For years, the Palestinian community of Ras Ein Al-Auja in the southern Jordan Valley has held firm the face of Israeli settler violence. But after settlers set up an outpost in the center of their village at the end of December, plowing private land, destroying a main road, and cutting electricity cables, many families decided they had no choice but to leave.

On the morning of Jan. 8, Ras Ein Al-Auja was filled with the all-too-familiar scenes of displacement in the West Bank. Residents piled belongings onto trailers, and squeezed their sheep, donkeys, and dogs into pickup trucks. Women and children carried mattresses, clothes, toys, and tarps, while young men spent hours dismantling their homes, pulling apart aluminum panels, beams, and plastic sheeting, desperate to salvage what they could.

All the while, around ten settlers circled them on horses and donkeys and in government-supplied off-road vehicles, watching the expulsion with evident satisfaction.

Twenty-six households from two extended families — more than 100 people in total — fled their village that day after two years of relentless settler harassment and repeated incursions. Activists maintaining a round-the-clock presence had managed to provide some measure of safety, but with Israeli authorities offering virtually no protection from the attacks, it was only a matter of time until residents began to flee.

Salameh Qa‘abna, 45, explained that since the start of the war in Gaza, settlers steadily closed in on Ras Ein Al-Auja, and he had grown accustomed to their behavior. The establishment of the new outpost just dozens of meters from his home, however, severed him from the center of the village and stripped away any remaining sense of stability. 

“The situation has become unbearable,” he told +972. “First they blocked our access to water from the canal and to the grazing lands. Then they attacked us on the road every time we went to [the nearby town of] Auja. A week ago, they plowed the land here and cut us off from the village — preventing children from going to school and water tankers from reaching us. It became a siege: The settlers brought their herds right up to our homes, and at night they gathered in groups, terrifying the children.

“About 25 families here are being displaced, heading into the unknown,” he continued. “People are taking what they can, but it’s not enough to build real shelter.”

Today, Ras Ein Al-Auja is surrounded by settlements and outposts on all sides: to the north, the settlement of Yitav and the Auja Farm outpost; to the west, uphill, the Baladim outposts near Kokhav HaShahar settlement; to the south, the outpost of radical settler Zohar Sabah; and to the east, Einot Kedem. In August 2025, settlers also erected an outpost in Ras Ein Al-Auja and took over homes abandoned by families who lived on the outskirts of the village.

Ras Ein Al-Auja’s story, however, isn’t unique. In nearby Palestinian communities like Al-Muarrajat and Maghayer Al-Dir, outposts set up last year in the centers of the villages led to a rapid escalation in violence and the forced expulsion of Palestinian residents within days of their establishment.

Since January 2023, when the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began documenting displacement linked to settler violence, more than 700 Palestinian families — roughly 3,900 people — have been driven from their homes in the West Bank. Displacement has been documented in 85 communities on the margins of towns and villages, primarily Bedouin and herding communities in Area C.

Across from Qa‘abna’s home, young men were tearing down animal pens and houses, loading salvaged equipment onto trucks. Like other Bedouin families in the Jordan Valley, Ras Ein Al-Auja’s residents are originally refugees from the Naqab, expelled in 1948; they moved here from Masafer Yatta some 30 years ago after purchasing the land, and are now preparing to leave once again.

“We’re going because the settlers never stop attacking us,” said Abu Taleb Al-Omari, 75, as relatives rushed around him trying to take apart what remained of their home before nightfall. “They stole all my sheep about a year ago. They threatened to kill us, chased us, beat us. In the end, they said they would slaughter us here if we didn’t leave.”

According to Al-Omari, settlers from the new outpost blocked children from reaching their school, chasing them with ATVs and forcing them to take a long, dangerous detour. “That’s how they drive us out,” he said. “Their goal is to remove us from this land, even though it’s registered in the land registry. We went to [the settlement of] Sha‘ar Binyamin and filed a police complaint, but nothing came of it.”

As in evacuations in the Naqab, residents here set fire to some of the structures left behind, hoping to prevent settlers from taking them over. In one house, stripped down to its frame, a young man lit a bed and a sofa; they burned slowly, filling the empty shell with smoke.

By sunset, almost nothing remained to suggest people had lived for three decades in that area of Ras Ein Al-Auja, aside from a few skeletal shack frames and concrete slabs. For now, many families remain on their land, but within days, the rest of the village may be entirely emptied — bringing to an end what had been the largest herding community in Area C, and the last one still standing in the southern Jordan Valley.

‘Nothing is harder than dismantling your own home’

Muhammad Eshaq Rashid, 55, was born in Ras Ein Al-Auja after his family was pushed out of Masafer Yatta, and has lived here his entire life. As relatives loaded their belongings onto a small truck, tears ran down his face. “I’ve never cried in my life until today,” he told +972. 

“We lived here peacefully for all these years, even with the army nearby. There were no problems. But since the settlers came, everything has changed.”

“There is nothing harder than dismantling your own home,” said Husseini Rashid, 40, as he hoisted sheep onto a truck. “We were expelled from Masafer Yatta in 1967 and came here. Now it’s happening again — this is a Nakba.” 

According to Rashid, settlers told residents earlier this week: “You lost. Wherever you go, we’ll come. There is no future.” They were given just a few days to leave.

“I knew it would come,” he added. “It’s the same groups in the south and the north [of the West Bank]. They have a plan, and the government is with them. If they decide something, it happens. They start with the small communities and move on to the larger ones. They work only through force. It’s not just the settlers — they work together with the army.”

Indeed, although settlers have led the expulsions in Ras Ein Al-Auja, they would not have occurred without the involvement of the Israeli army, police, and the Civil Administration. Israeli officials have failed to prevent the establishment of outposts or to intervene against violence, livestock theft, and harassment, and regularly dismiss residents’ and activists’ complaints as false. But they have also directly participated in the ethnic cleansing, joining settler raids and arresting residents. 

“For two years we’ve suffered daily from settlers, and no one stops it — not the police, not anyone,” Naif Ziad, 47, told +972. “We’re exhausted. We have nowhere to go. People are scattering to relatives, wherever they can.”

‘We still don’t know where we’ll go’

In the days after the first wave of departures, more families living near the outpost in the center of  Ras Ein Al-Auja were forced out as settlers continued to roam the village with their herds and vehicles. Several households farther away soon followed. According to activists, dozens more have fled this week, leaving only about two-thirds of the community still present — and half of those already packing their belongings.

Throughout this period, the settlers (many of them minors) escalated their incursions, repeatedly driving their herds into pens Palestinians had just abandoned, even as activists tried to push them back. No Israeli soldiers or police were present at any point; they typically arrive only after settlers call them in.

Kifah Rashid, 33, lives farther from the newly established outpost, but she realizes the settlers will not stop until the entire village is erased. “We know they’ll come for us too,” she told +972 on Jan. 13. “We’ve already started dismantling the houses. We still don’t know where we’ll go — the life we’re about to live won’t be our life, and it can’t be replaced.”

She stood with her children in the rain beside a makeshift structure where several family members had gathered. Around them lay scattered piles of metal sheets, iron rods, and plastic tarps. “The children fell asleep in the cold today,” she said. “The rooms we set up to protect them from the rain are leaking.

“At the village school, the girls had good teachers they were attached to; now they’ve left,” Kifah added. Since the start of the war, she said, workers have been unemployed, her family’s sheep were taken by settlers, and there is no way to make a living. “How are we supposed to survive?”

Some of the residents who left on Jan. 8, like displaced families from other communities, tried to resettle in an open area near Jericho in Area A, knowing that there was not any place in Area C of the West Bank— under full Israeli control — settlers or the Civil Administration would not reach. They purchased several structures there and pitched tents around them. But even there, they found no refuge.

On Jan. 9, dozens of Palestinian Authority security personnel raided the site, confiscated equipment, and dismantled the tents, claiming the evacuees were not permitted to settle on the land.

A feeling of failure

Since March 2024, dozens of activists from “Looking the Occupation in the Eye” and other protective presence groups have maintained 24/7 shifts in Ras Ein Al-Auja, stationed both in a structure at the center of the village and alongside families in their homes. They have tried to physically block daily harassment, theft, intimidation, and home invasions, often facing violence and arrests by soldiers themselves. In every interview I conducted with residents, they said that without the activists’ presence, they would have left long ago.

Doron Meinert, with “Looking the Occupation in the Eye,” recalled a visit on Jan. 3 by a senior army commander who had previously pledged to distance settlers from the village — a promise he did not keep. “He saw people dismantling the village and wrote to me that as long as there’s no violence, it’s not something they deal with,” Meinert said.

“Later he came back and spoke differently with the families and activists, promising to take care of everything. But for those who already left, it’s too late. As we’ve seen in other communities, once people dismantle their homes, they don’t rebuild them.”

The expulsion illustrates a broader reality in the West Bank: once settlers set a goal, it is usually only a matter of time before it is achieved. The limited means available to residents — and to the activists who stand with them — can at best delay the outcome. Past cases show that even when Palestinians own the land and courts issue orders allowing their return, displaced communities are rarely able to go back. Settler violence continues unchecked, and in Area C, rebuilding is effectively prohibited, even when structures were only temporarily dismantled or partially destroyed by settlers.

Today, around 200 Israeli activists arrived in the village to protest the expulsion and express solidarity with the residents. During the demonstration, Religious Zionist Party MK Zvi Sukkot — a former hilltop youth settler himself — arrived at the site, walked around the village, and argued with activists who called him a “terrorist.” In a brief interview he gave at the site, he claimed that “the residents were not expelled — they are leaving because Mekorot [Israel’s national water company] cut off their water.” Later, police and army forces arrived and escorted Sukkot out of the village.

“There’s a feeling of failure in the face of people leaving,” Meinert said. “On the other hand, we’re doing everything we can so that some families remain. The struggle isn’t over yet.”

A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.