The banner bars the entrance to the Khader house, at the foot of the Nablus hills in the northern West Bank. A little away from the center of Hawara, two portraits of smiling men stand out on the white plastic: Jalal, 34, and Kamal, 31, murdered on May 31, with their uncle, Jihad, 38 years. “It’s an impossible sentence to describe,” sighs Rehab Sharaf, their mother, surrounded by Jalal’s five children in the living room. Kamal broke into one of the abandoned buildings of a nearby Palestinian family this spring. The owners were offended, the affair escalated and one morning, a dozen young men armed with automatic rifles took his brother Jalal. They shot him and his uncle and then murdered Kamal, who arrived shortly after. “They were ready to kill everyone”, mourns the aunt, Rameh Khader.
On the day of the crime, “Everything happened very quickly, no one could have intervened in time”, explains the neighbor opposite, Mjahed Al-Hassan. The day before, two armed men had already threatened Kamal, outside his house, shooting “Several shots”, says this former member of the Jordanian army. Hawara is located in “Zone C”, part of the West Bank placed under total Israeli control by the Oslo Accords. The Israeli army is careful not to intervene in such civil matters. Under normal circumstances, the Palestinian police would therefore have requested an Israeli permit, to arrest the perpetrators themselves and take them to the Palestinian post, in “zone A”, where they have full authority.
Except that, since May 20, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has officially broken off security cooperation with the Hebrew State. She thus intends to protest against the annexation promised by the Israeli government of a part of the West Bank, from 1is July. This rupture is fraught with risks. Already, it hands over to them part of the residents of the West Bank under direct Israeli control. In Hawara, “Without coordination, [les meurtriers] could not be brought to the police station “, the day before the crime they remained free, deplores Awad Nejim, the spokesman for the municipality.
Since May, Palestinian police no longer enter Zone C, he details, or else “They come dressed in civilian clothes and without weapons”, often arriving after everyone. On a WhatsApp group, Mr. Nejim scrolls through messages calling for help, to defuse a neighborhood dispute, here asking for a helping hand. For several weeks, local officials, members or close to Fatah, the ruling party, have organized themselves in the face of a vacuum in maintaining order.
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