The story, linked to below, is the result of cooperating with Israel for many, many years, which should have warranted better treatment, however, they always want more land. It is not different from historical times, as described in the Bible, they never have enough. Like in these historical times, killing and stealing land was the order of the day. Using the pretext that God commanded these acts is hard to believe; God commanded "Thou Shalt not kill".
The following article is by the Al Jazeera staff, 22nd Jan 2026.
"Ras Ein al-Auja, occupied West Bank – When the music
stops, Naif Ghawanmeh, 45, takes a seat in front of the fire. The night
is chilly, and for the first time in weeks, everything is still for a
moment – the Israeli settlers’ celebrations have finished for the day.
But the village of Ras Ein al-Auja, situated in the eastern West Bank’s Jericho governorate, has been all but wiped out.
The village was one of the last Palestinian herding communities in
this part of the Jordan Valley, but now, the herders’ sheep have gone –
most of them stolen or poisoned by settlers or sold off by villagers
under pressure. Their water has been cut off – the Ras Ein spring
declared off-limits by the neighbouring settlers for the past year.
And
for the past two weeks, most of the community’s homes have been
dismantled. Many of the families forced out have burned their furniture
before they have left, not wanting to leave it for the invading settlers
to use.
“By God, it’s a difficult feeling,” Ghawanmeh says. He is at a loss
for words, fidgeting by the fire and at times rubbing his face in misery
and exhaustion. “Everyone left. Not one of them [remains]. They all
left.”
Since the start of this year, about 450 of the 650
Palestinian inhabitants of Ras Ein al-Auja have fled their homes – for
many the only place they have ever lived – because of violence by
Israeli settlers.
Other than the 14 Ghawanmeh families, including a large number of
children, who say they have nowhere else to go, the rest are packing up
and leaving in the coming days.
This rapid displacement of hundreds of people marks the largest
expulsion from a single Bedouin community as a result of Israeli settler
violence in modern times – a feat that has elicited taunting
celebrations by the encroaching settlers and left lives in ruins for
Bedouin families now deprived of shelter, livelihoods and community.
No land, no sheep, no water, no safety
Until
the New Year, the people of Ras Ein al-Auja had held out on their lands
despite an onslaught of physical attacks, thefts, threats, movement
restrictions and destruction of property by settlers – a state of being
that is now all too common for rural Palestinian communities across the
West Bank.
Settlers have been enabled by rapid growth in the number of settlement
outposts springing up across the West Bank. Settlements and these
outposts are illegal under international law. They are also built
without the legal permission of Israeli authorities but in practice are
largely tolerated and offered protection by Israeli forces, especially
in recent years under the far-right government of Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.
International law stipulates that occupying powers like Israel must
not move their own civilian populations into occupied territories, such
as the West Bank, where about 700,000 settlers now reside.
In December, another 19 settler outposts built without government approval were retroactively approved
by Israel’s government as official settlements. In all, the number of
settlements and outposts in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem
has risen by nearly 50 percent since 2022 – from 141 to 210 now.
This recent explosion of settler outposts has given way to a more recent yet even more dangerous phenomenon: shepherding outposts.
Each
of these outposts mimics the Bedouins’ way of life but with settlers’
own grazing flocks. They are typically run by a single armed Israeli
settler supported by several armed teenagers often funnelled in by
government-funded programmes intended to support “at-risk” troubled
youth.
The outposts serve as a launching pad for attacks, controls on
Palestinian movement and army-coordinated arrests, which have unfolded
in places like Ras Ein al-Auja.
Routinely, settlers steal and
poison the livestock that Palestinian shepherds, who largely inhabit
these remote areas, rely on for their livelihoods. On top of this,
settlers are preventing Palestinian shepherds who still have flocks from
accessing the grazing lands they’ve always used. Settlers have built
fences and engage in intimidation and violence, forcing Palestinians to
buy expensive animal fodder to sustain their flocks instead.
Settlers also target the basic resources that Bedouin Palestinians rely
on for themselves. Like most other Palestinian communities in the West
Bank’s Area C, which Israel fully controls, the people of Ras Ein
al-Auja are denied access to electricity by Israeli authorities. The
Israeli Civil Administration, which controls zoning and planning in Area
C, rarely grants permits for Palestinians to build infrastructure,
including connecting to the grid or installing solar energy systems. The
solar panels the villagers have put up have frequently been destroyed
by settlers.
In addition, these Palestinian shepherding communities, often located in dry regions, are now denied
sufficient access to water, including from the lush springs found in
Ras Ein al-Auja which once made this village one of the most prosperous
of the shepherding communities.
“They prevented us from getting
water,” Ghawanmeh says. “They prevented us from bringing the sheep to
the water and getting water from the spring.”
Near-total impunity
Israeli settlers
have also been emboldened by a wide-scale armament programme
spearheaded at the start of Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip by
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the near-total impunity
they enjoy when they carry out attacks. While court rulings in favour of Palestinians and against settlers have occurred, they are rare.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs, more than 1,800 settler attacks – about five per
day – were documented in 2025, resulting in casualties or property
damage in about 280 communities across the West Bank, and besting the
previous year’s record of settler attacks by more than 350. A total of
240 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 55 children, were killed by
Israeli forces or settlers in 2025.
These unprecedented levels of settler and soldier violence alongside
the wholesale deprivation of basic resources that rural Palestinians
need to survive have led to the erasure of dozens of rural Palestinian
communities.
In January and February 2025, the Israeli military forcibly displaced about 40,000 people from refugee camps in Tulkarem and Jenin,
according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Since the Gaza
war began in October 2023, settler violence has forced out 44
Palestinian communities in the West Bank consisting of 2,701 people,
nearly half of whom are minors. Thirteen more communities comprising 452
people have been partially transferred. These people end up wherever
they can find a place to stay, resulting in fractured communities and
families.
Such figures of displacement have not been seen in the West Bank in decades.
‘Two years of psychological pressure’
For
27 months, Ras Ein al-Auja has been subjected to all of these types of
attacks and restrictions. In the past year, multiple Israeli shepherding
outposts have sprung up at different corners of the village, which
extends for 20,000 dunums (20sq km or 7.7sq miles), and have come
increasingly closer to Palestinian homes.
“Two years of
psychological pressure at night,” remarks an exhausted Ghawanmeh, who
explains the haphazard shifts the men of his village have been taking to
keep watch. “If you sleep, the settlers will burn your house.”
Under the pressure of settler attacks, poisonings and thefts, the
number of sheep belonging to the community has dwindled from 24,000 to
fewer than 3,000. Settler attacks and invasions have become so constant
that nine solidarity activists – some progressives from Israel and
others from other countries – were required to keep an around-the-clock
protective presence.
Without anywhere else to go – and knowing
from both settler threats and accounts from displaced relatives
elsewhere that settlers would likely follow them anyway – the people of
Ras Ein al-Auja had hung on by a thread.
That is, until the latest settler outpost.
Following
a pattern seen in other now-displaced Bedouin communities like nearby
Mu’arrajat, some of whose inhabitants fled to Ras Ein al-Auja, settlers
began erecting outposts directly next to people’s homes at the beginning
of the year – right in the middle of the community.
“Life has
completely stopped ever since,” Ghawanmeh says. Families have barricaded
themselves inside their houses, terrified of the settlers who now
routinely graze their flocks just outside Palestinian homes.
Then, the spate of attacks this month compelled far more families to
flee and take their remaining sheep with them. Almost three-quarters of
the community has now gone. These families are now scattered across the
West Bank although most are now in the cramped towns and cities of Area
A, which makes up 18 percent of the West Bank and is administered by the
Palestinian Authority.
As a result, these communities’ centuries-old traditions as Bedouins are coming to an end.
“There’s a saying among the Bedouins: ‘Upbringing outweighs
origins,’” Ghawanmeh says. “It means you were raised here, you eat from
the land, you drink from the land, you sleep on the land. You are from
it, and it is from you.”
“To leave your house and leave your village”, he adds, “it is very, very, very difficult. But we are forced to.”
The
children who remain have been left rudderless and afraid at night as
they look at empty, scarred patches of land where once their friends and
family lived. “Children are scared, scared that the settlers, the
[settler security guards], will come,” Ghawanmeh says.
Al Jazeera requested comment from the Israeli military about the
accusations made in this article and to ask for details about what
action is being taken to prevent settler attacks on Palestinian
communities, including Ras Ein al-Auja. We received no response.
‘Even if you sing for me until tomorrow, I won’t be happy’
As
the swell of violence and land thefts gives way to a steady exodus of
the last remaining villagers, a couple of musicians come to provide some
relief from another day of traumatic separation and displacement.
“I hope they’ll feel seen, and I hope they’ll feel happy for at least
a few moments and that they can feel like children, even if it’s just
for a few minutes,” says Kai Jack, a Norwegian solidarity activist and
professional contrabass player.
About a dozen children huddle in
plastic chairs in a tin shack that once served as the meeting place for
the community’s many families to hear this rare performance. As they
listen to a handful of Palestinian folk songs, the children, at first
timid, relax and begin to clap and sing to staples like Wein a Ramallah
(Where? To Ramallah).
For the first time in weeks, the children even manage to crack a few smiles.
And
then, Jack and the accompanying violinist, Amalia Kelter Zeitlin,
settle into playing the Palestinian lullaby Yamma Mawil al-Hawa (Mother,
What’s with the Wind?). The children’s mothers, looking on from the
sidelines, begin to softly sing along:
“My life will continue through sacrifice – for freedom.”
As the song ends, the mothers join the children in rounds of applause. “Beautiful?” Jack asks.
“Very,”
replies one of the mothers who explains how she helps her child fall to
sleep with this very song. “And it has been so long since they were
able to [sleep well].”
As the performance ends and the children
crowd around Jack’s enormous bass, a few of the remaining Ghawanmeh
brothers retreat outside, their minds unable to rest as they contemplate
their inevitable expulsion.
“These songs are for the children,” Naif Ghawanmeh says. “We are tired inside. Very tired.”
One
of his small nephews, Ahmed, just 2 years old, begins to sing the
chorus of Wein a Ramallah. For one brief moment, the atmosphere is
almost festive. But while he is happy the children are relaxing,
Ghawanmeh shrugs it off himself.
“By God, look at me,” he says
over the fire, which is burning whatever supplies they didn’t want to
leave for the settlers to take. “Even if you sing for me until tomorrow,
I won’t be happy. You see, I’m tired inside. For two years, I’ve been
suffering from oppression, hardship and problems day and night from the
settlers.
“I’m tired inside.”"
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/1/22/if-you-sleep-settlers-will-burn-your-house-fear-in-the-west-bank
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Natalie Neysa Alund
