Majd Jawad
Middle East Eye / August 13, 2026
The spring that once sustained life here has run dry, as Bedouin families flee Israeli violence and resource theft.
Ramallah – Haitham Rashaidh was among the last to leave his home near Ein al-Auja, a natural spring and waterfall north of Jericho in the occupied West Bank.
His family packed up their tents and heaped all their belongings onto a tractor, and then began the two-hour journey across difficult terrain towards Al-Balqa, a sparsely populated area of the Jordan Valley, where they set up camp alongside their displaced neighbours.
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Leaving Ein al-Auja felt like losing a part of themselves, Rashaidh explained mournfully. Water once flowed here in a torrent, estimated at thousands of cubic metres daily – yet today, the ground is parched, the spring that once supported a Bedouin community of more than 100 families reduced to a trickle.
Palestinians used to treasure Ein al-Auja as an oasis of calm in a region under siege. But Israel’s diversion of water, alongside continuing settler attacks, ultimately made life in the community untenable.
“We did not leave the first time they tried to push us out,” Rashaidh told Middle East Eye. “We came back, rebuilt what we could, and tried to continue our lives.
“But it didn’t stop,” he said. “Every time we returned, the pressure came back stronger: more restrictions, more attacks, less access to water.”
This past January, having reached their breaking point, Rashaidh’s family uprooted their lives to Balqa, a tiny Bedouin encampment with no public services. It takes more than two hours to reach the nearest city centre from here, and Rashaidh acknowledges with visible sorrow that his children are no longer able to attend school.
The predicament facing his community has escalated sharply over the last couple of years, since the events of 7 October 2023 began redefining Palestinian life across the occupied territories.
Before the Gaza war, forced displacement from the Ein al-Auja area had been minimal, with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) recording only two settler attacks resulting in casualties or property damage between 2017 and 2023.
But since early 2024, several new illegal Jewish settlement outposts have been established in the area – and the attacks have consequently ramped up, with at least 38 documented cases last year.
“Access to water has been especially compromised; settlers believed to be from these settlement outposts have repeatedly cut or damaged water pipes connected to [Ein al-Auja] spring, blocked access roads used for water collection and delivery, emptied households’ water tanks, and intimidated or assaulted residents and herders attempting to collect water, severely undermining livelihoods,” Ocha noted in a January report.
In one documented case earlier this year, 26 families, comprising 124 people, were forcibly displaced amid ongoing violence by armed settlers and Israeli troops.
“It felt like they were testing how long we could endure,” Rashaidh said. “In the end, it wasn’t one incident that forced us out, but the repetition of everything, over and over again – until staying became impossible.”
Sustained decline
The dramatic and sustained decline of Ein al-Auja spring in recent years mirrors the disappearance of the surrounding Palestinian community. Its water flow, historically estimated at more than 1,000 cubic metres per hour – and potentially double that in rainy seasons – has dropped by 50 to 70 percent in recent years, and sometimes runs entirely dry, according to Ayman Abu Zaher, an environmental researcher who monitors the local water system.
As one of the region’s most historically significant springs, Ein al-Auja has come under increasing pressure from both climate change and from wells drilled nearby, Abu Zaher told MEE. In dry years, reduced groundwater recharge, combined with intensive pumping, has limited the spring’s flow.
The region’s hydrogeology is composed of two main groundwater layers, Abu Zaher explained: a shallow aquifer, typically accessed through wells ranging from 70-100 metres in depth, and a much deeper aquifer that feeds Ein al-Auja spring.
Historically, three state-managed wells in the Ein al-Auja area extended 500-600 metres underground – but over the past three decades, Israeli authorities deepened them to nearly 1,000 metres, and added a fourth, Abu Zaher said.
Collectively, he estimates that these wells extract between four and six million cubic metres of water annually from the deep aquifer that feeds Ein al-Auja spring. This water is then diverted to Jewish settlements, instead of supplying nearby Palestinian communities.
The imbalance is reinforced by the limited capacity of Palestinian-controlled water sources in the same area. Abu Zaher estimates that there are about a dozen Palestinian wells locally, but they are “shallow and insufficient”.
“The water they produce is not enough for agriculture and is increasingly unsuitable for irrigation, which pushes the area towards a trajectory of desertification,” he said.
Whereas irrigated orchards and cultivated fields once covered more than 30,000 dunums (3,000 hectares) in the Ein al-Auja area, only around 3,000 dunums remain actively irrigated today, Abu Zaher said.
For families who have been displaced from their homes and now live in tents in nearby areas such as Balqa, this transformation is not abstract; it is deeply embedded in the routines of everyday survival.
Among those most affected are women, who often bear the responsibility of securing water for their households. When they lived next to Ein al-Auja, they could fill their small plastic containers at the waterfall, quickly gathering enough for a single day’s needs.
Now, they must walk several kilometres under the scorching sun in search of water tankers or distribution points, often returning home with empty containers when supplies are unavailable or Israeli forces turn them away. Water rationing has become part of their daily reality.
“We were forced to buy large quantities of water due to the shortage in the spring,” Naifa Zaied, who was displaced to Balqa early this year, told MEE. “But in the last year, the army even prevented us from buying it. Water tankers were barred from reaching us.”
Water shortages have affected nearly every aspect of life, she said, with families rationing water for drinking, cooking, washing, and caring for livestock.
“We used to have water close to us. Today, every litre has become a struggle,” she said. “Sometimes we wait for water tankers that never arrive, and we are forced to save water for drinking before anything else.”
‘We are cut off’
The devastating impacts of the water crisis extend to local wildlife and pastoral communities across the Jordan Valley, where Palestinians have reported widespread livestock losses amid repeated settler attacks, theft and confiscation.
Movement restrictions and a loss of grazing access have worsened their plight. In one of the largest recent incidents, residents of the Ein al-Auja area reported that Jewish settlers stole around 1,500 sheep and goats during a raid on the community early last year, dealing a massive blow to local herding families. The following day, dozens of animal carcasses were found in the area.
The decimation of their traditional livelihoods has left many Bedouins with no choice but to seek jobs in nearby Jewish settlements, or to take on seasonal, low-paid work within the Israeli economy. The land that once sustained them is now accessible only as a site of labour, with no job protections or employment rights.
In Rashaidh’s case, before the family’s displacement, his primary livelihood was agriculture and livestock. Today, he works as a labourer on a date palm farm near Balqa.
“It is a highly risky environment, without work permits, and many of us are injured or arrested while going to or returning from work,” he said, noting that the commute to work is shaped by dangerous checkpoints, surveillance and the ever-present threat of arrest.
The fragmentation of this community, like many others across the occupied West Bank, has also contributed to the weakening of social support networks.
“Everything has become far. Even reaching basic services takes hours now,” one displaced resident living in Balqa told MEE, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of Israeli reprisals. “We are cut off from the places we used to depend on.”
A displaced parent from Balqa, who also requested anonymity, highlighted the impacts on education: “My children used to walk to school easily. Now they wake up very early, and still sometimes cannot arrive, because the road is long and unsafe.
“Some days, they simply stay home.”
Tourists under siege
Back in Ein al-Auja, where the cascading waterfall and surrounding mountain trails have long made it a natural attraction for visitors from within Palestine and beyond, it is not just locals who fear settler violence. Tourists have been targeted, too.
In January 2023, an international group of hikers – including American, Italian and French tourists – were confronted by a group of armed settlers, who reportedly attacked them with clubs and pepper spray.
“We were pushed back towards the hills and essentially surrounded,” one Palestinian participant told MEE, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of Israeli repercussions.
“We were beaten. Two women were injured, one Italian and one Palestinian, while the rest of the group tried to reach a safer distance.”
It took hours for Israeli forces to arrive to secure the group’s exit, according to the Palestinian participant.
Such incidents further chill an industry that has been deeply affected by the ongoing conflict. Tourism across the occupied West Bank took a significant hit after the outbreak of the Gaza war in 2023, with official data showing millions of dollars in lost revenue as visitor numbers have plummeted.
On weekends, the roads that once carried families, tour buses, and groups of hikers towards the Jordan Valley’s springs are noticeably emptier. Vendors who used to set up plastic chairs and tea stands along the way speak of long hours with no customers.
“We used to wait for buses coming from the northern and southern West Bank every weekend, but now traffic has become almost non-existent,” Muhammad Taha, a vendor from Jericho, told MEE.
Today, he and his colleagues watch the landscape instead of serving it.
Court battle
Meanwhile, for the families forced to flee the Ein al-Auja area, a court battle has become their last hope.
In a final attempt to halt their displacement, residents last year petitioned the High Court, calling on Israeli authorities to dismantle the illegal outposts encroaching on their land and to facilitate their return home.
“We called for judicial intervention to stop the effective disappearance of our communities under settler violence and the expansion of surrounding pastoral outposts,” Hassan Mleihat, the general supervisor of Al-Baidar, a local organisation that advocates for Bedouin rights, told MEE.
In arguments before the court, the state denied the existence of any formal evacuation orders, arguing that there was no government policy in place to prevent residents from returning – despite the realities on the ground, which many Palestinians fear have made their expulsion irreversible.
This past February, the court ordered Israeli authorities to help families return to their homes around Ein al-Auja spring, and to report back within 60 days on the actions it was taking to ensure their security.
By April, with the deadline unmet, the petitioners asked the high court to compel the state to carry out its obligations. The state is still contesting the requirements, telling the court that there is no basis to station a permanent security force in the area.
This case is by no means unique. Palestinian petitions demanding the prevention of evictions or the dismantling of outposts are rejected or stalled in Israeli courts as a matter of routine, with the state granted broad discretion over land management, even when long-term residents are proven to have lived there for decades.
And by the time the Ein al-Auja case reached the court, the last families had already left.
Back in Balqa, Rashaidh cites the importance of regional and global solidarity in the face of an ever-present and growing settler threat.
“No one leaves their land willingly, and that is one of the hardest things in life,” he said. “But to stand alone is not enough. We defended our land alone, and we lost our land, our livestock and our water. If we do not stand together, we will all lose.”
Resorting to the courts was not a strategic choice, Mleihat said, but rather a last-ditch attempt to assert the rights of Palestinians in the face of a rapidly changing reality outside the courtroom, where “the place had already been emptied”.
Indeed, Ein al-Auja is no longer what it once was.
The spring that flowed abundantly in years past has been reduced to intermittent streams of water. The soil is dry and cracked. The trees are fewer. The air is quieter.
There are no children’s voices, no herds moving.
Only the wind, passing through a place that was once alive.
Majd Jawad is a freelance journalist based in Ramallah, originally from the destroyed Palestinian village of Zir’in in the Jezreel Valley
