Israeli Campaign of West Bank Destruction Reaches the Region’s Food Basket

The destruction stretches for kilometres along the Arraba-Ya’bad road. Olive groves have been torn from the ground, structures reduced to twisted metal and Israeli flags planted across the landscape, reaching the strategically important Arraba Junction and beyond the red pylons marking Area A, which is technically under Palestinian Authority control.

Kamal al-Uraidi watched the bulldozers finish destroying the al-Fari family’s remaining olive trees. Two Palestinian women from the family pleaded with soldiers to let them approach the machines, but they were held back. The family later said soldiers confiscated their phones so they could not record the uprooting, and took and photographed their identity cards.

Further along the road, another bulldozer demolished more trees. Families salvaged wood from uprooted trunks, while rubble from homes and other structures remained days, weeks and months after the Israeli military began widespread razing operations in the area.

“This is a settlement plan: settlers over there, confiscations here, uprooting trees, Judaization of the land, expelling people from this land. They want to drive people out,” al-Uraidi said. “Soon, there will be nothing left.”

Arraba Mayor Ahmed Arda said his town had been suddenly hemmed in by the Mevo Dotan settlement to the west, the newly established Emek Dotan settlement to the north and several new settler outposts to the south. His phone, he said, now rings constantly. He described the situation as a “state of siege.”

Israeli settlements and outposts across the West Bank are illegal under international law. The Arraba military camp and four northern West Bank settlements were evacuated during Israel’s 2005 disengagement, leaving the area relatively free of settler infrastructure for two decades, apart from Mevo Dotan to the west. After October 2023, Arda said, settlers made 1,500 dunams, or 1.5 square kilometres, of farmland west of Arraba inaccessible. He said conditions had deteriorated sharply since March.

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This is a settlement plan: settlers over there, confiscations here, uprooting trees, Judaization of the land, expelling people from this land. They want to drive people out. Soon, there will be nothing left.