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IIn a grainy black-and-white security video, three masked, club-wielding men break into a brown car on a residential street.
It was 7.40 o’clock on a quiet Tuesday evening Christian city Tayyab’s occupied the west bankAbout 10 miles by road to the busy administrative capital of Ramallah.
Nadim Khoury, 65-year-old founder West Bank’s first brewery Located in the town, says his family has lived there for 600 years. “There’s no way I’m going anywhere,” he says boldly, speaking the day after the car attack.
But settler attacks are just one of many obstacles, including Israeli export controls and a heavily damaged tourist industry, that have led to a 70 percent decline in Tayyibe beer sales since the Hamas-led October 7 attacks and Israel’s subsequent military operations.
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“Doing business in Palestine is not like doing business in any other part of the world,” explains Nadeem.
He began brewing beer in a hostel room in Boston, USA, in 1982 and in 1994 founded the brewery with his brother David, based in the only Christian city in the West Bank.
It is now run by his daughter Madis Khouri, the only female brewmaster in the Middle East.
In recent years, sales among locals have declined significantly. Palestinians have been harassed economically since October 7, with thousands of people having their permits to work in Israel canceled.
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The area’s tourism sector, which Nadeem says provides most of his business, has also been destroyed as a result.
In spring 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism said an average of 278,000 tourists per month visited the West Bank and East Jerusalem between January and October 2023. In the months that followed, the number dropped to less than one percent.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), tourism has partially recovered but numbers are still lower than before.
Tayyaba’s exports have become increasingly important, including to Britain, Germany, France, the US and Canada – but its efforts are being hampered by Israeli checkpoint delays, permit requirements and restricted road access for Palestinians.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says there were 849 “movement barriers” in the West Bank as of May 2025.
Palestinians are often stranded for hours when roads are closed, with the agency saying that Israeli restrictions “exacerbate regional and social fragmentation, and contribute to worsening humanitarian conditions”.
The Israeli military says the security operation in the West Bank is conducted “to provide security to all residents of the area”, and there are “mobile checkpoints and efforts to monitor movement in various areas in the area”.
It added that claims that it deliberately restricts Palestinians’ everyday life are “completely baseless”.
For the Tayyeb brewery, restricting movement could prevent entire shipments from successfully leaving the Israeli ports of Ashdod and Haifa.
The closure of the Allenby or King Hussein Bridges between the occupied West Bank and Jordan creates even bigger problems.
Meanwhile, attacks by settlers on the spring that provides water to Tayyebeh and 18 other towns have limited the brewery’s output, it said.
“These settlers are criminals. They come, they vandalize, they attack the city and leave. We are in an open prison, we are occupied and we can’t defend ourselves,” says Madis.
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Madis says the brewery “has no control over anything, we don’t have our own roads, if we face any challenges in exporting we have no authority to help”.
But the family-run business, said to be the first micro-brewery in the Middle East, has committed to continuing its limited exports.
Beer from its original West Bank brewery is sold at Akoub, a Palestinian restaurant in west London, while it has also partnered with Glasgow-based brewery Brewgooder to produce Sun & Stone Lager, which is sold in Co-op shops across the UK.
Madis says keeping the business running is “our peaceful way of resistance to the occupation and the attacks of these settlers”.