Ras Ein al-Auja, West Bank
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Suleiman Ghawanmeh is drained of speaking. For over 10 years, he talked himself hoarse till he realized his phrases couldn’t save his community from being pushed out. After his last enchantment for assist got here to nothing, he, too, left.
“I am angry with the world… nobody listens to us… it’s as if we are not human beings,” he informed NCS.
His village of Ras Ein al-Auja in the occupied West Bank has now been erased – emptied of its Palestinian residents after a years-lengthy marketing campaign of relentless settler harassment that has intensified over the previous two years.
The ongoing violence towards what was as soon as the largest shepherding community in the West Bank elevated markedly this month, forcing households to desert their properties, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
Armed and masked settlers, many of them youngsters, descended on the Ras Ein al-Auja each day, residents and activists say, terrorizing the practically 120 prolonged households – greater than 800 folks in complete – who lived there. By the finish of January, that harassment compelled all of them to go away.
Ghawanmeh, 44, and his household had been the final to go on Sunday.
“We didn’t get displaced because a shepherd or a settler attacked us. No. The issue is bigger than that. The shepherd is a tool – a means of the occupation,” he mentioned.
Ras Ein al-Auja is the forty sixth shepherding community in the West Bank to be forcibly displaced since October seventh 2023, according to B’Tselem, which calls this a type of “ethnic cleansing.”
In response to the uptick in settler assaults final yr, the Israeli navy mentioned in a press release that it “views violence of any kind with severity and condemns it, as it harms security in the area.”
But that isn’t how residents describe the navy’s function on the floor.
Jewish settlers have been harassing the residents of Ras Ein al-Auja since 2010, based on members of the community. After the Hamas assaults of October 7, 2023 and the ensuing offensive in Gaza, residents say issues solely worsened. Settlers have constructed four new illegal settlement outposts round the village since April 2024, based on the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), closing in on Palestinian properties.
According to residents, activists and movies obtained by NCS, settlers believed to be from these outposts stole or broken water tanks, compromising the community’s entry to water and undermining its livelihood. They minimize electrical energy traces, stole 1000’s of livestock and vandalized sheep pens and Palestinian property – all with the assist or inaction of the Israeli navy.
NCS drove as much as one of the 4 outposts to talk with the settlers, however two males there refused to reply to our questions.
“We don’t accept journalists,” one younger Israeli settler informed us earlier than strolling us off the property.
Another settler quickly arrived and commenced filming earlier than calling the police. Both males refused to handle questions on their reported harassment of the Palestinians in Ras Ein al-Auja.
Ghawanmeh mentioned if the settlers didn’t take pleasure in the assist of the Israeli authorities and lots of governments round the world, his community wouldn’t have needed to depart.
He and his brothers spent all day dismantling their properties, pulling aside steel panels to rebuild elsewhere – wherever they’ll discover a place to settle.
Women and kids packed away their belongings, piling mattresses and tarps into pickup vans. Whatever couldn’t be transported was burned as a substitute.
“I don’t want them to benefit from anything of ours,” Ghawanmeh mentioned of the settlers.
In between the laborious duties, males spray painted the phrases “the last displacement 2026” and “the third Nakba” onto steel sheds – a reference to the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of 1948, when roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or had been expelled from their properties in what’s now Israel.
Ghawanmeh’s family was displaced from a village close to Be’er Sheva in southern Israel at the moment and forcibly transferred to Ramallah. They had been displaced once more in 1967 after the Six Day War.
Now, compelled from their house for a 3rd time, they are camped out about two miles from their village, uncertain of the place they’ll go subsequent.
Ras Ein al-Auja is situated in the southern Jordan Valley. In June 2024, Israel declared about 3,000 acres of the Jordan Valley, together with Ras Ein al-Auja, to be state land – the largest seizure of Palestinian land since the Oslo Accords, according to Israeli settlement watchdog group Peace Now.
That means the land is not thought of privately owned by Palestinians, and due to this fact they are prevented from utilizing it or accessing it. Peace Now says that is “one of the main methods by which the State of Israel seeks to assert control over land in the occupied territories.”
Haitham Zayed, a 25-yr-outdated who has lived in Ras Ein al-Auja his entire life, mentioned what had occurred to his village was half of a “systematic policy” by the Israeli authorities to “empty Palestinian land of Palestinians.”
Two weeks in the past, when some households from his village started leaving as the intimidation by settlers intensified, he vowed to remain.
“Do you think if I go somewhere else, it will be safe from the settlers or the army? There is no place in the West Bank that is safe from the settlers or the army,” he mentioned at the time.
Two days later, he informed NCS he had no different possibility however to go away.
“There is no more life in Ras Ein al-Auja,” he despatched in a textual content message. “We are reliving the Nakba.”