\u00a0<\/p>\n
JENIN, Aug 16 \u2014\u00a0Palestinian Amin Rahal and his three brothers haven\u2019t gone to work in weeks, instead taking turns guarding what remains of their land atop a West Bank hill from incursions by nearby settlers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe never leave the place unless we have two people here,\u201d says Rahal, a 31-year-old father of three, pointing to the roof of a settler\u2019s newly installed prefabricated home 100 metres from his house.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve stolen hens, land with olive trees, damaged the sage bush in our backyard with their ATVs, brought their sheep into our courtyard, and more,\u201d he told AFP.<\/p>\n
Last week, settlers from the newly inaugurated Israeli settlement of Emek Dotan just below his home put up a rope across his land and forbade him and his family from crossing it.<\/p>\n
A chicken farm and many olive trees stand on the other side of the rope and are now lost to the Rahal family under threat of violence.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur fear is that they will attack the children, burn one of the houses, attack us at night and break into the houses,\u201d as has happened in other West Bank villages where settlers have moved in, he said.<\/p>\n
Across the West Bank, such accounts have become common, with the UN\u2019s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reporting an average of six incidents per day involving West Bank settlers in 2026.<\/p>\n
These include theft, vandalism, arson, beatings and sometimes murder, with Palestinians complaining that most crimes against them go unpunished.<\/p>\n
Cancel Oslo<\/strong><\/p>\n The north of the West Bank, with its many Palestinian communities and few settlers, had been relatively spared from the tensions.<\/p>\n Under former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon\u2019s 2005 disengagement plan, four isolated settlements\u2014Homesh, Sa-Nur, Ganim and Kadim\u2014were evacuated to make a contiguous Palestinian space within the West Bank.<\/p>\n But under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s current government, the most right-wing in Israel\u2019s history, the abandoned sites\u2014long a sore point for the settler movement\u2014have been reinvested one by one in 2026.<\/p>\n A plan approved in December legalised 17 more settlements in the northern West Bank, with the specific intent of connecting them all, in another affront to the Oslo Accords reached during the 1990s peace process.<\/p>\n While all settlements on occupied territory are illegal under international law, the Oslo Accords allowed Israel to keep building settlements and demolish Palestinian buildings, but only in Area C\u2014the 60 percent of the West Bank under Israeli control.<\/p>\n The agreement is viewed as an outdated relic by Israel\u2019s far-right, which wants to build settlements across all the West Bank.<\/p>\n Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, has on various occasions made calls to \u201ccancel Oslo\u201d.<\/p>\n Excluding Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, 500,000 settlers now live in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, as well as three million Palestinians.<\/p>\n Palestinians around Jenin are worried many red lines have been crossed.<\/p>\n Inside Jenin itself, the largest city in that part of the north, a military base was established in Area A, the part of the West Bank supposed to be under Palestinian control.<\/p>\n With each settlement come demolitions, but Palestinians had until now assumed Areas A and B\u2014the latter of which is under Israeli military control but Palestinian civil control\u2014to be relatively safe. Not anymore.<\/p>\n In August, Israeli forces demolished several shops within 30 metres of a road leading to Ganim and Kadim, where settler caravans reminiscent of an American trailer park were newly connected to the electric grid and received their first occupants.<\/p>\n \u201cThey came to us directly and gave us an official order to evacuate the shop immediately, followed directly by its demolition,\u201d said Bara al-Damaj, owner of a stone products store that was torn down.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a moment, they destroyed our dreams,\u201d he continued, adding he had seen an increased military presence as a result of another new military base built at the entrance of Ganim.<\/p>\n Surrounded<\/strong><\/p>\n Mohammed, whose nearby home escaped demolition, still fears what the increased settler presence will bring in the future.<\/p>\n Declining to share his last name for security reasons, Mohammed said his son was detained and beaten by the army recently while walking in their field, and they cannot access their second field on the other side of the new settler road.<\/p>\n Army bulldozers blocked most agricultural roads with rubble, leading residents to fear being cut off and isolated.<\/p>\n In the village of Deir Abu Deif, losing access to the road means losing access to the city of Jenin.<\/p>\n \u201cThe situation is extremely frightening. We\u2019re surrounded from every direction,\u201d said Faij Rawajbi, whose produce store near the settler road was demolished.<\/p>\n Rawajbi, 38, complained that armed settlement security teams began harassing residents, conducting ID checks as if they were official authorities.<\/p>\n \u201cThis white van terrorises us and the entire eastern area\u201d of Jenin, he told AFP as the vehicle drove by.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything here has become settlements. They have turned our lives upside down.\u201d \u2014 AFP<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 JENIN, Aug 16 \u2014\u00a0Palestinian Amin Rahal and his three brothers haven\u2019t gone to work in weeks, instead…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1003838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[401869,26715,401870,99,167595,50,33601,17262],"class_list":["post-1003837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-amin-rahal","tag-bezalel-smotrich","tag-emek-dotan","tag-israel","tag-jenin","tag-news","tag-oslo-accords","tag-west-bank"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117103551425609366","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1003837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1003838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1003837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1003837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1003837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}