The fire came from the valley below, and by the time it reached the hilltop community of Gilad Farm, there was nothing to stop it.
Local officials are calling it what residents already knew standing in their driveways, watching smoke rise from Kedumim during Shabbat lunch: a terror attack. Seventeen families lost their homes completely. Fourteen local businesses were destroyed. The community’s water pipes, the very infrastructure firefighters needed to fight the blaze, were themselves consumed, leaving crews without enough water to hold the line.
Samaria Governor Yossi Dagan told me on camera, “This fire was started by terrorists. I saw the video. For me it’s clear, it’s sure, this is a terror attack. Every summer, our neighbors, the muslims from the ‘Palestinian’ Authority are doing [things] like this. This is a terror attack, it’s clear. We are here to build again, bigger than ever.”
What’s left is a landscape of ruins and ashes. A washing machine sits burnt to nothing in the charred wreckage of a home where a family did routine chores until last weekend. Seventeen plots of land with missing houses stand gutted, with nowhere for the people who lived in them to return.
But return is exactly what they intend to do, and quickly. Every resident interviewed in the aftermath repeated some version of the same demand: get us back into our community without delay. That urgency comes from experience. Gilad Farm’s families know that waiting on government process can mean waiting months, even years, while a community remains in limbo.
2+So they are not waiting. American Friends of Judea and Samaria arrived on the ground within day to ask residents directly what they need and to begin building an urgent fundraising campaign around those answers. It is a recognition, shared by the organization and the families alike, that state authorities may take time to formally classify the fire, secure funding and begin reconstruction, and that Gilad Farm does not have that kind of time to spare.
Yigal Dilmoni, co-founder of AFJS, said, “Unfortunately, maybe the government will decide that this is not caused by terror attack and will not help the community. That is why we came here today. To find a way to help them – we are starting a campaign to help the people here. We don’t want to wait for the government.”
2+The stakes go beyond one community’s rebuilding timeline. If the state does not move decisively, both to imprison those responsible and to restore what was lost, it risks signaling that arson against Jewish communities in Samaria carries no real cost. Residents here have already lived through that signal once. They are determined not to live through it twice.
2+For now, the work is manual and immediate: clearing ash, cataloguing what can be salvaged, deciding where the first new foundations will go. Gilad Farm was built once already, family by family, on this same land. Its residents say they intend to do it again.