Settler indicted after allegedly beating Palestinian woman unconscious with club

Ariel Dahari charged with committing two terror-related assaults and damaging a vehicle with racist motive in incidents caught on camera during a West Bank olive harvest

Prosecutors indicted a 24-year-old Israeli settler on terror charges Thursday after he was filmed allegedly beating a Palestinian woman unconscious with a club as she tried to harvest olives near the West Bank village of Turmus Ayya last month.

The defendant, Ariel Dahari, resides in the Oz Yair illegal outpost northeast of Ramallah. He is accused of joining other Jewish masked extremists in rampaging through the area, assaulting olive harvesters and damaging a vehicle at the scene.

The assault sparked outrage in Israel and abroad after Dahari was filmed allegedly beating 52-year-old Afaf Abu ‘Olia with a club, knocking her out and inflicting a severe head injury. She was hospitalized for a week as a result of the beating.

According to prosecutors, Dahari began his rampage by assaulting a village resident who had tried to escape him by car, forcing open the vehicle’s door, pulling him out, and chasing him down a hill while pelting him with stones.

Then he later allegedly attacked Abu ‘Olia.

A video shot by US-based writer Jasper Nathaniel showed a masked individual sporting (a Jewish ritual garment) running up to Abu ‘Olia, from al-Mughayyir, and bludgeoning her head with a club.

Prosecutors said that the assailant in the video was Dahari, and that he struck her two more times once she fell to the ground. She suffered from lacerations on her scalp, skull fractures and several limb injuries. Dahari then proceeded to attack two other olive harvesters, whom he struck several times with his club as they tried to flee, according to the charges.

Later videos showed Abu ‘Olia being lifted into a car to be taken away with blood running down the side of her face.

Her brother-in-law, Ayman Abu ‘Olia, told The Times of Israel in a phone interview last month that he had gone to harvest olives on his family’s land and was in his car when the assault took place.

“We went on Sunday morning to pick olives in Area B [of the West Bank]. I’ve been harvesting olives there for 30 years. It’s not an area that Palestinians are forbidden to enter,” said Abu ‘Olia. “About 45 settlers, masked and carrying clubs, smashed my car and beat me.”

Dahari was charged with committing two terror-related assaults and damaging a vehicle with a racist motive. Prosecutors requested that the Jerusalem District Court order him kept in custody until the end of legal proceedings against him.

Dahari is known to Israeli authorities in the West Bank, according to police, who arrested him on November 9, weeks after the attack on October 19.

According to the right-wing Honenu legal aid group, between 2016 and 2023 Dahari was served 18 restrictive administrative orders, including house arrest and a prohibition on being in contact with family members.

Settler attacks have been escalating in recent weeks, prompting security agencies to invest more in fighting the trend. Prosecutions of Jewish extremists are rare, however, and convictions are even rarer. Critics accuse the government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history, of shrugging off the attacks.

As of early November, the IDF had recorded at least 752 incidents of nationalistic crime and settler violence since the start of the year. The total for 2024 was 675 incidents.

On Wednesday, Hebrew media reported that Defense Minister Israel Katz told a closed-door Knesset committee meeting that settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank do not constitute “terrorism” but merely “a disturbance of public order.”

His remarks to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee angered opposition Yesh Atid MKs Elazar Stern and Ram Ben Barak, who insisted that the rioters “are Jewish terrorists, this should be defined as terrorism,” reports said.

The opposition lawmakers are said to be pressing Katz to reinstate administrative detention for suspected Jewish assailants, after the minister announced last year that the controversial policy would no longer be used to hold Jewish suspects without charge on security grounds, i24 News reported. Since then, the practice has only been used on Palestinian suspects.

Defending his refusal to implement administrative detention for West Bank settlers, Katz insisted there is a difference between a “security disturbance” and a “public disturbance,” and claimed settler violence falls into the latter category.

He purported that no security agency, including the Shin Bet, defines Jewish nationalist violence as terrorism, despite the fact that police announced this week that terror charges are to be filed against two Jewish suspects in settler attacks.

One of those was Dahari. The other was arrested on suspicion of burning property during a rampage by settlers through towns between Tulkarem and Nablus, in the northern West Bank.