'Yesterday is better than today': three years of expulsion empty the Jordan Valley

On a barren ridge called al-Awsaj, families who once grazed sheep across open hills now count their world in metres. One father says his family, which ranged ten or fifteen kilometres with its flock, cannot walk five hundred metres from the house. His sheep, once about three hundred, are down to roughly a hundred, fed on bought fodder because the grazing land is, in practice, forbidden ground. The ridge was barely inhabited three years ago. Today it holds displaced Bedouin families from emptied villages, overlooked by a settler outpost on the hill above the highway.

This is not one eviction. By the United Nations humanitarian office's count, at least 130 Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank have been fully or partly displaced by settler attacks and related restrictions since January 2023, uprooting more than 6,400 people. Nearly four-fifths of those displaced by settler violence in 2023 were pushed out after 7 October that year. The Palestinian commission that tracks colonisation counts almost 15,000 settler attacks since then, with 66 Palestinians killed by settlers. The humanitarian office puts the tempo at almost seven attacks a day this year, more than double the rate before October 2023. A joint study by two Israeli groups, Peace Now and Kerem Navot, found that settler farm outposts had seized roughly 18 per cent of the West Bank by the end of 2025, an area larger than the Gaza Strip. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported 19 outposts legalised by the present government after Palestinians nearby were violently expelled.

The method has been described in public by Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who holds wide powers over the territory through the defence ministry's settlement administration. At the September inauguration of a new settlement built where a Bedouin community stood east of Ramallah, he praised the outpost farmers who came first, saying in substance that a farm is established, land is taken, a community follows, and the line moves on. An Israeli researcher who maps settlement growth says the official account leaves out the expulsion that makes the sequence possible. Displaced residents describe army, police and settlers working as one. A West Bank protection coordinator calls al-Awsaj an internally displaced camp with a difference: there is no safe place behind it. Go where you like, she argues, and the pressure follows, in attacks, demolitions or both.

The largest single expulsion was Ras Ein al-Auja, once the biggest Bedouin community in the central Jordan Valley, with more than 600 inhabitants. Humanitarian coordinators once judged its removal unlikely. Repeated attacks from surrounding outposts proved them wrong. What was taken was not only houses. Families speak of schools shut because the Palestinian Authority, starved of tax revenue withheld by Israel for much of three years, cannot pay salaries, of children studying one day and not the next depending on private transport, of flocks thinning and kin scattered so that brothers meet once in six weeks. One displaced herder summed up three years in a single descending line: “Yesterday is better than today. Today is better than tomorrow.”

Israel's authorities had not responded to requests for comment in the reporting underlying this account. Whatever words governments choose, the arithmetic is on the ground: communities erased, outposts legalised, and a herding way of life being compressed, ridge by ridge, towards extinction. The Justice publishes the numbers because numbers, unlike press statements, cannot be talked out of existence.