The Palestinian school under siege

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0:09Today, a new school year begins in the West Bank.

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0:58Hello? Hello? Hello? It's the beginning of the school day at the Al-Makhir Boys' School in the West Bank. Good morning, how are you? Good morning. And we're speaking via a really bad internet connection to Wahid Abu Naim, the school's English teacher. Good morning, boys. In the background, we can hear him greeting his students. How are you today? And then, when the signal briefly improves, Wahid turns on his video. And suddenly I'm looking at a classroom full of boys in smart blue uniforms, their hair freshly combed, sitting at desks, smiling and waving.

1:44Wahid's English lesson starts with a question. Who's your friend? What's his name? Ratir? That's good. I watch the boys shyly point to their favourite classmates, explaining in broken English what they really like about each other. And then we play together. Before long, Wahid moves on to their dreams for the future. Doctor. Doctor. You want to be? Yes, engineer. Engineer. You want to be an engineer. And it's clear that Wahid loves his job. Who wants to be a teacher? I don't care. I don't care. Although we don't get lots of money, I don't care for these things. Because my students, especially in the morning, used to wait for me in the morning when I enter the school to shake hands.

2:43While going inside their classes. So it's a happy life inside the school. Outside the school is very different. That's why Wahid has spent his summer strengthening and raising the walls that protect the school and its 470 children I have prepared since weeks hard things around the school, surrounded all the school We were fixing all the gates Because outside there are men with guns Israeli settlers and armed soldiers And the school is in their sights

3:29Because we think that in a day, in the next weeks or next month May the military plan bring settlers around the school We think that because they are coming closer and closer to the village every week Wahid's school is now on the front line between the villagers, the settlers who want all of their land, and the Israeli military who are backing them up. And the children here have already paid the price. Five will never return to the school. Can Wahid keep the school open and his students safe? From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, the school under siege.

4:24The school is in the village of Almagher in the beautiful rolling hills of the Jordan Valley. It's located about 30 kilometres northwest of Ramallah. Many people who live here have been here their whole lives. We had a best life. Most of the people in our village used to keep sheep. We have lots of crops around the village. All of the mountains around the village are planted with olive trees. We used to go to the mountains to take all our families to stay for day and night, to enjoy. Not anymore. Our situation at the village here is different than other villages. Here, Al Mughayr village, it is the last village at the east side of Ramallah region.

5:22There are no villages to pass after our village. It is the last one and it is surrounded by settlers. This village of around 4 ,000 people has become completely encircled by a ring of illegal settler outposts. There are now 10 or 11 of them. and it means that the villages of al-Mukhiyah have been cut off from the land where they have historically lived, farmed and kept their sheep. The Israeli state has also designated a lot of the land around the village as a military firing zone, which means it's off-limit to locals, although settlers can be seen grazing their sheep here. Wahid says that their community has been under attack for years now, But recently, these attacks have become much more frequent and violent.

6:37to let the settlers go out of their houses. When people try to get them to leave, the Israeli soldiers are coming and beating the owners of the houses and telling them that they shouldn't do anything to stop the settlers. Yeah, this is the policy. So for you, the police, the military and the settlers are basically all one thing. Yeah, all of them are working for the same aim. It is just for violence under the protection of all the military. Now, as well as being completely encircled by settlements, a military checkpoint has also been raised right opposite the school. It's now on the one open road to the village, the one remaining lifeline for locals, and it's regularly blocked for hours a day.

7:24Last week, when the school tried to open after the summer, the kids had to stay home because most of the teachers couldn't make it through the checkpoint to work. Nine teachers are from the same village and others have to come from other villages. So we couldn't continue our work because 17 teachers couldn't pass to school. For one hour, we sent them back because we couldn't control everything without other teachers. And as we speak, Wahid can see more Israeli soldiers arriving from the window of the school. So now in front of me, just now they have increased. More military vehicles came now. This is right in front of you now, is it?

8:10There are more military vehicles arriving? Yeah. So how many soldiers can you see right now? There are three vehicles and out of them, there are five soldiers out of the cars, but cars having more military soldiers inside.

8:39Wahid knows almost every child in the town and their families. By April this year, the school had already lost one student to violence, 14-year-old Mohamed Nassan, who was shot by an Israeli soldier as he left the local mosque. But nobody in the town thought the school itself could become a target. It was 12.15 by our time. 21st of April. Two little students were out and they were rushing to me, to my class, to tell me that there are some settlers behind the wall of the school. So I went to that wall. I found that there are six settlers, all of them having long guns. Four soldiers were behind them, just a little far away from them protecting everything.

9:26It was the middle of the day and there were children in the playground, but there was also a group just outside the school gates collecting litter. Wahid goes outside to try and get the settlers and their guns to move away from the school. And he starts talking to the soldiers by the checkpoint, asking them to help him.

9:56He came in front, the first soldier, and raised his gun towards me, said, it's not your duty to ask us this question. Go back to your students, go back to your class. We know what we are coming to do here. Then the men outside the school, the settlers and the soldiers, move away from the gates. Some of them start to climb a hill opposite the school, so they're positioned on higher ground. They started shooting students who were out. They shot one of them while I was trying to take all students inside. I was four meters just in front of him. And when shooting started and when he was shot in his head, he fell down.

10:51Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar! I've watched a video of this moment and it's horrific. The shooting starts and you can see people running for cover. And you can see the bullets hitting the school wall. Several men, and Waheed said he's one of them, run over to where the boy is lying and pick him up. And they rush him to a waiting vehicle. And then they drive him to a medical centre in the next village. And back at the school, the shooting continues

11:41In other videos, frightened children and teachers are in a school stairwell trying to shelter under a window as bullets hit the glass

12:09Meanwhile, Wahid is with the 14-year-old who's been shot, and they've arrived at the medical centre in the next village.

12:21In the next village, the first minute, the doctor said that we lost him. He was dead. So then when I was there at the medical center, my father called me that my brother, he came to rescue his children and my children at school. And also he was shot by settlers and coming to the medical center. He also died before he reaches the medical center. because he got a bullet in his chest. So you waited at the medical centre and you saw your brother's body being brought in? Yeah, yeah, I saw him and I saw that he died before he reaches there. Wahid, I mean, I don't know what to say. I'm so sorry. Thank you, thank you for your feeling.

13:22Wahid, shooting at a school is so horrific. Did you ever imagine that this could happen? It happened many times at the village by many attacks by settlers. At school, I know it is different because when you plan to attack school, it means that you are attacking all the houses of the village because all children coming from all the houses of the school, the village, because each house has a child in our school. So by attacking the school, you're basically attacking every single person in the village? Yeah, yeah. Could you tell me about this boy? Who was he? The boy who was shot? Could you tell me about him?

14:10His name was Aus. He was in the ninth grade. I was his English teacher. He was a good student, but he lost his father before seven years. He was shot by settlers. All the people in the village used to be gentle with him, to let him feel safe, get hope of a future. but you know he couldn't forget that habit of losing his brother.

15:02I'm a Graham Harrison, you're The Guardian's chief Middle East correspondent. In April, you travelled to Al-Mukhe 'ah in the West Bank to report on the attack on the school. Can you tell us about that experience? So we went to a sort of morning tent. It was at the mosque. It had been set up. Relatives were gathering. People were coming to pay their respects for Aos. We spoke to his grandfather, to his uncle, to some of his school friends who were there at this morning gathering. and then we went to the school to see where he'd been killed and really in this job I cover a lot of really horrific violence but I did find this even so particularly horrific the the blood was still on the floor where he'd been shot and it was literally one sort of step outside the gate of his school I mean one of the things that you sort of get right when you're able to go visit places And, you know, something that for us foreign reporters barred from Gaza is particularly frustrating is you can get a sense of things, the reality in a way that you never can over the phone or even over video calls.

16:12And that's very much the case. The sort of school is nestled into this small hill on the edge of the village. And you can see that when these gunmen went up the hill, it was clear what they were doing, which was taking up a position of military advantage. Their target in this case was a school full of kids. And there's something about, you know, we've documented the hundreds of children who've been killed by Israeli soldiers, settlers over the last three years. But even in that context of sort of regular deadly violence, there is something particularly horrific about someone taking aim at a school full of children, I think.

16:49But Emma, what's so horrendous is that more students from the school have died since the school attack, shot by Israeli soldiers. Is that right? Yeah, it just feels like this is a community that's under attack in so many different ways. Ours was the second child from that school killed that year. Three more have since been killed. And the most recent incident in which the fourth and fifth students from the Al-Muraya boys' school were killed, that was an incident when settlers came into the town, escorted by police and the Israeli military to steal sheep from inside the town. The Israeli military told us that the police had gone there to recover stolen property.

17:32But I asked them, so where was the police investigation? Where was the warrant? Where was the details of the stolen property? And they sort of didn't have a response to that. Obviously, it's not credible in the first place, because we can see that's not what's happening. You can see videos of these things. But it's also kind of, to me, striking that the military aren't even really attempting to come up with a credible explanation for this violence that they're participating in. One thing that really struck me when I was talking to Wahid, the teacher at the school, was that he was so clear that the violence, the intimidation, the shootings that have been happening in his village were not only perpetrated by settlers, but that the Israeli military and the police were participating, coordinating and also enabling these attacks on local people.

18:22Have you also seen this in your reporting because there persists this idea that there is a distinction between the Israeli military and the settlers. Absolutely, Annie. And of course, you know, if you accept that the Israeli military are involved in these attacks, it does become a more complicated thing to discuss because then you're talking not about rogue individuals, but you're talking about part of the Israeli state. Inside Israel, there's very prominent people who've been very harsh in their criticism of what they consider settlers to be doing. They've described it as ethnic cleansing, as terrorism, but they want to draw a line between settlers and the Israeli military.

18:59And, you know, our reporting, many, many other people, including Israeli human rights groups, Israeli investigative journalists, has shown that that just isn't the case. And there is, you know, a lot of confusion on the ground, isn't there? In the case of the school shooting, Wahid and many others in the village thought the attack was by settlers. The Israeli military says it was an army reservist who shot AUS. So, you know, why is there all this, you know, lack of clarity? I mean, we had an investigation that we did earlier this year into these units called Hagmar, which are sort of essentially like local reserve units.

19:40They've been at the heart of a lot of the most extreme violence that we've been seeing. We had testimony from Israeli soldiers, from the regular army who were horrified by what they were seeing. And so they were telling us that these groups function basically as vigilante militias. What happened after October 7th, a lot of the regular army was deployed to Gaza or to Lebanon. And the government decided to call up what they call territorial reserve units, which is where you basically call up reservists from a local community. What that meant in occupied Palestine was that you were calling up reservists from a settlement to patrol the area around the settlement.

20:18So it was essentially handing uniforms and guns to settlers to do what they want. They were nominally under the control of the regular army units in their area, but of course they tended to know the area better. They would often be based out of their settlements, whereas the regular army units tend to be based in bases a bit further away. And so these soldiers told us, for instance, they'd often turn up at something they've been called to, perhaps by the police or by activists, and they would find that the hagmar, the territorial reserve, were already there. So that's one unit of the military that's been particularly implicated in violence.

20:56But you also have the mainstream now of the Israeli military that seems to be actively participating in much of this violence. I think perhaps one of the clearest examples of that has been happening in a village quite near Al-Mugaya, which is called Kusra. The settlers laid the siege and the regional commander of the Israeli military for the Occupy West Bank went to the village. He said, we're going to sort out this problem. The soldiers then took down a tent that the settlers had set up outside these Palestinian homes. And what they've effectively done is continue to enforce the siege. And they, in fact, went further than the settlers.

21:34They went into one of the homes, rove out the Palestinians and are still living in that home. So where the settlers fail to displace the Palestinians, they have succeeded. And that is under the watch of the chief commander for the entire Occupy West Bank. So you cannot say that that is a marginal faction of the Israeli military. That's the institution participating in a siege. And I wanted to ask how what we're seeing over the last few months or the last year is different to what we've seen before? I mean, that's a good question, because in some ways, the basic pattern, which is take land, expand the Israeli presence, drive out Palestinians, is the same sort of game plan that you've had for decades.

22:18This intensification, though, of both the land grabs, the ethnic cleansing and the violence, I'd really actually date it back to three years. It's really rapid intensification. It's got even worse in recent months. You could sum that up from the perspective of the settlers by quoting the minister for settlements, a far-right minister, Oric Struck, who in, I think, 2024, described the period after October 7th, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, as, quote, a time of miracles. I, and many people in Israel, find that a pretty extraordinary response. And she called it a time of miracles, because in her views, the settlement movement was able to advance towards its goals so fast.

23:05And that has meant displacement of Palestinians, ethnic cleansing, over 60 communities have been entirely forced out, I think at least 18 others have been partially displaced. That's nearly 5000 people who've been forced out of their homes. And large amounts of land that was used by Palestinians, whether for farming or as grazing land has been taken over and is now under Israeli control.

23:31Coming up, how long can the school hold out?

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24:22Last week Andy Burnham's government here said it would cut off trade with illegal settlers. The backlash was quite extreme. Could you tell us what the reaction has been like inside Israel? Well, you know, it's an interesting question, because obviously the Israeli establishment, I would say like most of the world, were shocked by the scale of the sanctions that Milliband announced, the language that he used, that he used the words ethnic cleansing, that he talked about terrorism. In Almugayir, 20 miles north of Jerusalem. You know, we saw Ed Miliband reference the killings of these students in his speech.

24:55Two teenagers were shot when settlers entered the village under police and military escort. Both died before reaching hospital. Madam Deputy Speaker, five teenagers have now been killed from their school this year. It was a much stronger statement than anybody expected. Because obviously, the government's responded very strongly. We've seen the foreign minister saying he's going to close the consulate in Jerusalem. You know, there was a lot of political debate among people who follow these things closely about what this meant for Israel at a time of isolation. It was a sign really of further isolation.

25:31The fact that 12 other countries came in behind announcing their planning versions of something like this, you know, added to this sense of isolation in Israel. But as you know, where it was in the news headlines. That came out on the same day that there was a massive expose in Haaretz, you know, one of the leading newspapers here, that Netanyahu had been personally warned by the leader of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning what we now know as the October 7th attack and had done nothing with that warning. He hadn't passed it on to his intelligence chiefs. And so that has absolutely, as you can imagine, consumed the country.

26:09Netanyahu's office has called the accusation an absolute lie, claiming that he never spoke to Zayed during the period in question and received no warning from him. The scandal, another hurdle for the prime minister as he faces national elections next month. And his actions surrounding the October 7th attack... You know, I can imagine that was huge news. I guess with the elections coming up at the end of October, considering there are such hardline elements within Netanyahu's government, you know, like the Minister of National Security, Ben Govear, and the Finance Minister, Smotrich, who are openly advocating for settlers taking over land in the West Bank.

26:48Are you expecting to see the attacks and the violence in the West Bank increasing as we get closer to that election? Yeah, so I mean, I'm afraid that, you know, the next three months, as things stand, I'm just very unfortunately expecting to see at least the same level of violence and frankly, probably an escalation, perhaps partly a sense that now is the time to sort of take as much land as you can while you can. It's much harder to evict people once they're in place. Perhaps the only thing that might push the government into action would be some sort of intervention from Trump. No, he's been very quiet, hasn't he?