Ras Ein al-Auja, occupied West Bank – When the music stops, Naif Ghawanmeh, 45, takes a seat in front of the fire. The night is chilly, and for the first time in weeks, everything is still for a moment – the Israeli settlers’ celebrations have finished for the day.

But the village of Ras Ein al-Auja, situated in the eastern West Bank’s Jericho governorate, has been all but wiped out.

The village was one of the last Palestinian herding communities in this part of the Jordan Valley, but now, the herders’ sheep have gone – most of them stolen or poisoned by settlers or sold off by villagers under pressure. Their water has been cut off – the Ras Ein spring declared off-limits by the neighbouring settlers for the past year.

And for the past two weeks, most of the community’s homes have been dismantled. Many of the families forced out have burned their furniture before they have left, not wanting to leave it for the invading settlers to use.

“By God, it’s a difficult feeling,” Ghawanmeh says. He is at a loss for words, fidgeting by the fire and at times rubbing his face in misery and exhaustion. ”Everyone left. Not one of them [remains]. They all left.”

Since the start of this year, about 450 of the 650 Palestinian inhabitants of Ras Ein al-Auja have fled their homes – for many the only place they have ever lived – because of violence by Israeli settlers.

Other than the 14 Ghawanmeh families, including a large number of children, who say they have nowhere else to go, the rest are packing up and leaving in the coming days.

This rapid displacement of hundreds of people marks the largest expulsion from a single Bedouin community as a result of Israeli settler violence in modern times – a feat that has elicited taunting celebrations by the encroaching settlers and left lives in ruins for Bedouin families now deprived of shelter, livelihoods and community.

Palestinians dismantle their homes as settler violence forces them out of Ras Ein al-Auja [Courtesy of Looking the Occupation in the Eye]

No land, no sheep, no water, no safety

Until the New Year, the people of Ras Ein al-Auja had held out on their lands despite an onslaught of physical attacks, thefts, threats, movement restrictions and destruction of property by settlers – a state of being that is now all too common for rural Palestinian communities across the West Bank.

Settlers have been enabled by rapid growth in the number of settlement outposts springing up across the West Bank. Settlements and these outposts are illegal under international law. They are also built without the legal permission of Israeli authorities but in practice are largely tolerated and offered protection by Israeli forces, especially in recent years under the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

International law stipulates that occupying powers like Israel must not move their own civilian populations into occupied territories, such as the West Bank, where about 700,000 settlers now reside.

In December, another 19 settler outposts built without government approval were retroactively approved by Israel’s government as official settlements. In all, the number of settlements and outposts in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem has risen by nearly 50 percent since 2022 – from 141 to 210 now.

This recent explosion of settler outposts has given way to a more recent yet even more dangerous phenomenon: shepherding outposts.

Each of these outposts mimics the Bedouins’ way of life but with settlers’ own grazing flocks. They are typically run by a single armed Israeli settler supported by several armed teenagers often funnelled in by government-funded programmes intended to support “at-risk” troubled youth.

Using animal grazing as a means to overrun Palestinian shepherds and seize their lands, such settlers had managed by April 2024 to take over about 14 percent of the West Bank, according to the Israeli NGO Kerem Navot. That figure has increased since then by at least tens of thousands of dunums (1 dunum equals 0.1 hectares and a quarter of an acre), according to Kerem Navot’s founder, Dror Etkes.

The outposts serve as a launching pad for attacks, controls on Palestinian movement and army-coordinated arrests, which have unfolded in places like Ras Ein al-Auja.

Routinely, settlers steal and poison the livestock that Palestinian shepherds, who largely inhabit these remote areas, rely on for their livelihoods. On top of this, settlers are preventing Palestinian shepherds who still have flocks from accessing the grazing lands they’ve always used. Settlers have built fences and engage in intimidation and violence, forcing Palestinians to buy expensive animal fodder to sustain their flocks instead.

Settlers also target the basic resources that Bedouin Palestinians rely on for themselves. Like most other Palestinian communities in the West Bank’s Area C, which Israel fully controls, the people of Ras Ein al-Auja are denied access to electricity by Israeli authorities. The Israeli Civil Administration, which controls zoning and planning in Area C, rarely grants permits for Palestinians to build infrastructure, including connecting to the grid or installing solar energy systems. The solar panels the villagers have put up have frequently been destroyed by settlers.

In addition, these Palestinian shepherding communities, often located in dry regions, are now denied sufficient access to water, including from the lush springs found in Ras Ein al-Auja which once made this village one of the most prosperous of the shepherding communities.

“They prevented us from getting water,” Ghawanmeh says. “They prevented us from bringing the sheep to the water and getting water from the spring.”

A Palestinian home is dismantled except for the floor in Ras Ein al-Auja, nearly all of whose inhabitants have been forced out by violent Israeli settlers [Courtesy of Looking the Occupation in the Eye]

Near-total impunity

Israeli settlers have also been emboldened by a wide-scale armament programme spearheaded at the start of Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the near-total impunity they enjoy when they carry out attacks. While court rulings in favour of Palestinians and against settlers have occurred, they are rare.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 1,800 settler attacks – about five per day – were documented in 2025, resulting in casualties or property damage in about 280 communities across the West Bank, and besting the previous year’s record of settler attacks by more than 350. A total of 240 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 55 children, were killed by Israeli forces or settlers in 2025.

These unprecedented levels of settler and soldier violence alongside the wholesale deprivation of basic resources that rural Palestinians need to survive have led to the erasure of dozens of rural Palestinian communities.

In January and February 2025, the Israeli military forcibly displaced about 40,000 people from refugee camps in Tulkarem and Jenin, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Since the Gaza war began in October 2023, settler violence has forced out 44 Palestinian communities in the West Bank consisting of 2,701 people, nearly half of whom are minors. Thirteen more communities comprising 452 people have been partially transferred. These people end up wherever they can find a place to stay, resulting in fractured communities and families.

Such figures of displacement have not been seen in the West Bank in decades.

Palestinians take their houses apart before fleeing the village of Ras Ein al-Auja in the eastern West Bank [Courtesy of Looking the Occupation in the Eye]

‘Two years of psychological pressure’

For 27 months, Ras Ein al-Auja has been subjected to all of these types of attacks and restrictions. In the past year, multiple Israeli shepherding outposts have sprung up at different corners of the village, which extends for 20,000 dunums (20sq km or 7.7sq miles), and have come increasingly closer to Palestinian homes.

“Two years of psychological pressure at night,” remarks an exhausted Ghawanmeh, who explains the haphazard shifts the men of his village have been taking to keep watch. “If you sleep, the settlers will burn your house.”

Under the pressure of settler attacks, poisonings and thefts, the number of sheep belonging to the community has dwindled from 24,000 to fewer than 3,000. Settler attacks and invasions have become so constant that nine solidarity activists – some progressives from Israel and others from other countries – were required to keep an around-the-clock protective presence.

Without anywhere else to go – and knowing from both settler threats and accounts from displaced relatives elsewhere that settlers would likely follow them anyway – the people of Ras Ein al-Auja had hung on by a thread.

That is, until the latest settler outpost.

Following a pattern seen in other now-displaced Bedouin communities like nearby Mu’arrajat, some of whose inhabitants fled to Ras Ein al-Auja, settlers began erecting outposts directly next to people’s homes at the beginning of the year – right in the middle of the community.

“Life has completely stopped ever since,” Ghawanmeh says. Families have barricaded themselves inside their houses, terrified of the settlers who now routinely graze their flocks just outside Palestinian homes.

Then, the spate of attacks this month compelled far more families to flee and take their remaining sheep with them. Almost three-quarters of the community has now gone. These families are now scattered across the West Bank although most are now in the cramped towns and cities of Area A, which makes up 18 percent of the West Bank and is administered by the Palestinian Authority.

As a result, these communities’ centuries-old traditions as Bedouins are coming to an end.

“There’s a saying among the Bedouins: ‘Upbringing outweighs origins,’” Ghawanmeh says. “It means you were raised here, you eat from the land, you drink from the land, you sleep on the land. You are from it, and it is from you.”

“To leave your house and leave your village”, he adds, “it is very, very, very difficult. But we are forced to.”

The children who remain have been left rudderless and afraid at night as they look at empty, scarred patches of land where once their friends and family lived. “Children are scared, scared that the settlers, the [settler security guards], will come,” Ghawanmeh says.

Al Jazeera requested comment from the Israeli military about the accusations made in this article and to ask for details about what action is being taken to prevent settler attacks on Palestinian communities, including Ras Ein al-Auja. We received no response.

Residents of Ras Ein al-Auja prepare to leave as Israeli settler attacks have intensified on their community, property and livestock this year [Courtesy of Looking the Occupation in the Eye]

‘Even if you sing for me until tomorrow, I won’t be happy’

As the swell of violence and land thefts gives way to a steady exodus of the last remaining villagers, a couple of musicians come to provide some relief from another day of traumatic separation and displacement.

“I hope they’ll feel seen, and I hope they’ll feel happy for at least a few moments and that they can feel like children, even if it’s just for a few minutes,” says Kai Jack, a Norwegian solidarity activist and professional contrabass player.

About a dozen children huddle in plastic chairs in a tin shack that once served as the meeting place for the community’s many families to hear this rare performance. As they listen to a handful of Palestinian folk songs, the children, at first timid, relax and begin to clap and sing to staples like Wein a Ramallah (Where? To Ramallah).

For the first time in weeks, the children even manage to crack a few smiles.

And then, Jack and the accompanying violinist, Amalia Kelter Zeitlin, settle into playing the Palestinian lullaby Yamma Mawil al-Hawa (Mother, What’s with the Wind?). The children’s mothers, looking on from the sidelines, begin to softly sing along:

“My life will continue through sacrifice – for freedom.”

As the song ends, the mothers join the children in rounds of applause. “Beautiful?” Jack asks.

“Very,” replies one of the mothers who explains how she helps her child fall to sleep with this very song. “And it has been so long since they were able to [sleep well].”

As the performance ends and the children crowd around Jack’s enormous bass, a few of the remaining Ghawanmeh brothers retreat outside, their minds unable to rest as they contemplate their inevitable expulsion.

“These songs are for the children,” Naif Ghawanmeh says. “We are tired inside. Very tired.”

One of his small nephews, Ahmed, just 2 years old, begins to sing the chorus of Wein a Ramallah. For one brief moment, the atmosphere is almost festive. But while he is happy the children are relaxing, Ghawanmeh shrugs it off himself.

“By God, look at me,” he says over the fire, which is burning whatever supplies they didn’t want to leave for the settlers to take. “Even if you sing for me until tomorrow, I won’t be happy. You see, I’m tired inside. For two years, I’ve been suffering from oppression, hardship and problems day and night from the settlers.

“I’m tired inside.”