Israeli settlers are pushing ahead with a largely unnoticed de facto annexation of large areas of rural land in the occupied West Bank that has already seen the almost total displacement of Bedouin in large areas.
While settler activity, including violence, has long been well-documented in the section of the West Bank designated by the 1993 Oslo accords as under Israeli security and administrative control – the so-called Area C of the occupied territory, including the south Hebron Hills – settlers have switched their focus to mostly rural Area B, which was designated to be under Palestinian civil control initially.
All three of the Oslo areas – Area A being the major Palestinian cities – were intended under the accords to be transferred to a future Palestinian state.
At a time when the US president, Donald Trump, has talked about the relocation of Palestinians from Gaza, effectively endorsing its ethnic cleansing, a process of displacement is already advancing in Area B as West Bank Palestinians come under pressure from settlers and their far-right political backers in Israel.
In one section of Area B in the arid desert hills between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea near the Israeli settlement of Tko’a all evidence of Bedouin who once lived there appears to have been erased, while in a second area those that remain are being harassed by settler violence.
In a landscape of deep wadis and dusty limestone escarpments, Bedouin shepherds until recently grazed flocks on the low-lying plants that appear in the winter months, or on seasonally cultivated forage crops in the flat valley bottoms.
Valleys that once sustained groups of Bedouin up to a few hundred are now occupied by ramshackle illegal outposts, sometimes a single house or hut, sometimes a couple of buildings, visible radiating out from Tko’a through the hills and connected to the main settlement by snaking water pipes.
Cisterns used by the Bedouin for generations are now under settler control, while new settler cultivation, largely of olive trees fed by the water pipes, is replacing grazing for sheep.
According to Yoni Mizrachi, a researcher for the settlement monitoring group Peace Now, much of the emptying of this area near Tko’a took place in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, an event that supercharged settler activity on the West Bank.
With it has gone a unique culture in the hills, which until only a handful of years ago seemed inseparable from the landscape.
“You can see how empty it is except for a few outposts,” Mizrachi said, adding that while these illegal outposts framed their activity as “farming” these shacks in reality represented an effort to take control of large rural areas that had succeeded even in the absence of the Israeli military.
“In 2024 I counted 59 new illegal outposts,” said Mizrachi, referring to all of the West Bank. “It was a record year. A new one every week. Before, you might see between zero and 10 to a dozen in an average year.”
It is an effort that has been supported by the building of new illegal roads which, in the area east of Tko’a, have been bulldozed into the hills. “The Bedouin here are the weakest and most vulnerable of the Palestinian communities and they are being displaced as communities and made homeless,” Mizrachi said.
A short drive south brings you to Minya and a massive open landfill site on the edge of the desert hills where, a kilometre or so from the dump, Bedouin are still trying to remain on their land.
In one small encampment, Jameel and Mujahid Shalalda have managed to hang on, despite a campaign of violence since a group of young extremist settlers arrived nearby in December.
The shacks of the settlers known as the Flock of Abraham are visible in the near distance, their cars moving across a nearby hill.
The Guardian is shown a video of recent attacks: settlers attempting to frighten the Bedouin flocks, setting fire to a building, stealing equipment and setting a dog on the Bedouin children.
“There are two tribes here. We’ve been here for 52 years,” said Jameel. “The settlers arrived three months ago. Every day and every night we are afraid what they will do. There was another family here, but they were frightened into leaving. But we have nowhere else to go.
“They’ve destroyed structures in our camp and even though we have been to the police they do nothing.”
Yehuda Shaul of Ofek, the Israeli Centre for Public Affairs, said: “We are talking about thousands and thousands of dunums of land.” A dunum is equivalent to a quarter of an acre.
“What’s happening around Tko’a is what is happening elsewhere,” said Shaul. “New areas being cleansed by settler violence.”
Shaul said that in the 12 months before 7 October 2023 “we saw something like 100 Palestinians displaced” but in the months after the Hamas attack it was 1,400. He added that the acceleration of settler activity in the Tko’a area was being accommodated by the current Israeli political climate.
“Three and a half years ago there were around 240,000 dunums Palestinians could not access because of settler violence,” he said. “Today that figure is close to 800,000. That’s 12% of the West Bank.”
What was important now, Shaul said, was how Israeli settlers who had long behaved with impunity in Area C were now shifting their tactics to new parts of the West Bank with the aim of completely fragmenting the territory intended for a future Palestinian state.
“Now the settlers have become increasingly emboldened, the language being used is about the ‘battle over open space’, avoiding talking about Area B or C,” he said. “Because saying that, in their view, reinforces the Oslo paradigm which they reject.
“It’s now not good enough that Palestinians are contained in Areas A and B. Now the goal is that they must be contained in the built-up areas. The open spaces – they say – are ours. They are trying to put the last nail in the coffin [of a meaningful Palestinian state.]”
