‘Apocalyptic Horror Movie’: What Bay Area Volunteers Witnessed in Gaza, the West Bank

David Hummel, a Berkeley City College student, attended the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that were part of a national protest movement on school campuses, and he was looking to do more.

“I think it’s just about being human, really,” Hummel, 20, said. “To be blind to the suffering of people just because they happen to be born in other places in the world. If you do know about it and decide to just do nothing, then I don’t think I could live with myself.”

Israel’s military assault on Gaza began after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in southern Israel by Hamas-led militants, who killed roughly 1,200 people and took about 240 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. More than 100 hostages have been released or rescued.

Israel’s retaliation has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials. U.N. human rights officials say the number is likely an undercount. The bombardment of Gaza sparked protests demanding a cease-fire. In the Bay Area, residents have organized and joined a flurry of spirited protests and marches critical of the United States’ support of Israel.

The war has impacted Bay Area life, from politics to Silicon Valley to campus culture.

Hummel is just one of the Bay Area residents who moved by the protests, traveled to the West Bank to volunteer. Through other activists, Hummel heard about the advocacy group Faz3a, which trains people for organized trips to the West Bank to provide “a mass presence of internationals on the ground, providing direct protection for Palestinians, under local Palestinian guidance.”

“Once I heard about the opportunity to go to the West Bank, I really couldn’t take my eyes and mind off of it, really,” he said.

He arrived in the Middle East in early July. He traveled with Faz3a to Qusra, a village north of Jerusalem, where he spent most of his time. On July 21, Hummel and eight other volunteers were walking with a Palestinian farmer to his olive groves in an area that was cut off to Palestinians. The farmer hadn’t seen the trees in eight months.

While they were in the olive groves, Hummel said a group of Israeli settlers drove near the fields. More joined them, roaming the groves on foot. Hummel described the settlers, who wielded metal sticks and wooden bats, as “relatively young looking.”

Hummel and the volunteers recorded the settlers while the Palestinian farmer slipped away. Then, Hummel said, one settler took charge.

“I was hit in the face by these wooden bats, and I had significant swelling, and as well on my arm,” he said. “The other volunteers were also badly beaten. One woman, she couldn’t walk for a few days after.”

Hummel said the Israeli army arrived soon after but did not pursue the attackers, instead firing shots in the direction of the Palestinian man who was with the volunteers.

Faz3a confirmed the incident to KQED and other news outlets. CNN reported that the Israeli military acknowledged that “a number of masked Israeli civilians assaulted a group of foreign citizens while they were planting trees in the area.”

On July 24, Hummel filed a report, viewed by KQED, with Israeli law enforcement but said there was no response. During his weeks in the West Bank, Hummel heard story after story from Palestinians about life under Israeli surveillance. He said what he endured was “just a small fraction” of what Palestinians experienced.

Volunteering in the Middle East

Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza has injured more than 97,000 Palestinians and displaced 1.9 million people, almost the entire population of Gaza. With Israeli strikes killing aid workers and destroying hospitals, a humanitarian crisis, including sickness and starvation, has unfolded.

On Sept. 30, Israel launched a ground invasion into Southern Lebanon it described as targeting Iran-backed Hezbollah. According to the Lebanese health ministry’s most recent figures, around 2,400 people have been killed in Lebanon since October 2023, many in the past month.

The strikes in Lebanon have also killed paramedics and health care workers and closed major hospitals, driving South Bay resident Mohammad Subeh to get on a plane.

“Safety is not guaranteed,” Subeh, an emergency room physician, told reporters on Oct. 4 in front of San Francisco International Airport before he left for Lebanon. “I don’t let that kind of overwhelm me too much because, ultimately, we’re there to help the people on the ground. They have nothing, no other alternatives available to them.”

Subeh, who is Palestinian and has family in Gaza, said he would be leading a team of six doctors and surgeons assisting with treating the injuries — amputations, head wounds, burns and more — of survivors. He also was in Gaza earlier this year.

“After going through the process of entering into my first drive through the encampments, you feel like you’ve entered this apocalyptic horror movie. It’s like, ‘Is this really 2024? Is this earth right now?’” he said on KQED’s The Bay in April. “You start hearing missile strike after missile strike, and it just shakes the whole vehicle.

“For me, it was very startling. It took me almost a week to actually kind of drown out the missile strikes.”

He recalled operating on a young girl named Reema, who had been shot. She was screaming in pain after the surgery because they didn’t have pain medicine.

“I never imagined seeing so many dead children in front of me,” Subeh said. “Mothers, family members screaming, crying. There was so much that I was seeing that I was not used to. I wasn’t prepared to see.”

Protective presence in the West Bank

Not all volunteers can enter Gaza. Some, like Hummel, joined groups that assist Palestinians in the West Bank through what is called protective presence work.

The Center for Jewish Nonviolence organized protective presence volunteers. The center has partnered with Palestinian families living in the West Bank for over a decade.

The West Bank is divided into three sections — A, B and C — and center volunteers tend to go to Area C since it is fully controlled by Israel. In July, the International Court of Justice, the world court in The Hague that was first established in San Francisco in 1945, ruled that Israel’s settlement policies in the Palestinian territories violated international law.

“Protective presence work is when basically activists accompany Palestinians in the West Bank,” explained Chase Carter, a San Francisco resident who works with the center. “The reason this accompanying work is needed is because these communities are really vulnerable to attacks from Israeli settlers, as well as harassment, arrests and violence from soldiers that are also trying to prevent them from living their daily lives.”

According to the UN, since Oct. 7, more than 700 Palestinians and 40 Israelis have been killed in the West Bank, with increased instances of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians. A recent Gallup poll shows that Palestinians living in the West Bank say their lives are worse than ever before.

Volunteers from places like the United States, Canada and Europe are often asked to do presence work because of certain privileges they have as international citizens, Chase said. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates noted the restrictions in his recent appearance on CBS, where he described his time in the West Bank.

“The person that is guiding me is a Palestinian whose father — whose grandfather and grandmother — were born in this town, and I have more freedom to walk than he does,” Coates said. “He can’t ride on certain roads. He can’t get water in the same way that Israeli citizens who live less than a mile away from him can. Why is that OK?”

Carter said volunteers also aim to document any possible human rights abuses to submit to experts or lawyers “that can then lead, potentially, to repercussions for the individuals or the organizations that sponsor this kind of extremist violence.”

For example, on Oct. 1, the U.S. sanctioned Hilltop Youth, a far-right group that, according to the federal government, “repeatedly attacked Palestinians and destroyed Palestinian homes and property in the West Bank.”

Like in Hummel’s case, there are immense risks.

In September, Israeli troops in the West Bank shot and killed 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi of Seattle. Eygi was working with the International Solidarity Movement, which also does protective presence work.

Sydney Levy was preparing to go to the West Bank when he heard about Hummel’s experience.

“I had to discuss it with my husband just before going, saying, ‘Hey, you know, what do you think? What should I do?’” Levy, an Oakland resident, recalled.

He has been involved with pro-Palestinian activism for more than two decades and has lived in Jerusalem. He ultimately decided to go through the Center for Jewish Nonviolence and was there for over a week in the summer.

Levy, who is Jewish American and speaks Hebrew, said he felt a sense of futility when communicating with Israeli police or the Israeli army. He saw homes demolished and a lack of action from the justice system.

“It was relentless,” he said. “It was almost every two to three hours, the same story repeated again and again. The police would never come. Or when they came, they would never side with the Palestinian villagers.”

Levy said he has been “speaking with all of my friends, saying we need to go again and again because we cannot let these tactics of intimidation stop us from standing in solidarity with Palestinians.”

Hummel was similarly emboldened, especially as he shared his experiences with his classmates this fall.

“I’ve gotten a lot of requests from people asking, ‘How do I get involved in this as well?’” he said. “And so, that’s been powerful to bring this type of work or this organization to more people.

“I’m looking to go back as soon as possible.”

KQED’s Samantha Lim contributed to this story.