A family in Hebron has described being ordered out of their home in the middle of the night after two Israeli soldiers were killed nearby, in an account published by the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. The evacuation came roughly half a day after two Palestinians shot dead the two soldiers a few hundred metres away, according to the report. Ruba Sultan, a 37-year-old secondary school teacher, told Dagbladet that residents of two neighbourhoods around the scene were told to leave.
Why it matters
The account offers a rare household-level view of how a single deadly attack in the occupied West Bank can quickly reshape daily life for Palestinian families living near the site. It also places the Sultan family's experience alongside a wider pattern of displacement and demolition that other Norwegian outlets have reported from the territory in recent days.
Dagbladet frames the events around the night of Friday 23 to Saturday 24 October, which the family says it is trying to forget. According to the paper, residents were told around midnight to evacuate. Ruba Sultan said that when soldiers called from outside that everyone should leave, the family decided to go together with the brother of a relative named Baher, his family and other neighbours. They took only essentials, she said, including passports and property documents.
A child's re-enactment and a promise of destruction
The report opens with three-year-old Karim, who demonstrates how he and his grandmother had to stand in the dark in front of armed Israeli soldiers. "Like this," he says, according to Dagbladet.
The article also cites Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who after the soldiers' deaths vowed that the place would be destroyed and changed completely, in the paper's rendering of his remarks. Dagbladet's headline describes the situation as "a living nightmare."
The reporting does not give further detail on the identities of the two soldiers or the two Palestinians, nor on what has happened to the Sultan family's home since the evacuation.
Wider coverage of settler violence and demolitions
The Dagbladet account appeared alongside related coverage from other Norwegian outlets. The publication Utrop traced the growth of settler violence from Vienna to the West Bank in a piece examining how such violence developed over time. The newspaper Adresseavisen reported that the Israeli army was withdrawing from a neighbourhood in Hebron. TV 2 reported that Israel had driven out thousands of people and demolished houses in the West Bank.
These reports are separate from Dagbladet's interview and are summarised here as they were published; CYBEV.io has not independently verified their contents.
Taken together, the coverage points to a period of heightened pressure on Palestinian communities in the Hebron area, with military movements, evacuation orders and house demolitions reported by several outlets within days of the October shooting.
What to watch
Whether the Sultan family and their neighbours are allowed to return, and how the Israeli military's reported withdrawal from the Hebron neighbourhood affects those who were told to leave, are the open questions following Dagbladet's report.
