Ruth Michaelson, Sufian Taha & Quique Kierszen
The Observer / August 10, 2024
The Nawajas saved for 15 years to build their house. Now it is razed, along with over 2,000 more since 7 October, under a huge expansion of illegal Jewish settlements
When Israeli security forces suddenly arrived with bulldozers and a demolition team to tear down Mahmoud Mahmud Jibril Nawaja’s house, they came with little explanation.
“This land does not belong to you,” the officer in charge told him as he handed Nawaja a demolition order. They accused him of building on land without a permit, although his family has owned the plot for generations. Nawaja had applied for one, providing the land deeds and other ownership documents, but had heard nothing from the authorities for years, until they arrived that day in June.
The Nawajas, a family of seven, moved into a tent next to the rubble of their destroyed home, with the tracks of the bulldozers still visible in the earth around them. The same security forces soon returned and demolished the tent one morning as they ate breakfast.
“These demolitions are equal to death. They are killing us, but just in a different way,” said Nawaja.
He and his family are just some of the 2,155 Palestinians the UN estimates have been displaced across the West Bank in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks, when Hamas militants attacked towns and kibbutzim around Gaza, killing 1,200 people and taking almost 250 hostage.
As an Israeli assault has ripped Gaza apart, killing almost 40,000 people, the West Bank has suffered another form of sweeping violence, including mass displacement, settler attacks and a marked land grab by the Israeli government.
In June, leaked comments by Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, described his efforts to annex the West Bank entirely. “My life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state,” he said.
Successive governments under the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have allowed settlement expansion and undermined the landmark 1993 Oslo accords, which divide the West Bank into three sections. Roughly 18% of the territory, namely densely-populated urban centres, are known as Area A, under the full control of the Palestinian Authority, which has administrative but not security control of Area B.
Area C, which makes up an estimated 60% of the West Bank, is under the control of the Israeli civil administration, and the site of a growing number of Israeli settlements, all illegal under international law.
The Israeli authorities advanced plans for more than 12,000 settlement housing units last year, according to Israeli research group Peace Now, while Smotrich and members of the civil administration told a meeting of the foreign affairs and defence committee in the Knesset that 95% of building permit applications submitted by Palestinians in Area C were rejected. Since October, the Israeli government has claimed over 24,000 acres of land in the West Bank as under state control, the largest since the Oslo accords.
Settler activists see their mission as claiming more land by building outposts in the West Bank, confident that the Israeli government will later provide infrastructure and possibly legalize the settlement entirely.
“It’s a competition,” said Daniella Weiss, a settler recently sanctioned by Canada. Her method is to target areas of the West Bank claimed by the Israeli state for new outposts. Critics and supporters of settlements both describe the construction as creating “facts on the ground”, marking a new reality that is hard to remove once built.
Peace Now, which tracks settlement expansion, said Netanyahu’s government “has invested immense resources in creating facts on the ground” in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks. “This includes expanding settlements in the West Bank and accelerating annexation processes, with the aim of eliminating the possibility of a two-state solution and peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” they said.
The Nawaja family had saved for 15 years to build their dream home, cherishing every piece of limestone that made up its white walls, down to the window frames. Nawaja’s wife, Rihan, had sold all her gold jewelry from her dowry to pitch in a third of the money.
“When the kids learned we wouldn’t have a house any more, in one minute it meant their dreams and hopes being destroyed in front of their eyes … Our memories were buried under the rubble,” she said.
Palestinian communities across remote rural areas such as Jawaya in the south Hebron hills, where the Nawajas live, know who governs each tract of land, down to the last stone. Nawaja pointed at neighbouring houses, including one where the land under half the building is under the domain of the Israeli civil administration, while the other half of the house falls partially under nominal Palestinian control.
Yonatan Mizrahi, a researcher with Peace Now, said: “It’s clear that the Israeli civil administration doesn’t want Palestinians to be there.” The difference in the number of building permits that the civil administration issues to Israeli settlers versus Palestinians over decades makes this plain. “You can count the number of permits that Palestinians have received in the last two decades, it’s very little,” he said.
COGAT, the Israeli body which oversees the civil administration, did not respond to requests for comment.
Next to the highways and Israeli military checkpoints that cover the West Bank, the fruits of a decades-long construction boom are visible from the billboards that advertise luxury apartments or large mansions in settlements. Some of the real estate is now selling for prices that were unimaginable several years ago, fueled by massive state investment in infrastructure. In 2023, Smotrich’s intervention ensured the government would provide £733m in upgrading and paving new roads in the West Bank for the following two years.
Yehuda Shaul, of the research and advocacy group Ofek (the Israeli Centre for Public Affairs), termed the Israeli state’s decades of investments in West Bank infrastructure as a project to “suburbanise” the territory. The growing network of highways to connect even the most remote settlements to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv attracts settlers who might not be as openly ideological as Weiss and her followers, he explained.
“Until today, the settlements are not a viable economic project – about 60% of the workforce there commutes daily to Israel,” he said. “So highway networks are the most important thing for the settlement project in that sense … it normalizes this project to the average Israeli, and the way to do that is to suburbanize.”
Data compiled by Peace Now shows that since 7 October the Israeli government, in efforts again spearheaded by Smotrich, recognised 70 outposts previously considered illegal even by Israeli government standards, supplying them with funding and infrastructure such as electricity or water. The cabinet also approved establishment of five new settlements, while settlers established dozens of new outposts and paved tens of kilometres of new roads to expand their own land grab, seizing further territory from Palestinians.
While the US and others including the UK have sanctioned individual settlers as well as outposts in recent months, so far only Canadian sanctions have targeted Amana, a company involved in the construction of illegal outposts. The company is part of a small group of determined settlers and players whose aim is to “create facts on the ground”, according to a previous Peace Now report.
For the Nawajas the future remains deeply uncertain, as they figure out how to live in the shade of a tented open building with a direct view of the rubble of their home. From speaking to others in the village whose homes were also demolished, they believe it is forbidden for them to even touch the tangled heap of metal rebar and white slabs, let alone clear it.
Nawaja, who works in construction, has been unemployed ever since 7 October because the Israeli authorities stopped granting Palestinians in the West Bank permits to enter Israel for work, stifling the construction industry. For now, the family spend their days attempting to reestablish a normal life from a tent, surrounded by olive trees, the hot summer winds blowing air inside. Rihan, describing the conditions, said simply: “You drink the dust.”
Ruth Michaelson is a journalist based in Istanbul
Sufian Taha in Jerusalem
Quique Kierszenbaum is a Jerusalem based reporter and photographer who has been covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories since the Second Intifada
