-ordinating group movements around Duma Junction, calling urgently for cars to collect settlers from the area, and asking for advice on how to avoid police.
“We are on our way out of Duma, it’s full of security forces,” said one of the group members, Israel Yuval, in a voice note. “We were chased by soldiers. What’s the plan? Where should we go? Let us know.”
Shmulik Fine – a settler who was convicted in 2015 of incitement to violence and terror – reported to the group that Israeli police were beginning to arrest settlers in Duma.
“Why arrests? Let all of Duma burn,” replied “Tali”. A Facebook account linked to this number belongs to a Tali Dahan, with a status that suggests she worked for the Israeli police at the Allenby Bridge border crossing nearby.
“That’s the way,” Dahan replied to pictures of Duma on fire. “Make them afraid, those beasts. Exterminate them.” (Dahan denied working for the Israeli police or writing the WhatsApp messages, despite being contacted by the BBC on the number used to post in the group. The police did not respond to questions.)
Israel Baniuk, a 17-year-old settler who has advocated elsewhere on social media for Jews to resettle the Gaza Strip, warned that Palestinian villagers were posting videos online and the settlers could lose the “media war” against the “Nazi” villagers.
“Always remember that this is an open group,” warned Ofer Ohana, a prominent far-right settler activist from Hebron. “All the messages here can leak to those who gather information against us.”
The wave of attacks had begun a day earlier, just hours after Benjamin Achimeir went missing. In al-Mughayyir, a village of about 2,500 people less than a mile from Achimeir’s outpost, Abdellatif Abu Aliya was at Friday prayers when he heard about the disappearance.
The 52-year-old construction worker, who lives in the house on the northernmost edge of the village, returned home to see settlers massing around his house. From his rooftop that morning, he said, he witnessed a level of organisation and intent among the settlers that he had never seen before in all his years in the village and three previous attacks on the house.
Video footage filmed by the family shows armed settlers patrolling around the property, at least two in what appear to be Israel Defense Force (IDF) uniforms, prior to the attack beginning. They approached the house through olive groves that Abedllatif said once belonged to his family, he said, but which were now, like many once-Palestinian olive groves, off limits because of settler expansion.
