Just days after Israeli settlers drove out the Palestinian Bedouin community of Al Mu’arrajat East at gunpoint, one of the settlers arrived at Farahan Ghawanmeh’s doorstep.
“Wait a few days, this will be my house,” he told Ghawanmeh, a resident of Ras Ein al-Auja, another Bedouin village in the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley.
The West Bank Protection Consortium (WBPC), an alliance of five international nongovernmental organizations seeking to prevent the forcible transfer of Palestinians in the occupied territory, warns that Ras Ein al-Auja’s days are indeed numbered. It may soon suffer the same fate as Al Mu’arrajat East and other Palestinian herding communities that are now abandoned after a relentless stream of settler violence in recent years pushed them to leave their homes of decades. Within the last two months, 40 Palestinian families have left Ras Ein al-Auja, Ghawanmeh said, due to attacks from surrounding settler outposts.
When these communities are displaced, they often move to nearby villages that can accommodate them. The community of Al Mu’arrajat East is now scattered approximately half a mile from where its members used to live. Some moved to an area in the Ramallah Governorate, while others went to villages in the Jericho Governorate. In both places, they are still surrounded by settlers and experience daily violence.
While Israel’s government has not explicitly called for Palestinians in the West Bank to be expelled en masse, their comments and actions imply this is indeed the goal. In 2024, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Palestinians should be temporarily evacuated during Israeli assaults on the northern West Bank. More recently, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the recent approval of the E1, a settlement project that is a de facto extension of the existing settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, and which calls for the construction of more than 3,000 homes east of Jerusalem, “buries the idea of a Palestinian state” by eliminating the possibility of creating a territorially contiguous geographical entity.
Since occupying the West Bank in 1967, Israel has made the region nearly uninhabitable for Palestinians through movement restrictions, depletion of resources, home demolitions, land seizures and army raids. But Ghawanmeh says it was not these difficult conditions that have caused Palestinians to flee. Rather, it is the recent waves of settler violence sweeping across the West Bank that are the driving force.
“When all administrative and legal tactics failed to displace us, the Israeli authorities turned to settler violence and the creation of new grazing outposts,” Ghawanmeh said during a July 10 press conference hosted by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Ras Ein al-Auja. “These outposts, run by extremist settlers who claim ownership over the area, mimic traditional Palestinian pastoral life while stealing our sheep and blocking us from accessing grazing lands we have used for generations. They build these outposts around our community and use them to control and restrict our movement.”
Outposts are often simply extensions of Israeli settlements and can refer to any type of small encampment set up by settlers. While some are offshoots of existing settlements, others are erected on their own without any connection to an established settlement. Grazing outposts specifically feature livestock, which settlers take to graze on Palestinian land.
Approximately 78 herding communities comprising more than 2,800 Palestinians have been displaced since the summer of 2022 because of settler violence, with the expulsion intensifying after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza.
In July 2022, the entire community of Ras a-Tin was displaced; this was the first time a village was uprooted not by the Israeli army, but as a result of pressure from settlers. Ras a-Tin’s evacuation acted as a catalyst for the mass expulsion of Palestinian shepherds we see today. According to the WBPC, about 50,000 Palestinians are currently at risk of forcible transfer at the hands of settlers. While all Palestinians living in Area C of the West Bank, which is controlled by the Israeli military, are vulnerable, Al-Baidar Organization for the Defense of the Rights of the Bedouins says the most targeted areas are the north and central Jordan Valley, east of Ramallah, the central West Bank and Masafer Yatta, an area south of the city of Hebron.
During the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Israeli forces ethnically cleansed the Palestinian village of Bayt Nuba and established the Israeli settlement of Mevo Horon on its ruins in 1969. “In order to take over the area, the settlers asked and received [from the Israeli government] a herd of cattle, which they have until today,” Dror Etkes, founder of Kerem Navot, an Israeli organization monitoring Israeli settlement and land management policy in the West Bank, told New Lines. “That was the first time that herding was used as a tool to establish sovereignty over an area in the West Bank.”
Etkes explained that settler herding was used only intermittently as a form of displacement following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967. Some settlers, motivated by a biblical-romantic Zionist vision of Jews tending the land, established outposts in the 1980s that emerged as a powerful presence in the next two decades. But according to Etkes, “The phenomena which we are talking about today, we can start seeing it around 2009, very gradually. But the really big jump in terms of herding outposts happens actually during the first Trump presidency.”
The recent election of President Donald Trump, coupled with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasing dependence on the far right to ensure his political survival, laid the groundwork for these herding outposts to expand rapidly. To maintain his governing coalition, Netanyahu must meet the demands of his far-right coalition partners like Smotrich, an Israeli settler pushing for Israel’s official annexation of the West Bank, who is a staunch supporter of these shepherding outposts. With Trump’s second term, the Israeli government feels that land-grabbing and settlement expansion will be shown more leniency compared to previous administrations. Notably, this is seen in Israel’s recent approval of the E1 settlement project, which has the Trump administration’s support. The plan for building this settlement had long been frozen because previous U.S. administrations opposed its construction, which would separate the West Bank from East Jerusalem, thereby nullifying the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state, as Smotrich made clear.
Shepherding outposts ballooned from between one and four per year to near double digits starting in 2018. Twenty-nine were erected in 2023, and an additional 38 were created in 2024, according to data compiled by Kerem Navot and the Israeli NGO Peace Now. In the last three years, at least 73 shepherding outposts have been established.
While both Israeli settlements and outposts are illegal under international law, Israel only considers outposts illegal. Despite this, many outposts are retroactively legalized and even get government assistance, receiving water and a hookup to the electrical grid before they are authorized by the state. In May 2025, Israel’s Security Cabinet decided to approve 22 new settlements in the West Bank; more than half are shepherding outposts.
“Pastoral outposts are not merely an expression of radical settler ideology, but part of a broader Israeli policy aimed at altering the demographic and geographic balance in the West Bank,” Hassan Mleihat, Al-Baidar’s director, told New Lines.
According to research from Kerem Navot and Peace Now published in April 2025, settlers have seized 14% of the West Bank through these herding outposts. Significantly, this was done with state support; Kerem Navot and Peace Now’s joint report has revealed that the Israeli government is funneling tens of millions of dollars to these outposts. Although outposts are illegal under Israeli law, settlers are able to bypass this ban and receive government funding through an opaque, labyrinth-like system of loopholes allowing state-financed nongovernmental entities to allocate money to outposts.
Citing security needs for settlements, Israel provides funds to the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization, a state-backed NGO in charge of establishing settlements in the West Bank, which then distributes that money to shepherding outposts through regional settlement councils. This budget goes to infrastructure, such as the paving and construction of roads, and equipment like solar panels, electric gates, fences, vehicles, cameras, drones, generators and lighting poles for the herding outposts.
The Settlement Division also awards grazing contracts — land allocations for the purposes of grazing — to settlers, who, according to Kerem Navot and Peace Now, use these agreements to establish shepherding outposts. Additionally, the Settlement Division awards grants for business initiatives, which settler shepherds then use to purchase herds, and offers loans to settlers in herding outposts who use the funds to buy livestock and build pens. Israel’s Agriculture Ministry also awards grants for grazing purposes to settlers in shepherding outposts.
Approximately 30% of the NGO grants that are disbursed through the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of the Negev and Galilee support volunteer agricultural programs. Their activities are mainly concentrated in shepherding outposts in the West Bank, where these registered NGOs recruit at-risk youth who have dropped out of school to work in the outposts as shepherds. The Jewish National Fund (JNF), a quasi-governmental agency responsible for purchasing land for Jewish settlement, has funded these programs for youth to volunteer in shepherding outposts. The JNF also supports the establishment and maintenance of these outposts, according to financial documents obtained by Kerem Navot and Peace Now.
Using state money, these settler shepherds build outposts and graze on private Palestinian land, thereby shrinking the space Palestinian shepherds have to graze. “I used to go up to the hilltops with my livestock,” Ghawanmeh told New Lines. “Now they’re confined to the barn.”
“You are under surveillance from everywhere. If you go out, they’ll attack you,” Ghawanmeh added, describing how one Palestinian shepherding family tried grazing their herd, and within 15 minutes, the settlers came and stole more than a thousand sheep from them.
With the constant attacks and theft, Ghawanmeh decided to sell the majority of his flock and take up a job teaching instead. The entire community of Ras Ein al-Auja had 24,000 sheep before 2019. Now they only have 10% of their flock left.
Not only is the Israeli government financing these outposts, but the expulsion of Palestinians because of these settlers is also occurring under the army’s watch. Settlers “were under the protection of the army, chasing after our sheep and goats,” Aliyah Mlihat, one of the residents displaced from Al Mu’arrajat East, told New Lines. “We asked for protection from the army and police, but no one came.”
Given that Area C is under Israeli military control, Israel’s army is responsible for maintaining order here. Sarit Michaeli, international director for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, explained that this is not what’s being done. She has, on multiple occasions, seen that police have failed to help Palestinians when they are under attack from settler gangs.
Palestinians “are basically left with no protection whatsoever. They’re absolutely abandoned,” Michaeli said during the July 10 NRC press conference at Ain al-Auja. “This means that when settlers attack them and they call the police … the police will not show up, or they will show up and then make up some excuse why everything that the settlers are doing is okay. The army will side with the settlers.”
Earlier this month, West Bank District Police Commander Maj. Gen. Moshe Pinchi said the police priorities have changed so that protecting Israeli settlements supersedes enforcing law and order. In other words, ensuring Palestinian safety from settler assaults isn’t part of the police’s job description anymore.
The majority of these outposts are popping up in Area C, which comprises 60% of the West Bank. Land and settlement experts say the location is strategic. “Israel wants to push all the Arabs to the Palestinian built-up area,” Dr. Khalil Toufakji, a Palestinian cartographer, told New Lines, referring to Areas A and B of the West Bank, which are more populated, developed regions. “They want to minimize the Palestinians in Area C to control them in the future.”
And the settlers are an integral part of implementing that vision. “Settlers who are attacking these communities are not doing it because there’s some sort of rogue element,” Michaeli said. “They’re doing it as representatives of the Israeli state. Settler violence is a major informal tool that Israel is using to empty these areas of their Palestinian inhabitants.”
Settlers attack and invade Palestinian homes, knowing that they are acting in an environment of impunity; very rarely are they charged or imprisoned for committing what are technically criminal acts. Under Netanyahu’s far-right government, the long-standing culture of impunity has become even more extreme. Until recently, the Israeli army considered the most violent and extremist settlers, and Israelis sympathetic to their ideology, unfit for military conscription; since Oct. 7, 2023, however, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, himself a notorious extremist settler, has ordered that those settlers receive military uniforms and weapons.
Since Smotrich became the Settlements Minister in 2023 as part of the newly created “Settlements Administration,” the Israeli government has been fast-tracking the annexation of Area C.
First, Israel’s Civil Administration, the military body in charge of the West Bank, transferred power to a civilian official in the Settlements Administration. By definition, occupation implies temporary military rule, so if it switches to civilian hands then the land becomes formally annexed because the occupying power is extending its civilian law to the territory. Then, in May, Israel’s Security Cabinet decided to initiate land registration procedures in Area C, to formally register land in the name of Jewish Israelis or the state and further strip Palestinians of their property rights. The escalating settler violence in Area C fits squarely into the government’s annexationist agenda.
“This is part of the larger plan of taking over Area C and annexing it on the ground by just forcing people out, ethnically cleansing the land, and then establishing first an outpost, which is the beginnings of a settlement, and then ultimately declaring it part of Israel,” said Allegra Pacheco, WBPC’s chief of party.
While Area C is the first target, the entirety of the West Bank is at stake. Kerem Navot and Peace Now estimate that approximately 7,400 acres of land under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction (Areas A and B) are now in the hands of settler shepherds. Area A covers the metropolitan sections of the West Bank, like Ramallah and Bethlehem, while Area B consists of hundreds of villages. In both, settlers are establishing outposts on agricultural land.
“It’s not only about Area C anymore. It’s about open areas in general,” Etkes said. “Israel is trying to shatter Oslo, to say we are here in order to take Area A and B too.”
The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and 1995, divided the West Bank into Areas A, B and C. They were meant to pave the way toward the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This never materialized, and Israeli state and settler actions today appear keen on dismantling that two-state possibility.
“The idea is to break a Palestinian contiguity and prevent the establishment of a viable Palestinian state,” Pacheco said. “So that the two-state solution is no longer an option.”
And Israel’s aim to erase the Palestinian presence in the West Bank seems to be working, as Ghawanmeh tells New Lines he no longer sees a future in his village as armed settlers descend on their homes daily.“There’s a limit for how much we can take,” Ghawanmeh said. “If they pressure us too much, we have no other option but to leave.”
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