The assailants use a web of publicly accessible WhatsApp groups to track the trucks and coordinate attacks, providing a window into their activities.
By Loveday Morris, The Washington PostFar-right Jewish protesters pray as they block a road in the West Bank near the Tarqumiyah crossing, where aid trucks headed to Gaza must pass before entering Israel, on May 17.
An attack on Thursday showed the system in action: Users in one WhatsApp group with more than 800 members began posting about a flatbed truck loaded with sugar, sharing photos from the road as they followed it. Fahed Arar, who owned the cargo, said the 30-ton load of sugar was actually destined for Salfit, a Palestinian town in the West Bank. The driver escaped unharmed, he said, but the Israeli military wouldn’t let him reload the goods.
The violence and vandalism, committed with near-total impunity, raises questions about the willingness of Israel’s security forces to restrain extremist settlers and protect Palestinians. It also challenges the Israeli government’s claim that it is doing all it can to ensure that aid flows to Gaza, where the humanitarian situation has deteriorated rapidly since IDF forces moved into the southern city of Rafah.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan has called the targeting of aid trucks “a total outrage,” and the Biden administration is considering imposing sanctions on people involved in the attacks, according to a senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
We “never called on people to take the law into their own hands,” said Rachel Touitou, spokeswoman for Tzav 9, which boasts hundreds of members, including settlers and demobilized reservists, and has been active in blocking aid trucks since January. A recent incident illustrated the Israeli authorities’ hands-off approach to enforcement. In the early hours of May 17, about two dozen far-right youths set up a makeshift blockade at Tarqumiyah; soldiers and police officers drove past the group multiple times without stopping them.
“It’s not our job to stop them, it’s our job to protect them,” said a female soldier of the young settlers. She declined to give her name.
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