Mohammed Shalalda leaned on a cane to walk after a bloody night of Israeli settler violence that shattered his family's sense of safety in their own home.
At dawn on Sunday, a group of settlers, numbering in the dozens, attacked the Shalalda family home in the al-Daraja area near the town of Sair, east of Hebron, wounding Mohammed, his elderly mother, his sister, and his brother.
Mohammed was sleeping on the roof of his old house when he awoke to the sound of voices around 3am. More than 15 settlers then attacked him, brutally kicking him and beating him with wooden sticks before he had barely opened his eyes.
The settlers dragged him to the ground despite his wounds bleeding profusely.
“I started screaming to wake the residents and rescue me, but the settlers put a blanket over me and continued beating me violently. I was bleeding, and I didn’t know where the bleeding was coming from; my whole body was their prey,” he told Middle East Eye.
The settler raid is part of a broader pattern of escalating Israeli attacks aimed at forcing Palestinian families to leave their homes so that settlers can seize their land, in a policy pursued throughout the occupied West Bank.