At dawn on Friday, April 12, Israeli teenager Benjamin Achimeir walked out of his settler outpost in the occupied West Bank with a flock of sheep and disappeared.
14-year-old Achmel has been living and working on a small farm near his family’s settlement, Malachei HaShalom.
According to Israeli police, the teenager was murdered that morning at the ranch, but his body was not found 24 hours later. When the sheep returned to the farm without him, a massive search began involving the Israeli police, army, air force, intelligence services and thousands of volunteers from the settler community.
For some, that’s not enough. At 08:30 on Saturday, Limor Son Har-Melech, a member of parliament suspected of involvement in the murder, and Elisha Yered, a former spokesperson for extremist settlers, External The photo of a Palestinian man was posted in a settler WhatsApp group last August.
“On Shabbat, suspicion has been building for nearly 24 hours that Benjamin was kidnapped at the ranch, but still no obvious steps have been taken,” Yerid wrote.
The same message was posted on various settlers’ WhatsApp groups that morning. It called on them to take matters into their own hands – to “coronate” nearby Palestinian villages (a term used to block residents’ access), to “house-to-house searches” and to “collectively punish the murderous Arab population”.
The message also contains a list of rendezvous points. A few hours later, similar messages would circulate among settler groups, but with fire emojis attached to each location, as well as calls from individual settlers to “destroy the enemy,” “destroy the beast,” and – referring to nearby Palestinian Village – “Let the whole Douma burn”.
