‘In the days of old, the world was safe’: West Bank family’s enduring unity

Mattresses spread across the floor beneath the stone dome of the Masallam family home in Khirbet al-Marajim [Al Jazeera]

As friends and relatives constantly cycle through the compound, no family in al-Marajim is as rooted to the land — or as visible a presence — as the Masallams, who for generations have spent their lives farming and grazing on the small hill overlooking the wadi below. The settlers know that, too. “If they manage to displace our family, they control the pastures,” said Thabet. “That’s why they focus on targeting this house. They want the entire area — and if we fall, the rest do.”

During settler attacks and military incursions, Thabet is the family’s anchor. He works the phones — calling relatives in Duma, the Palestinian liaison and Israeli solidarity activists whenever settlers or soldiers arrive. Warm and gently humorous, his can-do persistence keeps fear from overtaking the household.

But that visibility has also made him a target. Over time, a tense cat-and-mouse dynamic has developed between Thabet and the settlers and army, becoming part of the rhythm of the daily invasions.

Even under pressure, Thabet’s energy remains contagious. The women sing folk songs while making cheese in the courtyard. At night, siblings sneak moments to dance together while brushing their teeth. “Laughter and joy come naturally to us,” Thabet says one calm evening, amid the family gathering.

It always did. For as long as anyone in the family could remember, the area was peaceful.

“We would go in the night to Duma,” Hajja remembered life there decades ago. “We would stay up until 10 or 11 and go home walking, no car or anything. We would even sleep here outside, just lay out the mattress and sleep under the stars.

“We could never sleep outside now.”

Spring wildflowers cover the grassy hills around the Masallam family compound [Al Jazeera]

In springtime, the grassy hill around their home is dotted with flowers of red, yellow and purple between gnarled olive trees. Sometimes their sheep and goats still manage to graze across the terrain, their bells clanking in the wind.

But more often now, settlers release their cows onto the family’s land — destroying the olive trees — while the Masallams keep their own flocks penned inside, for fear of attack or theft.

When the family do get moments of calm, it’s easy for the Masallams — convivial by nature — to slip back into reminiscing about the life they once had on this hill.

“When relatives from Talfit [a Palestinian village in Jenin] would come, they would help us harvest the wheat,” said Nayef, sprawled on his side on the thin fellahi mattress wrapped with floral patterns, on his head, a black and white keffiyeh and iqal. Talfit is a Palestinian village about 18 kilometres away in Jenin. “Twenty or 30 relatives would come. It was a special day.”

“How beautiful, how happy the harvests were!” exclaimed Maysoon, 42, Nayef’s wife, clasping her hands in her raspy voice. “It was a party.”

With the wheat they harvested, Hajja and Maysoon baked bread in an underground taboon oven outside their home. Including the roughly 1,000 litres of olive oil they produced each year, they lived off what the land and their livestock gave them.

These days, amid army prohibitions and rampant settler attacks, much of that is impossible.

A death and a kidnapping

The family patriarch was Musa, Hajja Latifa’s husband, the grandfather of Thabet and the father of Nayef, from his other wife, now deceased.

“Every day, life was sweet with him,” said Thabet, as everyone nodded around the circle. “People respected him because he was good to people.”

A shepherd and a simple man, Musa frequently rode his donkey into nearby Duma to drink tea with friends.

While returning home one afternoon in 2016, Musa — 80 at the time — crossed the Allon Road, a highway cutting north-south through the central West Bank. According to the family, a settler from Kokhav HaShahar — a settlement 10 kilometres south, considered illegal under international law — struck him and his donkey with a motorcycle. The donkey was killed on impact.

The collision left Musa with severe internal bleeding. A teenage Thabet and others rushed to the scene, about two to three kilometres from the family home, attempting to give first aid.

An Israeli ambulance arrived but, according to the family, attended only to the settler — who had also been injured — leaving Musa without treatment. A Palestinian ambulance eventually transported him to hospital, but he died of his injuries on the way.

The family filed a complaint, but the settler was never held accountable. Ever since, the military and settlers have banned the family from accessing the hill where Musa was struck.

Muhammad Masallam, 25, named his young son after his late grandfather Musa [Al Jazeera]

The legacy of his death runs through the family’s names. Nayef and Maysoon, parents of nine, named their youngest son — now seven — Musa. Their oldest son Muhammad, now 25, and his wife Mona, 21, named their own baby boy Musa two and a half years ago.

Despite the tragedy, for almost eight years afterwards, the remote rolling hills just off the Allon Road remained mostly free of settler incursions.

“By God, the first year when we were married, there were no settlers like this, no attacks,” said Mona.

But as settler violence surged across the occupied West Bank in the year leading up to, and especially after, the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, waves of Palestinian communities along the Allon Road were violently displaced — among them Ras al-Tin, Ein Samiya, East Taybeh Bedouins, Khallet al-Maghara, Wadi as-Seeq, Maghayer al-Dir, Khirbet Ein ar-Rashash, and al-Baqa’a.

Much of the violence has been carried out by organised groups of “hilltop youth” — young settlers who establish illegal shepherding outposts, typically a handful of teenagers led by an armed adult, using their own grazing flocks as cover to attack Palestinian shepherds, steal their animals and drive them from their land.

These outposts are illegal not just under international law but also technically under Israeli law, though they have been largely supported by the Netanyahu government.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), from the beginning of 2023 to April 22, 2026, at least 5,879 Palestinians from 116 West Bank communities were forcibly displaced in this manner, with 45 communities erased completely.

This spreading settler encroachment soon reached the Masallams. The settlers established the outpost of “Malachei HaShalom” — Hebrew for “Angels of Peace” — in 2015, with the Israeli government later legalising it as a settlement in 2023.

In November 2024, a satellite outpost was established less than a kilometre from the Masallam home. Ever since, the family’s lives have been turned upside down.

The illegal settlement of Malachei HaShalom overlooks the grazing lands around Khirbet al-Marajim, where the Masallam family says escalating settler violence has made life increasingly untenable [Al Jazeera]

After Hajj Musa’s death, the second Earth-shattering episode for the family came on the night of March 14, 2025.

“Five minutes before the settlers attacked, I knew something was going to happen,” said Thabet. “An army patrol came to the old entrance and stood by it before the settlers even came.”

Thabet immediately called his father to the main room and alerted relatives in Duma. Based on past experience, the family assumed the settlers were coming for the sheep, and braced accordingly.

Mona was entirely unaware of what was going on. She had just stepped out to her uncle’s house, 70 metres away, to drop off a key.

“We didn’t know that they wanted to attack, to burn,” she said. “We didn’t know of these things before.”

It was almost midnight when about 30 settlers arrived on foot and on ATVs (all-terrain vehicles used off-road). They began throwing stones at the house, causing chaos.

The men rushed to the main door, throwing their weight against it as a settler tried to smash it open with an axe — leaving the dents that still mark the metal today.

As settlers smashed the windows of both Nayef’s and Muhammad’s houses, trapped family members barricaded themselves in a bathroom. Mona and several others were sealed inside her uncle’s house.

Then the attackers set fire to the family’s car — and to Muhammad’s house.

Thabet Masallam in front of the family car, torched by illegal Israeli settlers [Al Jazeera]

In the panic and confusion of the spreading flames, a terrifying realisation struck: 18-month-old Musa and his six-month-old sister Mira were locked alone in a room of the burning house. The family had put them there for safety, never imagining the attack would reach the homes themselves.

“We had never experienced an attack like this before,” said Thabet.

“When they burned the car and burned the house, we said the kids are finished, they are gone,” said Mona. “I was in shock. I didn’t know what they did to them.”

The men jumped into the burning house to find them — and found the cribs empty.

The settlers had broken the window glass, breached the room, and taken the two infants into the freezing night.

Young men from Duma, alerted by Thabet’s frantic calls, arrived and chased after the settlers. As they followed, the settlers panicked and abandoned the babies in the dirt of a wild field.

The babies were found a couple of minutes later, crying.

The attack lasted nearly 20 minutes. In the area, three homes were set alight by the settlers, who fired live rounds at other families and vandalised solar panels, windows and other property.

The Israeli army — despite having been positioned at the entrance before it began — arrived only half an hour later.

According to the family, soldiers watched the perpetrators leave, and one soldier punched Leen Masallam, 14, a relative, in the face as the family tried to reach their home.

“The army came and started hitting us,” Thabet said. “Why? What is my sin? Why are you hitting me?”

After months of watching soldiers and settlers operate in tandem, the family had reached one conclusion, said Thabet: “The army is with the settler. They work together. The army doesn’t want us to stay here, either.”

The attack immediately evoked the 2015 murder of the Dawabsheh family in nearby Duma by settlers. “Of course, it’s not strange for them to burn kids,” said Thabet. “We saw with our own eyes what they did to the Dawabsheh family. They burned them alive.”

Young Musa Masallam, 7, walks through the rubble of his older brother Muhammad’s family home [Al Jazeera]

Muhammad’s house was destroyed. The charred shell of the family car remains parked outside the compound.

Terrified for her children, Mona left the family compound and stayed with her parents for more than two months, as her father initially refused to let her return.

As with every attack since, no one was held accountable.

“If you get inside [the settlement to file a complaint], the officer looks at you like you are the criminal,” said Thabet.

“You tell him, ‘The settlers burned my car, they attacked my sheep.’ The first thing he says is, ‘Where is your proof? Did you film it?’ If you say yes and show him the video, he says, ‘The video doesn’t show their faces clearly,’ or ‘This is an edited video.’ If you say no, they smashed the cameras, he says, ‘Then you have no case. Maybe you burned your own car to blame the Jews.’  This is what they actually say.”

The Israeli police did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Bit by bit, he destroys you’

Following sunrise prayers each morning, the family assumes the various roles of the fellahi (farmer) household. Nayef begins his days reading passages from the Quran.

“Never in my life until last year did I not go to the mosque for Isha prayers,” he said. “But if the settler brings the army and comes for us … there is no power nor strength except God.”

Hajja and Maysoon start their day by milking the flocks of sheep. Crouched low beside the sheep, Maysoon begins to sing softly as she works, her voice rising and falling in rhythm to her hands.
“The songs help the milking,” insists Maysoon with a wry smile.

They are not formal songs so much as fragments — half-remembered verses and improvised lines passed down through generations of fellahi women.

During the harvest season, women sang songs of the sickle and the land. Here, in the early morning among the flocks, the verses surface more loosely, hummed or with lyrics reshaped to fit the moment.

As the milk foams into the pail, Maysoon drifts into a familiar refrain:

“Mother, we set out at dawn, our boats moving on,

The sea was calm for the sake of our duty.

We did not fear the enemy as much as we feared our own … ”

The two spend the rest of the day together turning the raw milk into baladi cheese in the courtyard and inside the old stone home. Hajja prefers to hum while making cheese — tudandin, a low, steady melody that fills the courtyard. They begin by curdling the fresh milk, then straining it through cloth to remove liquid before adding salt as a preservative. They place the cheese under a board to press out moisture, giving it time to congeal.

Hajja Latifa (R) and Maysoon Musallam look on as an ATV drives on the small roads near their home [Al Jazeera]

Seven-year-old Musa, meanwhile, is looking for anyone willing to kick a football before school — if he can make it to school at all, now that the family has no car.

After the milking, Muhammad and Thabet bring the sheep out to graze. But even in these brief peaceful moments on the soft grass, they watch anxiously for settler ATVs, or for their cows.

“The cows have ruined us — it’s total destruction,” said Thabet, reaching towards the family’s olive trees, their branches torn and stripped after the animals ate through them. Along with the access restrictions, all of the family’s 450 trees have sustained serious damage due to the settlers’ cows, who invade their lands on an almost daily basis. “They had leaves and their branches were beautiful. The tree was healthy,” explains Thabet.

The family once produced up to 1,000 litres of olive oil a year. This past season, they produced only 10, due to both tree damage and access restrictions from settlers and soldiers, according to the family — a devastating drop in income, mirroring losses reported across the occupied West Bank during the olive harvest.

Such access restrictions have been extended to their wheat fields, which they have been unable to harvest for three years. And while in the past they bought 10 tonnes of animal fodder for 15,000 shekels ($5,000) a year, now, with the sheep mostly penned, they must buy 50 tonnes — costing 75,000 shekels ($25,000).

“Where am I going to find the difference of 60,000 shekels?” said Thabet, watching his sheep graze on a patch overlooking the verdant wadi below their home.

“You understand how the settler fights you? Because you have no income and are poor, bit by bit, he destroys you until you say, ‘I don’t want the sheep. I want to sell the sheep.’ And when you sell the sheep, you say, ‘I have nothing in Marajim, I want to leave.’ And he takes the land.”

Daily encounters with their abuser

One morning, a settler arrives on an ATV — the kind of equipment the current Israeli government has spent tens of millions of dollars providing to outposts across the occupied West Bank. Officially, the vehicles are for farming and shepherding. In practice, they are regularly used to intimidate and terrorise Palestinian communities.

Thabet (R), Maysoon and Muhammad carry buckets of fresh milk after the morning milking [Al Jazeera]

At the family’s driveway, the settler films each member of the family in silence. The bearded man in a kippah, appearing to be in his late 20s, takes a long, grimacing look at each face before fixing his stare on Muhammad, standing in front of the compound.

Muhammad furrows his brow and stares back, indignant. The settler drives away.

Just weeks earlier, this same settler had viciously attacked Muhammad, according to the family and Israeli activists who stay with them to provide a protective presence.

“The worst feeling you can imagine,” said a stony-faced Muhammad when asked what it is like to see him arrive each day. “Especially when my children are just inside.”

After the settlers torched the family’s vehicle during the March attack, the children had to walk dangerous mountain paths to school or rely on relatives and activists for rides. Eventually, the family bought a scrapped car for 2,000 shekels ($690) — just enough to get the children to school three kilometres away.

Shortly after that, one night in February 2026, the bearded settler — likely the outpost leader, based on his older appearance and authoritative interactions with soldiers — arrived at the compound with armed men in military uniforms. They declared the car illegal. According to the family and an Israeli activist present, soldiers handcuffed Muhammad, threw him down, and stood aside as the settler beat him with his fists and boots.

“It’s forbidden for the army to tie you up and let the settler hit you,” said 15-year-old Salman, Muhammad’s younger brother, his lanky frame at odds with his babyface. “It’s forbidden for the army to hit you. But it’s become normal for them.”

Soldiers held a gun to Muhammad’s head with a finger on the trigger.

They also took the key to the family’s livestock pen and handed it to the settler — “so that when he comes to steal, he just opens it,” said Thabet, who changed the locks that same night.

According to the family, when a police officer finally arrived — two hours later — he warned the family against driving the used car and left. The soldiers and the settler stayed.

In full view of where the officer had stood, they destroyed the car completely: smashing the battery, the engine, the wires, the glass, the tyres, and pouring dirt into the exhaust pipe. “They damaged everything,” said Thabet. “The car became scrap metal.”

Muhammad was left bloodied, with red marks across his chest and face. Thabet had been away in Duma, working the phones with the Palestinian liaison — close enough to know what was happening, but unable to stop it.

“You die from the pain inside you — the heartbreak, the pain and the ache when you see your brother getting hit and you can’t do anything for him,” he said. “It’s something not natural.”

Thabet Masallam beside the family compound in Khirbet al-Marajim, where the Masallams continue resisting pressure to leave their land [Al Jazeera]

Determined to keep the children in school, the family had the car repaired. Two days after bringing it back, however, the soldiers returned.

This time, they came for Nayef. Forcing 15-year-old Salman to his knees, the soldiers demanded the car keys. When Nayef explained that they were with Thabet, they turned on him. “They started hitting me for nothing,” Nayef recalled, sitting outside the family home with his youngest daughter, Jannet, five, on his lap.

Soldiers struck him with rifles and boots, leaving a torn muscle and lasting leg injuries. He remembers a soldier ordering him to the ground before two of them pepper-sprayed him and stood on his back.

“The image of the soldier to us before — we considered him a regular soldier,” Nayef said. “If you were afraid, you would call out to a soldier to tell him what problem you have. But today — no. He is barbaric, just like the settler.”

The Israeli army did not respond to requests for comment.

It was especially during the first three months of 2026, when a group of religious soldiers were stationed in the area, that the settler attacks grew more violent and frequent, with increased participation by soldiers.

But Thabet had been away again. The same frantic calls, the same helplessness — this time his father instead of his brother.

“It’s very hard to see your father, your brother, your family being beaten and humiliated,” he said. “You feel how weak you are. No one asks about you, no one cares.”

After assaulting Nayef, the soldiers cut up the car’s engine to render it useless a second time.

‘You are too precious, habibi’

In such peril, the family steals whatever moments of joy it can. During the early Ramadan evenings this year, family and friends gathered around a fire in the compound’s open courtyard, working through dozens of qatayef sweets that Maysoon and Hajja Latifa had spent all day preparing – folding the batter and filling them with sweet cream.

Children and cats scurried around the adults while tea was passed between them.

Leaning on his cane, Nayef sat by the fire with grandchildren climbing onto his lap. “The house that has no kids in it has no happiness, has no joy,” he said with a chuckle.

Musa (R) and his cousins play football inside the family compound [Al Jazeera]

Seven-year-old Musa played football near the compound entrance with his cousins until his sisters scolded them for nearly hitting the fire. Thabet grabbed the boy with a laugh. “What did you do in class today, boss?”

“Saleh and Karam! I pulled their hair, and I hit them. They are twins!”

“Look at this troublemaker!” bellowed Thabet. “Twins! Why? Poor guys!”

“They were ganging up on me!” Musa protested, grinning mischievously. “They are big! Older than me! I knocked them to the ground!”

Thabet let out a holler. “Sure thing, boss!”

“We have a lot of joking and laughing,” Thabet said. “We are under psychological pressure. If we don’t laugh, we die.”

But amid the laughter, worry seeped through. When Musa begged to play football outside the compound walls, Thabet eventually relented — though with one instruction: “Come inside immediately if you see the settlers approaching.”

By the fire, Muhammad and Mona’s children — two-and-a-half-year-old Musa and one-and-a-half-year-old Mira — were held tightly by the adults around them. The little boy had been too young to remember the night he was taken from his crib, but when settlers approach now, his eyes go wide, and he begins to tremble. If someone shouts the word “settler,” he cries.

“It changes every moment of your life as a mother after that,” said Mona. “When the settlers come, we gather the kids, we put them in the house, and we lock them in with the key” — the same home that was set on fire.

Late in the evening, baby Musa picked up a wooden stick and inched it towards the fire. His mouth fell open as the tip began to glow, turning to ember.

Hajja Latifa lunged forward and pulled him back, tossing the stick away. She feigned hitting him before pulling him into her arms and squeezing him tight.

“You are too precious, habibi!”

‘We will overcome them all’

For all the smiles, the family still manages together — the folk songs hummed, the little dances shared, the playful jokes and teasing around the circle in the stone-domed home — the threat grows more pressing by the day.

As the weeks of Ramadan went on — especially after regional fighting escalated between Israel and Iran — the situation only worsened.

Settlers and soldiers erected roadblocks at the entrance to al-Marajim and on the road connecting them to Duma, cutting the family off from petrol, school, medical clinics and basic groceries, and preventing them from selling their cheese at the Talfit market.

A monthlong closed military zone order expelled the Israeli solidarity activists who had been living with the family, filming attacks and placing themselves between the Masallams and the settlers.

Without them, the violence accelerated.

On March 8, settlers pepper-sprayed the men outside and towards the family compound where children were hiding. Two nights later, roughly 15 soldiers arrived and immediately assaulted Nayef, Muhammad, and 15-year-old Salman, according to the family. Visiting relatives — including Professor Muhammad Masallam, his wife, and their teenage children — were also beaten.

The soldiers bound and blindfolded Nayef, Salman, Muhammad, and three of their relatives and then poured cold water over them in the freezing night. Among those present was a settler the family recognised by his voice — masked, in a brown shirt and army-green trousers — whom they identified as the same man who releases cows onto their land.

Thabet was away when his phone rang from his little brother’s number. A voice he didn’t expect said in Hebrew: “You have five minutes to come home.”

The soldiers had come for him. Several times, he had barely escaped in exactly this kind of cat-and-mouse situation — settlers calling the army, and soldiers arriving at the compound to search for him specifically. “When the settler calls the army, I leave immediately,” he explained. “I know this is not a normal army — they come with the settler. So I move away. If I stayed, I would be badly beaten.”

The reason they single him out, he believes, is straightforward: “They want to humiliate me and break me. I am the one who always defends the family — through the police, through the liaison. I am the most active. So they think if they break me, they break the whole family.”

On March 23, the Civil Administration, the Israeli military body governing civilian affairs in the occupied West Bank, demolished the home of Muhammad Masallam — the only other multigenerational household living year-round in al-Marajim, who had been bound and beaten alongside their relatives 13 days earlier — without warning.

The Civil Administration also ordered Thabet’s family to dismantle the fence protecting their sheep within 14 days — forcing them to relocate their flocks — and declared the area an archaeological site, which the family fears will be used to demolish their own homes as well. “The settler brings the Civil Administration,” said Thabet. “They work together.”

An ATV moves across the hills beyond an opening in the Masallam family compound in Khirbet al-Marajim [Al Jazeera]

When Thabet and several relatives tried to remove rocks blocking the road back to Duma, settlers detained them and handed them over to soldiers. Thabet alone was held for several hours, blindfolded. He says he was beaten. “But it’s normal,” he said the next day, with the same easy shrug he gives after every violent incident, though with tired eyes this time. “It could have been much worse.”

After the string of attacks, the family sent the women and children to stay with relatives scattered around Duma — a move that, across the occupied West Bank, has often proved to be the first step towards permanent displacement. But after a couple of weeks, most of the family came back. Everyone has returned except Muhammad, Mona and their two young children.

The attacks have not stopped. Even after movement restrictions were briefly relaxed following a United States ceasefire with Iran, settlers riding ATVs and accompanied by an unmarked military vehicle returned on April 14 to block the road connecting al-Marajim to Duma and destroy the pipe supplying water to the hamlet.

The message, as always, was the same: leave. But they have not left.

“The life ahead of us is difficult — we have settlers, we have the Civil Administration, there are many stories ahead of us,” said Thabet. “God willing, we will overcome them all and stay here. God willing.”

Beyond the hill, close enough to be faint but unmistakable, the roar of settler ATVs continues. Inside the compound walls and amid crackling fire, the family’s laughter carries into the night.