‘Exterminate the beasts’: How Israeli settlers took revenge for a murder in the West Bank

 

At dawn on Friday 12 April, Israeli teenager Benjamin Achimeir walked out from his settler outpost in the occupied West Bank, with a flock of sheep, and disappeared.

Achimeir, 14, had been living and working on a tiny farm outpost near his family's settlement, Malachei HaShalom - one of nearly 150 Israeli settlements in the West Bank regarded as illegal under international law.

The young teenager was murdered that morning out on the pasture, according to Israeli police, but it would be 24 hours before his body was found. When the flock of sheep returned to the farm without him, a massive search began, involving the Israeli police, military, air force, intelligence services and thousands of volunteers from the settler community.

For some, it was not enough. At 08:30 on Saturday, Elisha Yered, a former spokesman for MP Limor Son Har-Melech and extremist settler suspected in the murder of a Palestinian man last August, posted in a WhatsApp group for settlers.