By Ali Sawafta and James Mackenzie
AL-MUGHAYYIR, West Bank (Reuters) – Fatima Abu Naim, a mother of five, lives in a hillside cave in the occupied West Bank, under increasing pressure from Jewish settlers who, she says, try to steal her family’s sheep and come by regularly to tell her and her husband to leave.
“They say, ‘Go, I want to live here’,” she said.
The same stark message from settlers has been heard across the West Bank with increasing frequency since the start of the war in Gaza 18 months ago, notably in the largely empty hillsides where the Bedouin graze their flocks.
According to a report last week by the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA, nearly half of over 40 settler attacks documented at the end of March and early April hit Bedouin and herding communities, “including incidents involving arson, break-ins, and destruction of critical livelihood sources”.
The Israeli police did not respond to requests for comment.
The West Bank, an area of some 5,600 square kilometres that sits between Jordan and Israel, has been at the heart of the decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since it was seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
Under military occupation ever since, but seen by Palestinians as one of the core parts of a future independent state, it has been steadily cut up by fast-growing Israeli settlements clusters that now spread throughout the territory.
Israeli settlements are deemed by most countries to be illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this. Ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government talk openly about annexing the area completely.
Sparsely populated upland areas have come under increasing pressure from outposts of settlers who have themselves begun grazing large flocks of sheep on the hillsides used by Bedouin and other herders.
According to a joint report last week by Israeli rights groups Peace Now and Kerem Navot, settlers have used such shepherding outposts to seize around 78,600 hectares of land, or 14% of the total area of the West Bank, harassing and intimidating nearby communities to expel them.
The report quotes documents from the attorney general’s office to show that around 8,000 hectares of West Bank land have been allocated for grazing by Israeli settlers in such outposts, who receive significant funding and other material support including vehicles from the government.
“The Bedouin communities are in may ways the most vulnerable,” said Yigal Bronner, an activist on the board of Kerem Navot who has monitored settler abuses for years and who says the problem has become more severe since the war in Gaza.
“If they don’t get the message, then the settlers come to their homes, they beat people up, they steal their sheep.”
Without being able to graze their animals, many Bedouin cannot afford to maintain their flocks, leaving them with no way of earning their living, he said.
“People are really, really struggling to make ends meet.”
“THIS IS OUR LAND”
The windswept hillside where Abu Naim’s family lives in an encampment set up around two rock caves just outside the village of Al-Mughayir, is typical of the rugged terrain along the spine of the West Bank.
The family has already been forced to move from the Jordan Valley, where Bedouin communities have faced repeated attacks by violent groups of settlers who run flocks of their own.
Now living in their third home this year, she says they have once again faced aggression from intruders who she said recently killed six of her family’s sheep and forced her husband to keep them penned up.
“The problems with the settlers started a year and a half ago, but we’ve only been really harassed for two months now. The goal is to get us out of here,” she said. “The sheep stay in the enclosure. They don’t let them out or anything.”
Abu Naim’s husband, who has confronted the settlers, was arrested this week for a reason she is unaware of. Palestinian and Israeli rights groups say there is effectively no legal redress for the herding communities and the bitterness of the Gaza war has hardened attitudes further.
“This is our land,” said 65 year-old Asher Meth, a West Bank settler who was enjoying an outing at the springs of Ein al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley that the nearby Bedouin community is prevented from accessing.
“And if the state of Israel would wake up, and say ‘Actually, do take the land’ and say ‘This land is now part of Israel’, the Arabs will understand better and move back from trying to kill us.”
A few hundred metres from the spring, in a large Bedouin encampment, 70 year-old Odeh Khalil, has heard the message.
Ever since losing 300 sheep to a raid by settlers last August, he has kept his remaining animals in an enclosure but for the moment, says he is determined to hang on.
“People cannot live without sheep. If we leave, it will be all gone,” he said. “They want to deport us and say this is Israeli property.”
(Editing by Peter Graff)
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