On the first day of Ramadan, Yasser Abu Aram sat and stared despondently at his plot of land in Khirbet Samra in the occupied West Bank. Months of relentless harassment by young Israeli settlers — who stole his livestock and encircled the small shepherding community day and night — had taken their toll.

“Everything that is happening here is also happening in the surrounding communities,” Abu Aram told +972 Magazine. “Today it’s me. Tomorrow it’s someone else.”

Abu Aram is one of the approximately 60,000 Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley, which runs along the eastern flank of the West Bank and makes up nearly 30 percent of the territory. The residents of Khirbet Samra are descendants of Bedouin tribes displaced from the Naqab/Negev desert in 1948; Abu Aram’s family was uprooted twice over in the West Bank before settling in Khirbet Samra in 2005.

Now, following a surge in settler attacks, as well as the establishment in February of a new outpost on the hill overlooking the community, Abu Aram has decided to leave the place he has called home for the past two decades.

“The land became one with our family; the mountain is one of us,” Abu Aram said. “It holds our memories.” He and his family packed up their belongings on March 1; now, all that remains of his home are scattered remnants, and a graffiti-covered sign left behind by the settlers — who tauntingly call themselves “Shabab Samra,” Arabic for “Youth of Samra.”

Khirbet Samra is one of the few remaining Palestinian shepherding communities in Area C of the northern Jordan Valley, which falls under complete Israeli control. Like many other Bedouin communities in the area, its residents have faced escalating settler violence since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023, particularly where settlers erected illegal outposts near their villages.

From large-scale livestock theft, to home raids and beatings, the violence and displacement spiked in the Jordan Valley after the Israeli military launched “Operation Iron Wall” in January — an offensive that has displaced more than 40,000 Palestinians, primarily in northern West Bank refugee camps — the day after U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration. 

“It’s very systematic and well planned,” explained Dror Etkes, founder of the Israeli organization Kerem Navot, which monitors settlement activity in the West Bank. Trump’s return and the new military assault in the West Bank, Etkes continued, provided “a clear sign for the settlers to escalate their violence to expel more Palestinians.”

Now, Israel’s takeover of the Jordan Valley is almost complete. Khirbet Samra is located east of the Allon Road, a north-south highway Israel built in the 1970s to connect settlements and lay the groundwork to annex the territory east of the road, which runs along the border with Jordan. But while Israel has been working for decades to ethnically cleanse the Jordan Valley, over the past two years, it has accelerated its efforts at an alarming pace: 100,000 dunams of land east of the Allon Road have been nearly emptied of Palestinians, according to a forthcoming joint report by Yesh Din, an Israeli anti-occupation nonprofit organization, and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

As Abu Aram sat with three of his young children near the remains of his home, dozens of his family members — many of them from the community of Masafer Yatta, which also faces ongoing violence and displacement — loaded hundreds of his goats and sheep onto livestock trucks, while others dismantled solar panels and hauled water tanks. “At least we are together during the holiday,” joked Abu Aram’s sister-in-law, who asked to remain anonymous.

From occupation to annexation

Since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, life for Palestinians in the Jordan Valley has never been easy. In the subsequent decades, as Israel started to build settlements in the area, it classified around 50 percent of the Jordan Valley as “state land,” with large portions turned into nature reserves or closed military zones. This has meant that Palestinians in Area C of the Jordan Valley are barred from shepherding, building or farming in at least 85 percent of the territory. 

In the early 1980s, the Israeli military designated the area in and around Khirbet Samra as part of a firing zone — massive swaths of land often not clearly marked. Palestinian communities inside firing zones suffer from particularly high demolition and eviction rates and endure live military exercises with no warning, sometimes just meters from their tents.

In 2018, Abu Aram’s 3-year-old grandson was shot in the head while sleeping during one such training exercise. The local hospital did not have the technology to remove the bullet, which penetrated his brain, and it remains lodged in his head. According to Abu Aram, his grandchild suffers from severe headaches as a result. The IDF told +972 that a military police investigation “determined that it could not be confirmed that the minor was hit by IDF fire.”

Israeli authorities also severely restrict Palestinian access to the Jordan Valley’s abundant water resources, diverting the vast majority from its main aquifers for settler use. With no access to running water, Abu Aram had been forced to buy tankered water, which is both expensive and liable to theft by settlers. Before leaving Khirbet Samra, he asked his neighbor — one of the few Palestinians remaining in the area — to hold onto his water tanks until he finds a more permanent place to settle. “He laughed,” Abu Aram recalled. “‘Our situations are the same,’ he told me. ‘The settlers would just come and steal them too.’”

Obtaining building permits is also extremely difficult for Palestinians in the Jordan Valley and throughout Area C: between 2016 and 2021, Israel approved less than 1 percent of permit requests submitted. In 2015, under the pretext of “building without a permit,” the Israeli army demolished the local school serving Khirbet Samra and the surrounding villages, forcing local children to travel to a school 25 kilometers away to continue their studies. 

Toward the end of the first Trump administration, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to formally annex the Jordan Valley, and Trump gave Israel the green light to do so. While Netanyahu ultimately decided against formal annexation amid stern international pushback, Israel’s de facto annexation of the territory accelerated dramatically, with the establishment of 46 new settler farms and outposts between 2017 and 2021.

Two of those outposts, which Israeli settlers Uri Cohen and Asael Kurnitz erected near Khirbet Samra in 2016 and 2019, respectively, quickly functioned to restrict Palestinian shepherds from accessing their grazing land. Unlike established settlements, which have roughly defined borders and require substantial resources, these pastoral outposts — typically built on Israeli-designated “state land” — expand as far as the herder chooses to graze, require minimal infrastructure, and often consist of just a young family and a few volunteers. As a result, they facilitate theft more quickly than traditional settlements, and increasingly have driven the forcible displacement of Palestinians across the West Bank.

The settlers who erect these outposts, too, tend to be much more violent and aggressive toward Palestinians. In 2021, Palestinians from Khirbet Samra filed a petition with the Israeli High Court listing more than 30 incidents of settler violence, including throwing stones, damaging their property, and threatening shepherds and their flocks by riding ATVs or horses. The community never received a response, according to petitioners.

In their upcoming report, Yesh Din notes that the settlers from the shepherding outposts operate as “state-backed armed militias.” “Israel uses the settlers to take over the land — it gives them money, security, and infrastructure,” explained Yonatan Kanonich, head of research at Yesh Din. “The state enjoys the results of this violence.”

The Agriculture Ministry  provided NIS 1.66 million ($450,000) in funding to illegal agricultural farms from 2018 to 2024, which were largely transferred as part of support for “Preserving Open Areas through Animal Grazing.” In 2022 and 2023, Asael Kurnitz received over NIS 255,000 ($70,400), while Uri Cohen, of the Nof Gilad farm, received over NIS 595,000 ($164,000). There are documented instances of Cohen harassing communities while in his military uniform.

In an attempt to move as far away from the settlers as possible, Abu Aram and his family are headed for Tammun, a town in Area B, where the Palestinian Authority nominally exercises full administrative control while sharing security control with Israel. But even there, they may still be exposed to Israeli violence; for the first time since the Oslo Accords, at least 8 settler outposts have been established in Area B in the past year.

“The settlers and the army want to finish me,” said Abu Aram. “We just want to be able to sleep at night.”

 Besieged by settlers 

In the shadow of Israel’s war on Gaza, residents of Khirbet Samra have been driven off of their lands at breakneck speed. Tareq Hmeid, Abu Aram’s neighbor, was the first to flee with his family in October 2023. “We were under siege from the settlers,” Hmeid told +972. “We couldn’t herd our flock, and getting water was becoming extremely difficult.”

Harassment against Hmeid and his property by settlers, including repeated acts of urination on his land, increased dramatically even before the war. In the summer of 2023, in an attempt to stop settlers from driving into the village, Hmeid placed tires along the dirt road leading to the community, but it made no difference. In October that year, following the start of the war, Uri Cohen and two other settlers stormed his residence, attacking Hmeid, his brother, and his 15-year-old cousin with sticks. One settler struck Hmeid under his left ear and on his left leg with a gun, leaving him bleeding and limping for a week.

According to Hmeid, while the Israel police arrived as the attack was ongoing, the officers did nothing to stop the settlers. Instead, Hmeid and his brother were arrested, and released later that evening. While they were detained, Hmeid’s family members dismantled their tents and evacuated the women and children. Hmeid never returned to Khirbet Samra after his release (the police did not respond to a request for comment about the incident). 

“It was tragic,” Hmeid said. “I had no magic trick in my hand to make it better. At the end of the day, you just want to protect your kids and your family.” 

Israel Police, responsible for enforcing criminal law on Israeli civilians in the West Bank, have systematically failed to address crime against Palestinians. Between 2005 and 2024, 94 percent of cases involving ideologically motivated offenses by Israelis against Palestinians in the occupied territory were closed without an indictment. 

“The Israeli government and its governmental organs, including the police and the military, are supporting the settlers,” said Etkes from Kerem Navot. “It goes on right now. As we speak, other communities are being exposed to such terror.” 

Settler violence, aided or at best ignored by the Israeli authorities, has severely and systemically eroded the resilience of Palestinian shepherding communities, according to Yesh Din. “We don’t talk about it, but settler harassment and violence completely compromises these communities’ privacy,” said Ayman Gharib, a Palestinian human rights activist with the Popular Resistance Committees in the Jordan Valley. “Many communities who experience harassment are hesitant to speak up about it or report it because it causes them shame.”

Now, for the residents of Khirbet Samra, displacement not only means being left homeless; their very livelihood and culture is under threat. As shepherds, Abu Aram and Hmeid both rely on the production and sale of yogurt, milk, and cheese in Palestinian cities. Without access to grazing pastures and natural water sources, they will no longer be able to sustain their way of life.

“Instead of controlling our land, our resources, our labor, we [Palestinians] are forced to become consumers — reliant on the generosity of our occupiers,” Hmeid lamented.