Three Years of Israel Pushing West Bank Palestinians Off Their Land

On 23 September, weeks before Israel's parliamentary elections, ministers and lawmakers gathered on a hill in the occupied West Bank to inaugurate Metzoke Eretz, a new settlement widely considered illegal under international law. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich used the occasion to praise the outpost that had paved the way for the formal settlement.

"The first pioneer settlers were here at the farm… we will raise them up as our greatest joy," Smotrich said. "It shows this method works: set up a farm, seize land, prepare it, turn it into a community, then move on to the next point. There are very, very many such heroes — people who prove they are not in real estate. They are doing Zionism."

Metzoke Eretz was formerly an outpost — the term for Jewish settlements illegal even under Israeli law — named Netzah Harel, established in 2023 between al-Muarrajat, a Bedouin community on privately owned Palestinian land east of Ramallah. Alia Mleihat, 29, and others in the community remember the settler group well.

"Of course, this outpost played a big role in driving out the Palestinian Bedouin communities in al-Muarrajat and the areas east of Ramallah," said Alia, now living in a tent in al-Awsaj a few kilometres away after being forced to leave in July 2025. "[The Netzah Harel group] took part in every attack settlers carried out against families, and in confiscating sheep, under the protection of Israeli police and army."

Dror Etkes, founder of the Israeli NGO Kerem Navot, argues that Smotrich's description of his "method" is accurate — with one omission. "The political discourse ignores the chapter of expelling people [Palestinians]," Etkes said, suggesting Smotrich and other politicians avoid saying it outright to avoid scrutiny by international criminal courts. "They want it to happen, they know it is happening, and they let it happen."

According to Haaretz, Metzoke Eretz is one of 19 outposts legalised by the Netanyahu government after nearby Palestinians were violently expelled.

'Not a single moment of joy'

Jamal Mleihat, 45, Alia's uncle, sits with eight relatives in a bare concrete house on a hillside in al-Awsaj, his daughter Sewar on his lap. Below the slope, rows of young trees climb the cultivated land toward a factory at the foot of the hill. The hillside itself is rock and dust, now home to about 25 families from al-Muarrajat and others forced out over the past three years.

"Before 7 October [2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and Israel launched its war in Gaza], we were on the pasture — no harassment, free movement," said Jamal, a father of seven. "We had healthcare. There were schools. There was water in the same camp. Life was a million times better than this."

Since 7 October, Israel's government has stepped up raids in the occupied West Bank, while settlers have been largely given free rein to attack Palestinians with little interference from within Israel.

Just below Jamal's shelter, alone on the slope, Muhammad Ghawanmeh lives with his wife and seven children. His toilet does not work; he relies on a water tank and has almost no electricity. The rocky road to the Mleihat family's area is too steep for vehicles. He put up a fence around his home after recent settler attacks, and is now frequently tracked by Israeli settler drones.

Ghawanmeh comes from Ras Ein al-Auja, once the largest Bedouin community in the central Jordan Valley — strong enough that humanitarian coordinators told Al Jazeera in October 2023 that displacing the village was unlikely. Instead, more than 600 Palestinian residents there experienced the largest expulsion of a Bedouin community in three years, following repeated settler attacks from four surrounding outposts.

"From childhood, the land was open. The water was open. We lived happily. We would graze sheep 10 km, 15 km and come back," he said. "Today we cannot go 500 metres from home."

His flock has shrunk from about 300 sheep to roughly 100 weak animals, forcing him to buy feed instead of letting them graze on land he says has largely been declared off-limits by Israeli settlers and the military.

'Nothing left but this place'

A few hundred metres from Ghawanmeh's fence, a white caravan and several containers mark an Israeli outpost, set up about six months ago on a hill overlooking Highway 90 and the displaced families along the slope. Two months ago, Ghawanmeh said, soldiers came to his home and told him he could no longer go out to the highway. Settlers, he said, "go with the army".

"You leave this place, go to another, and it follows you — the same problem, unsolved," Ghawanmeh said. "Every three months there is another displacement."

Al-Awsaj was previously almost uninhabited, but Bedouin from communities that have been wiped out now pour onto this barren slope, looking out over land largely declared — once again — off-limits to grazing.

Allegra Pacheco, head of the West Bank Protection Consortium, calls al-Awsaj "basically a refugee camp, an internal displacement camp, like those we see in other countries. But here, there is no safe space. People in al-Awsaj are pursued by settlers wherever they go, or their tents are demolished by Israelis."

"It is very painful to have to convince the authorities, the Palestinian Authority, international leaders to recognise that this is a mass displacement happening before our eyes, and that people have nowhere to go," she said.

A forced displacement plan

In the West Bank, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has recorded at least 130 Palestinian communities fully or partially displaced by settler attacks and related restrictions since January 2023, with more than 6,400 people driven out. According to the Palestinian Anti-Colonization and Wall Committee, nearly 15,000 settler attacks have occurred since 7 October 2023, killing 66 Palestinians. OCHA says the rate of settler attacks has risen from about three per day before 7 October 2023 to nearly seven per day this year.

The surge in displacement after October 2023 is also reflected in that year's figures: nearly 80 percent of Palestinians displaced by settler violence in 2023 were driven out after 7 October.

A report by Peace Now and Kerem Navot found Israeli farm outposts had seized about 18 percent of the West Bank's area by the end of 2025. "That is an area larger than the Gaza Strip put together," Pacheco said.

"What we are seeing is an ongoing, sustained plan of forced displacement and mass destruction," she said. "The Israeli authorities demolish, the Israeli military destroys, and Israeli civilians — armed groups — carry out vandalism and spread fear to push people out."

A September report by the Israeli NGO B'Tselem, titled "The Elimination Project", links the situation to Smotrich's 2017 "Decisive Plan", which offers Palestinians three choices: live under Jewish rule, leave, or face violent repression.

"Smotrich's plan has been implemented," Pacheco said. "He laid out exactly what is happening, and he is very proud of his success. Now he wants to transfer that success to [other parts of the West Bank], and to the Galilee [a region of Israel with a large Palestinian citizen population]. Wherever Palestinians live, he wants to make life so difficult that they have to leave."

With Smotrich wielding broad powers in the West Bank through the Settlements Administration in the Defence Ministry, and Israeli military commanders in the West Bank increasingly drawn from the hardline settler movement, Palestinians across the West Bank describe a deepening symbiosis between the army, police, bureaucracy and settlers in seizing their land.

"They all work together, like a cell, one complementing the other," Jamal Mleihat said. "The army, the police, the settlers — they are the displacers, they build the settlements, they take part in theft, in everything. And the army shields them."

Al Jazeera contacted Israeli officials for comment but has not received a response.

A worse future

Smotrich has withheld part or all of the tax revenues Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority — about 60 percent of its income — for most of the past three years. The Palestinian Authority now struggles to provide even the most basic services. In al-Awsaj and many other places, that means schools do not open. "The public school is closed today, there are no salaries," Ghawanmeh said.

There are no school buses; families must pay for private vehicles, and "one day they study, one day they don't, depending on the driver's mood", Jamal said. The displaced are left alone on a harsh patch of rock.

"Palestinians are not protected in the West Bank," Pacheco said. "They are completely vulnerable to assault, attempted murder, arson, home invasions. The Israeli army, which should protect them, does not. The Palestinian Authority cannot enter. And the international community does not protect them."

"We are beginning to feel there is nowhere safe," Ghawanmeh said. "Fear. Terror. Repression. Ethnic cleansing. That is what we feel."

Amid the land grab, Ghawanmeh looks out at the harsh terrain he knows will not be a refuge for his family — only another temporary stop. He now sees his brother once every month and a half or two months. "The threats to Bedouin life have almost become a risk of extinction," he said. "We now live in pockets, separated."

"For three years now, each day has been better than the next," Ghawanmeh said. "Yesterday was better than today. Today is better than tomorrow."