2025 Attack and Displacement
On May 24, Israeli settler militias and army attacked the Palestinian Bedouin community of Mughayyir al-Deir, injuring six including 14-year-old Omar Mlihat. This was the final move in the gradual ethnic cleansing of the village.
On May 18, the settlers pitched a large tent in the middle of the Bedouin community and hooked the site up to running water from a nearby outpost they had erected shortly before the war. They then expanded the outpost in Mughayyir al-Deir day after day.
Within days, 25 families (around 125 people) were forced to flee and are now in the industrial zone of Beitunia where they do not have access to water or electricity.
Struggle for the Right to Water, Health and Education
Palestinians of Mughayyir al-Deir have long fought for their basic rights, especially their right to water. In February 2024, settlers attacked families attempting to reach their sole remaining water source – a dangerous journey required after Israeli authorities banned direct piping to the village.
Despite Mughayyir al-Deir having its own communal well, Israel’s apartheid system had forced the community to sign an agreement with Israel’s national water company Mekorot, which is illegally exploiting and controlling all water resources in the West Bank, in order to be permitted to access their own water, but in a far away area. The agreement would force the community to buy expensive water from the company. This in turn allowed Israel’s military to block access to the water, or impose humiliating interrogations on anyone wanting to collect water.
Settlers employed drones to monitor the community while blaring anti-Islamic slurs and loud noises through loudspeakers to terrify their livestock. Violent armed settlers repeatedly assaulted residents and barred them from most of their traditional grazing grounds. This pushes Palestinians into ever smaller spaces and de facto annexes ever more land.
It isn’t only water that Israel denies the community. Its healthcare collapsed when a mobile medical clinic ceased operations due to settler attacks.
Also education has become impossible. Following October 7, the al-Muarrajat school teaching Mughayyir al-Deir’s children shut down. Though the school partially reopened in January 2024, constant disruptions and dangerous travel conditions through settler-controlled areas have forced 10 percent of the children from Mughayyir al-Deir to drop out of school.
Outposts as a Tool of Eviction
Even before this last outpost was erected, Mughayyir al-Deir was encircled by settlements. To the north lies the outpost of Mitzpe Dani; to the east, Ruach Ha’aretz (“Spirit of the Land”), established shortly before the genocide started and later expanded; and to the south, near the ethnically cleansed village of Wadi Al-Siq, stands one of the outposts founded by Neria Ben Pazi.
Naira Ben Pazi, the leader of a settler group known as Neria’s Farm, has lately been put together with Zohar Sabah, under “sanctions” by the British government. Joined by Zvi Sukkot, an Israeli MP who openly advocates mass killing of Palestinians, they visited the new outpost to support settlers. In a video shared on Instagram by activists on the ground, one settler in Mughayyir al-Deir said: “This is the last remaining spot — thank God we’ve driven everyone out … All of this area is just for Jews.”
Colonial countries like the UK would like us to believe that sanctioning single settlers is anything but a colonial charade to deflect from the urgent need to hold Israel itself accountable and end Israeli impunity. The ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their homeland since 1948 is not the responsibility of “fanatic settlers” but a core element of the settler-colonial project that is the establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian land. Settler militias supported by the Israeli army are a tool, albeit essential, of the Zionist colonial project.
Governments have to take concrete action to stop Israel’s genocide, apartheid, ongoing ethnic cleansing and illegal occupation and and immediately end military aid and other diplomatic and financial support to Israel.
Historical Context: From the Nakba to Settler Colonialism
The expulsion of Mughayyir al-Deir’s residents is part of the broader settler-colonial project that began with Israel’s establishment in 1948.
Many of the displaced families originally belonged to the Naqab Bedouin tribes in Beersheba, expelled during the 1948 Nakba to the Jordan Valley. In the 1970s, Israel displaced them again to build a military base, forcing them into Mughayyir al-Deir.
Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley are increasingly displaced by Israel; especially around the Allon Road, built in the 1970s, which was designed to link settlements and facilitate annexation of the Jordan Valley. For instance, Wadi Siq is now fully occupied by settlers after its Palestinian population was evicted 4 days after October 7.
Mughayyir al-Deir has been the last remaining Palestinian community east of the Allon Road in the Ramallah periphery, following the forced displacement by settler violence of seven neighbouring communities in the last three years. And now, it no longer remains.
Bedouin Communities
Bedouin communities whether across historic Palestine are facing displacement. Beersheba still has a Bedouin community resisting Israel’s evictions.
On May 29, thousands of people gathered in Beersheba for a large demonstration, called the “Dignity March,” protesting Israeli policies of home demolitions and displacement targeting Palestinian villages in the Naqab. Around 15,000 protesters from various Palestinian villages and towns rallied in front of Israel’s so-called “Bedouin Settlement Authority”. This protest follows a series of demolitions by Israeli authorities in recent days, with many more homes now at risk under government plans aimed at further displacement of Bedouin communities. Today, there are more than 200,000 Bedouins living in the Naqab. However, many live in “unrecognized villages”, and the Israeli government has been pushing for their expulsion so that they can build settlements or expand existing ones.
On May 19, Israeli authorities demolished 16 homes in the village of Al-Sarra in the Naqab. The Israeli government intensified demolitions and forced evictions in unrecognized Bedouin villages within the Naqab region in 2024, with a 400% rise in home demolitions compared to the year before.
Political Analysis: The Annexation Plan
The expulsion of Mughayyir al-Deir is part of a strategic Israeli policy to erase Palestinian presence in Area C (under full Israeli control). Settlers have seized 786,000 dunams (14% of the West Bank) through pastoral outposts. These outposts serve as the base for formal settlements, backed by army and state.
The area spanning from Ramallah to Jericho, covering 150,000 dunams, has been nearly completely ethnically cleansed of Palestinian communities in recent months. Settlers, supported by Israeli military and government forces, rapidly built pastoral outposts and carried out violent attacks against Palestinians. Currently, just two Palestinian communities in—M’arajat and Ras Al-Auja—continue to resist in the southern Jordan Valley area.
The “Ramallah settlement belt”, which refers to the cluster of Israeli settlements surrounding Ramallah in the West Bank and where Mughayyir al-Deir is located, is strategically located and planned to serve as a connecting element between the E1 settlement block, east of Jerusalem and the settlements in the Jordan Valley, with the aim of splitting the West Bank in half and contributing to the fragmentation and control of the Palestinian ghettos to which the West Bank is being reduced.On May 29, the Israeli occupation government approved 22 new settlements in the occupied West Bank; 12 of them are existing outposts that will be expanded, one will be considered by Israel as an independent settlement, and 9 are entirely new settlements. Two of the settlements, Homesh and Sa-Nur are particularly symbolic. Located in the north of the West Bank, they are actually resettlements, having been evacuated in 2005 as part of Israel’s “disengagement plan” from Gaza, promoted by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, which paved the way for the transformation of the Gaza Strip in a full-scale concentration camp and prepared the conditions for Israel to perpetrate the current genocide.