On Thursday, 21 May 2026, at around 1:00 A.M., six masked settlers, some armed with clubs and others equipped with burglary tools, arrived at the community of Haribat a-Nabi in Masafer Yatta while residents were asleep in their homes.
Some of the settlers stood guard among the community’s homes, while the others went to a sheep pen belonging to local resident Munir Abu ‘Ali, 46. The settlers broke the lock on the pen’s door, led the flock, about 40 sheep and goats, outside and left the area without the community’s residents noticing them.
At around 4:15 A.M., Munir Abu ‘Ali woke up for al‑Fajr (dawn) prayer and discovered that the pen gate had been broken open and that his flock had been stolen. He then watched footage from the security camera installed on his house and saw that settlers had broken into the pen and stolen his flock. Munir called the police to the scene and that same day filed a complaint at the Kiryat Arba police station, but his flock was never returned to him.
Munir Abu ‘Ali, 46, related in his testimony:
I woke up for prayer at the call of dawn, and as usual went out to walk by the pen to check on the flock. I didn’t find the sheep inside the pen. The pen’s door was open, and its lock was broken. I returned home and woke up the whole family. I called the neighbors and the Israeli police. In the meantime, we looked for the flock in the area but didn’t find anything. We went back to watch the security camera footage and saw that about six settlers came to the area of the house, broke the lock on the pen’s door, went inside and took the entire flock, then left toward the settlement of Susiya. We filed a complaint with the Israeli police in Kiryat Arba that same day.
Even after the incident, the settlers kept invading our home and harassing us on a daily basis, including provocations like grazing their own flocks of sheep in front of our house.