Israeli Press
Haaretz reports settlers beat a Jerusalem dentist on his own land
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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Haaretz published on Tuesday the account of a Palestinian dentist from Jerusalem who went to his own land east of Bethlehem because settlers were cutting his olive trees, and was beaten there with his son while police questioned him rather than his attackers.
Dr Majed Alian, from Sur Baher, drove out on Sunday after hearing that men from an outpost established nearby had started on the trees, the paper reported.
His brother Muhammad gave Haaretz the sequence. Two settlers sprayed pepper gas and set on the pair; when they tried to push them back, about ten more arrived, masked and carrying clubs, and, in his words, attacked them brutally.
Muhammad was attacked in turn after he reached the scene. He told the paper that officers made no attempt to stop the attackers, and that the man they took aside for questioning was his brother.
What the Palestinian outlets added#
Palestinian and Arab outlets carried the same attack on Sunday evening, placing it in the Jannatah area east of Bethlehem and reporting that roughly ten settlers struck Alian with stones and clubs, broke his hand and smashed the windows of his car.
Haaretz's report carried no statement from the police or the army.
Why this one is in the Hebrew press#
The Israeli papers have run the settler file hard for ten days, since the siege at Qusra put an American ambassador on the record calling settlers terrorists.
What the Bethlehem case adds is the ordinary version of the same machinery: no siege, no cameras, an outpost that appeared beside privately owned land, olive trees cut in daylight, and an owner who arrived to protect his property and left it with a broken hand.
The olive harvest opens in six weeks. Both the timing of the cutting and the pattern the brothers describe — the outpost first, the trees next, the land after — are the sequence Palestinian farming unions have documented across the West Bank all year.
