Salem al-Hathaleen, a bearded Palestinian shepherd with sun-weathered skin, has been tending the family herd of sheep and goats since he was a boy, as his father did before him.
Now, feeling helpless, he gazes from his doorstep toward the barn where the livestock are shuttered, only 5 feet away. He’s only permitted to feed and water them roughly every three days – when accompanied by Israeli soldiers.
That’s because at the end of June, the thin strip of land between Mr. Hathaleen’s home and the barn was declared by Israel’s military administration to be part of a new closed military zone.
Why We Wrote This
In the South Hebron Hills is a Palestinian village with a new settler outpost in the middle of it, making life burdensome in the extreme. Villagers say the tactic, part of a struggle for control of the West Bank, seeks to make them give up and leave.
The bureaucratic move creates a buffer between his home and four new mobile homes that are part of a new Israeli settler outpost in the heart of his community, a Palestinian Bedouin village in the southern West Bank.
That means that for Mr. Hathaleen and his family, the barn and the land it sits on are off-limits. The settlers, villagers say, are trying to make life so miserable for them, especially in this area in the South Hebron Hills, that they will abandon everything and leave.
Control over West Bank
The tactic is part of an ongoing contest for control over the West Bank marked by unchecked, rising settler violence and state-ordered demolitions. The settlers, who claim the entire West Bank as part of their biblical birthright, seek to prevent a Palestinian state.
“Let’s ignore the issue of human rights,” the shepherd says. “How can the livestock survive for three full days without water? It’s only every few days the army gives me between five to 10 minutes to feed” them and give them water.
Adds his wife, Ikhlas al-Hathaleen, “We care for these animals in the same way we care for our children, and for the past 22 days, the army has prevented us from reaching our livestock. … They are hungry and thirsty.”
It’s not only the barn they can’t access, the family says, but also their outhouse, the only bathroom for their family of 14. Instead, they must use the bathroom at a nearby community center or at a neighbor’s home.
“I have become uncomfortable in my very own home,” says Ms. Hathaleen.
She says she fears for her family’s safety from the settlers, whom they see from their windows and who, she says, try to intimidate them through jeering, hurling curses, and climbing on their roof and stomping.
Increase in settler activity, violence
Um al-Kheir is the only Palestinian village in the heart of which Israeli settlers have built a fully developed outpost on the same grounds, with mobile homes, roads, and links to electricity and water.
The new cluster of settler homes joined several others on a nearby rocky outcrop that have been there since last September. The construction is part of an increase in outpost activity, much of it unauthorized, as well as settler violence across the West Bank since October 2023, when the militant Palestinian movement Hamas attacked Israel, sparking the war in Gaza.
Dina Kraft
Human rights groups and Palestinian residents say Israel’s far-right government is complicit in settler efforts to uproot them. An Israeli court order telling settlers to stop construction of the outpost, which purported to be a satellite of the adjacent hilltop settlement of Carmel, founded in 1980, and barring them from Um al-Kheir, has been ignored.
Under international law, all Israeli settlements are considered illegal, while Israeli law differentiates between government-planned and unauthorized (and often provocative) building projects carried out by settlers. In practice, that distinction is often blurred, rights activists say.
“The outpost was built without proper permits … and without the political approval,” says Michael Sfard, a lawyer who represents Um al-Kheir residents. “They are trying now to retroactively legalize it, as they do with most outposts. But that does not change the fact that it was built illegally.”
Reached for comment, the Israeli military spokesperson’s office said the area of Um al-Kheir is within the boundaries of Carmel, and “a temporary closed military zone order was issued … following repeated incidents of friction between Palestinian and Israeli civilians.”
The spokesperson’s office said further that the Hathaleen family “is permitted to use the restroom facilities available to them.”
“Um al-Kheir is one example of how settlers, the military, the courts, and the Israeli authorities work together to drive Palestinians from their land,” says Yair Dvir, spokesperson for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. “Since October 2023, Israel has forcibly displaced 62 Palestinian communities across the West Bank, and these violent efforts to drive Palestinians from their land have already expanded beyond small herding communities to established villages and towns.”
Dina Kraft
Mr. Dvir calls the Israeli actions ethnic cleansing and faults the international community for not speaking out. In early July, Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, visited this village as he toured the West Bank. Along one road, his vehicle was blocked and harassed by armed settlers.
Displaced by 1948 war
Um al-Kheir’s 200 residents are descendants of a Bedouin tribe that was displaced from Israel’s nearby Negev Desert in 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli war, and which then settled on a hillside here. Israel considers the entire village illegally constructed and has executed repeated demolitions.
The village is marking one year since Awdah al-Hathaleen, one of its most prominent residents, was shot and killed by an Israeli settler named Yinon Levi, according to witnesses and video footage. Mr. Hathaleen helped film “No Other Land,” a 2024 Oscar-winning Israeli-Palestinian-produced documentary about violence and displacement in the South Hebron Hills.
Mr. Levi was detained overnight, claimed he acted in self-defense, and was released: an example, villagers say, of the impunity with which settlers operate.
Awdah Hathaleen had been filming near the village soccer field. On Tuesday, a group of village boys played there, overlooking the outpost.
If the ball sails over the rings of barbed wire that line the field and into another swath of land declared a closed military area, they know the drill.
The game is over.