Dalia Hatuqa
Jewish Currents / February 3, 2025
By establishing dozens of new pastoral outposts, Jewish settlers are hastening land seizures in the Jordan Valley.
On October 12th, 2023, just five days after the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel and the start of Israel’s war on Gaza—which experts have termed a genocide—a group of armed Jewish settlers arrived at the Palestinian herding village of Wadi al-Seeq in Area C, the part of the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. Protected by the Israeli army, the settlers beat the 200 residents of the village in broad daylight. According to Haaretz, some of the residents were “stripped to their underwear,” “photographed handcuffed,” “urinated on,” burned with cigarettes, and subjected to sexual violence. Speaking to Jewish Currents, Abderrahman Kaabneh, Wadi al-Seeq’s mukhtar (mayor), recalled that the settlers then gave residents one hour to leave the area. The entire herding community quickly took its flocks and fled on foot until it reached a strip of land west of the village, near the city of Ramallah. Fifteen months on, the people of Wadi al-Seeq remain displaced, living in small tents on lands only a few miles away from their homes, but with little hope of return.
In displacing the herders of Wadi al-Seeq, Jewish settlers relied on an increasingly prevalent tactic of dispossession: a pastoral outpost. Unlike built-up settlements that can take years to establish, pastoral settlements often sprout quickly, starting off as a settler caravan or a farming shed and eventually growing to take over much of the surrounding land. Kaabneh recalled how Israeli settlers used just such a settlement to lay the groundwork for their October attack on his village, arriving in February 2023 with one tent and several cars to establish a farm outpost. “We were surprised because the land is solely agricultural and pastoral,” he said. But settlers kept coming regardless, and “soon the outpost had snowballed into ten tents, cattle, and about 400 sheep.” The settlers began to graze their livestock in the village, and to use the road Palestinians had paved with the help of European funding, even though they had their own infrastructure. They also began carrying out attacks on the residents of Wadi al-Seeq, all of which helped build momentum for the emptying of the village on October 12th—effectively bringing 9,000 dunams, or 3.5 square miles, of land under Israeli control.
Pastoral settlements, also known as farm, grazing, or shepherd outposts, are not new: Israelis have long used them as a way to seize Palestinian land. But while the tactic was deployed intermittently in the 1980s and ’90s, its use has multiplied in recent decades. Between 2012 and 2022, 66 pastoral outposts were established in Area C. According to Kerem Navot, a group which monitors Israeli land use policy in the West Bank, such outposts brought around 94 square miles of land—almost 7% of Area C—under settlers’ control. Suhail Khalilieh, head of the settlements monitoring department at the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), explained that this vast land transfer has taken place because “pastoral settlements are built with the idea that they can extend to wherever the herder goes. This is how they have proliferated, and now take up thousands of dunams.” (A thousand dunams equals approximately 0.4 square miles.) These land takeovers have accelerated since October 2023. Between that month and July 2024, at least 25 new settlements, most of them agricultural, were established in Area C. According to Khalilieh, such outposts have already led to the dispossession of “no less than 40 Palestinian Bedouin communities,” showing them to be a very effective means to Israel’s true end in the West Bank: “To control more land by expelling Palestinian farmers and herders.”
As settler rampages become more frequent amidst Israel’s recent “Operation Iron Wall”—under which the army has laid siege to the Jenin refugee camp, attacked Tulkarem, and killed at least 20 Palestinians across the occupied West Bank—this goal of expulsion is becoming ever clearer. Indeed, Kaabneh noted that the settlers who dispossessed his community had been explicit about it: “The settlers told us there is no place for us in Wadi al-Seeq, and not even in Area B of the West Bank [which is subject to Israeli security but is under Palestinian administrative control],” he said. “They told us to go to Jordan, and they even offered us money to move there.” Kaabneh emphasized that what had happened in Wadi al-Seeq was thus no aberration, but “all part of a long-term plan to push us out and take over our land.”
Nearly 65,000 Palestinians live in the Jordan Valley, many of them descendants of Bedouin communities who were expelled from their lands in 1948 in a mass displacement event remembered as the Nakba (“catastrophe”). Known as the West Bank’s bread basket, the Jordan Valley is a fertile and sparsely populated strip of land that could play an important role in future Palestinian economic and agricultural development. However, in practice Israeli policies have rendered 85% of the area off-limits to Palestinians. Almost 50% of the Valley is designated as Israeli “state land,” while other plots are classified as “closed military zones” and nature reserves. Yet other areas have been given to settlement regional councils, which are the municipal authorities that administer small settlements with government funding. These land designations have routinely enabled Israeli authorities to restrict Palestinians’ access to the area’s water resources and infrastructure, and to demolish their homes on the grounds that they are “illegally” constructed. Together with rising settler violence, such measures have displaced growing numbers of Palestinians from the Valley: Between January 2022 and September 2023, 28 Palestinian herding communities comprising 1,105 people left their homes in the area—numbers that have grown exponentially since then.
Pastoral settlements have fuelled this process by giving settlers a home base from which to expand the parcel of land taken, inflict violence on the Palestinian communities who live there, and restrict their access to land and water, endangering their livelihoods. According to Kerem Navot, “each of the farm outposts is part of a regional system . . . acting in sync from different directions to seize maximum possible territory.” In some cases, pastoral settler councils have done this by confiscating hundreds of livestock belonging to Palestinians, claiming they are “stray animals” or invoking the council’s grazing bylaws. “Any animal that strays from the confines of the village is made to pay a hefty fine to have it returned to [the owner],” said Hassan Mleihat, who oversees the non-governmental Al-Baidar Organization for the Defense of Bedouin Rights. “This is part and parcel of a greater plan to push these communities into poverty and eventually into exile.”
Even though pastoral outposts are unauthorized constructions not formally recognized by the Israeli government, their activities are often supported by the state. Certain government agencies and politicians have long backed such outposts, leading to many outposts being retroactively legalized. As Israel sought to use the war on Gaza as cover to expel Area C Palestinians, this support increased in the form of Israel declaring thousands of dunams of West Bank territory as “state land” that could then be settled; building new roads for settlements; and providing a budget and infrastructure even to outposts it deemed illegal. In May 2024, it was reported in local Israeli media that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, had ordered government ministries and other authorities to begin funding 70 illegal outposts, construct public buildings in them, and connect them to water and electricity networks and other infrastructure. Additionally, Amana, a state-backed settler organization which has approximately $160 million in assets, has supported pastoral outposts by providing them with workers and equipment to get set up and flourish. Specifically, Amana has connected outposts with water and electricity, granted Israelis loans to establish new herder settlements, and even hired a full-time person whose role is to be a “farm coordinator.” Amana secretary general Ze’ev Hever—a convicted member of the Israeli terrorist organization Jewish Underground—boasted at an online conference last year that “thanks to pastoral farms, in the last three years we have reached the most remote areas. Today [the] pastures cover almost twice as much land as built-up communities.”
This trend appears set to continue, if not worsen, with the start of the new Trump administration in Washington, DC. The administration has already expressed interest in extending Israeli sovereignty to major settlement blocs like Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel, and Gush Etzion, as outlined in Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan. It has also signalled openness to allowing the incorporation of the Jordan Valley into Israel proper, and to pressuring other countries to recognize Israeli sovereignty over annexed areas, as seen with the Golan Heights in 2019. Trump’s return is additionally set to free up Jewish settler organizations from the meagre US scrutiny they have recently come under. For instance, in November 2024, Amana was sanctioned by the US for being “a key part of the Israeli extremist settlement movement.” But even such sanctions, which were primarily symbolic, are now being reversed, giving settlers an even freer rein to push Palestinians out.
For Palestinians in the Jordan Valley, this means the continuation of a long history of dispossession. The families of Wadi al-Seeq are descendants of refugees from Tel al-Sabe in the Naqab (Negev) Desert who were expelled in 1948, and were displaced several more times before finding a home in the village in the 1980s. Now, even that home has been taken. “What happened to us [on October 12th, 2023] is forced displacement. We’re living through a new Nakba,” Kaabneh said. A week after the expulsion, the Israeli army briefly allowed the residents of Wadi al-Seeq to return and collect their belongings. But when they went back, Kaabneh said, everything had been either destroyed or stolen: “The houses were ransacked, tents taken, clothes torn, children’s things broken, animal feed dumped on the ground, and water tanks stolen. We couldn’t find anything to take. We left empty-handed.” Now, the residents of the emptied village are living in an increasingly untenable exile. Prior to its depopulation, Wadi al-Seeq relied heavily on livestock farming, with some 98% of the families herding animals or working the land; now, they are watching their livestock die from malnutrition due to the lack of pastures for grazing. The village used to have access to 50 or 60 wells and didn’t have to pay for water, but today, they pay 50 shekels (about $14) for every cubic meter of water they buy. “We are on the edge of an abyss,” Kaabneh said of these living conditions, “and if things remain as they are, if they don’t improve, we will sink.”
Dalia Hatuqa is a journalist who specializes in Palestinian and Israeli affairs