‘Families told me they have no choice but to leave,’ says our chief Middle East correspondent, Emma Graham-Harrison, reporting from the village of ‘Ein al ‘Auja in the occupied West Bank.
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Palestinian Bedouin families living there were forced to leave in January after years of persistent harassment and violence by Israeli settlers. This means that a large area in the southern Jordan Valley now has no Palestinian residents.
The project to displace Palestinians is being carried out by violent extremists backed by far-right cabinet ministers. However the annexation of this area is a decades old political project in Israel, with cross-party backing.
On Sunday, the Israeli security cabinet took actions to tighten Israel’s grip on the West Bank, including extending Israeli control to areas currently run by the Palestinian authority.
Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the changes were aimed at ‘burying the idea of a Palestinian state’.
Across the West Bank, settlers have seized more than 18% of the land designated for a future Palestinian state, said Dror Etkes, founder of the settlement monitoring group Kerem Navot, with very few repercussions. A map published by a settler news outlet to celebrate the forced displacement of one Palestinian village showed an aspirational Israeli-controlled area covering nearly 400 sq km just in the Jordan valley. That is an area bigger than Gaza.
Watch as Graham-Harrison explains the story behind the ethnic cleansing of this village and how annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank is becoming a reality, endangering the future of a Palestinian state.
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