PA expels 20 families from clan in Yatta after deadly gun battle
Traditional law and forms of justice still hold sway in many Palestinian communities.
By Seth J. Frantzman
Twenty families from a large Palestinian clan in the southern West Bank
city of Yatta were expelled after the Palestinian Authority and local
mediators approved a form of traditional justice. The mediation resulted
in the families being exiled to a community near Jenin, with many on
social media condemning the result as an injustice.
On September 8, a Palestinian man was killed and three were injured,
including a young woman, during a gun battle in Yatta. Twenty five year
old Taher Ahmed Khalil Shannaran was slain, according to police
spokesman Louay Arzikat.Palestinian media reports said Palestinian
police investigated the incident and Palestinian Security Forces were
deployed in the city to prevent further violence between the two feuding
families. “They called on citizens to exercise restraint and to
encourage dialogue rather than violence,” according to a report from
Ma’an News Agency.
Local leaders also sought to stop the spread of rumors on social media
sites. Rateb al-Jabour, Coordinator of the Popular and National
Committees in southern Hebron told local media that houses were burned
and gun battles between the families were reported.
The city remained “tense” and security forces patrolled areas to
“maintain order,” according to reports. Video posted online on September
8 included more than a minute with the sound of constant gun fire. A
large funeral took place the following day for the victim and hundreds
from Yatta turned out. Facebook groups and other media widely reported
the incident last week. The focus soon turned to the Abu Malash clan and
a form of traditional jurisprudence argued they should leave Yatta to
prevent further violence between them and the victim’s family. Photos
posted online showed members of the family packing up their things in
preparation to leave.Othman Shannaran, a local resident, posted details
from the agreement on Facebook. In it he notes that “the other party
refused to identify a particular person as a perpetrator of the heinous
murder. Therefore, the conferees decided that for the safety and
integrity of the Abu Malash clan,” they should be expelled together. He
writes that the agreement was made within the “ethics of Islam, the
nobility of Arab tradition and of the horse-riding people of Yatta and
Hebron.”
The exiled family members have now moved to a town near Jenin. Photos
from September 15 showed the families unloading their vehicles near
Jenin. A Facebook page from Yatta also posted images of the families
leaving. Comments generally expressed sympathy for the exiled families.
One woman wrote “we are stuck in our clan system and its trashy laws”
and he compared the images of those loading their trucks to Palestinians
who fled in 1948.
Inter-family violence in the Palestinian Authority is sometimes solved
through local agreements based on customary and traditional law. Fights
between families in Yatta have occurred in the past. In 2014, a man
named Ali Ismail Ibrahim al-Adrah was reportedly beaten to death and the
PA had to deploy security forces to the city to prevent further
violence and “revenge attacks between the families.”
The decision to relocate a large family due to a killing illustrates how
the Palestinian Authority security forces and police, despite decades
of training and work with Western governments, is still beholden to
local traditional law. Yet the responses on social media show that some
younger Palestinian activists object to the handling of the situation,
comparing it to “collective punishment.” With the PA facing a budgetary
crisis and pressure from the US, Ramallah seeks calm in places like
Yatta that are under full Palestinian control.
The EU and UN did not condemn the decision to exile members of the
family from Yatta. In addition, Israeli security forces did not
intervene in the gun battle, even though the IDF often carries out raids
in the West Bank to detain people for weapons possessions.
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