Khirbet Samra is one of the last Palestinian shepherding communities in the West Bank’s eastern flank. State-backed settler militias are driving them out.

From large-scale livestock theft, to home raids and beatings, the violence and displacement spiked in the Jordan Valley after the Israeli military launched “Operation Iron Wall” in January — an offensive that has displaced more than 40,000 Palestinians, primarily in northern West Bank refugee camps — the day after U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration. 

“It’s very systematic and well planned,” explained Dror Etkes, founder of the Israeli organization Kerem Navot, which monitors settlement activity in the West Bank. Trump’s return and the new military assault in the West Bank, Etkes continued, provided “a clear sign for the settlers to escalate their violence to expel more Palestinians.”

Now, Israel’s takeover of the Jordan Valley is almost complete. Khirbet Samra is located east of the Allon Road, a north-south highway Israel built in the 1970s to connect settlements and lay the groundwork to annex the territory east of the road, which runs along the border with Jordan. But while Israel has been working for decades to ethnically cleanse the Jordan Valley, over the past two years, it has accelerated its efforts at an alarming pace: 100,000 dunams of land east of the Allon Road have been nearly emptied of Palestinians, according to a forthcoming joint report by Yesh Din, an Israeli anti-occupation nonprofit organization, and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

Read the full article at +972 Magazine

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