In the occupied West Bank, Israel is uprooting the Palestinian Ka’abneh Bedouin from their land — community after community.

An Outpost 50 Meters Away

Since the third of May, settlers have intensified their daily attacks, day and night, on the families of the Arab Abu Faza’a al-Ka’abneh community, east of al-Taybeh, east of Ramallah. The latest escalation began when settlers from the “Hilltop Youth” planted a herding outpost barely fifty meters from the community’s homes, raising a tent and a livestock pen near the families’ houses and sheep enclosures. This outpost has become a spearhead for closing in on the land and opening the way to seize everything around it.

The families of Arab Abu Faza’a al-Ka’abneh live from herding and their livestock. That is why settlers strike at that very source of life, choking it day after day to make staying impossible and force the families out. They uproot and burn olive trees. They seize grazing land and block the families’ livestock from reaching it. They have cut the community’s water since May 6, disabling the one pipe that feeds it. They even chase and terrorize children on their way to school.

Uprooted in 1948

The Ka’abneh have been refugees since the Nakba. In 1948, Zionist militias drove them from Tel Arad, near Beersheba in the Naqab, as part of the ethnic cleansing that uprooted tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouin from the south. Most were pushed across the border into Jordan; those who remained in Palestine were scattered into Bedouin communities on the eastern slopes of Jerusalem and in Bethlehem and Hebron.

The Bedouin had lived in the Naqab desert since the seventh century. On the eve of the Nakba, they numbered between 75,000 and 90,000, across ninety-five tribes. After the 1948 ethnic cleansing, only 11,000 remained on the lands colonized in 1948.

Herding Outposts: A Weapon of Displacement

Since the start of Israel’s genocide on October 7, 2023, the Israeli occupation state has escalated its war on Palestinian Bedouin communities in the occupied West Bank — treating their very presence as an obstacle to settlement expansion, annexation, and Judaization.

By March 2025, settlers had established more than 70 new herding outposts. These outposts now control 786,000 dunams — around 194,000 acres — an area equal to 14% of the occupied West Bank and 2.5 times more land than all Israeli settlements combined. Between October 7, 2023 and mid-July 2025, at least 2,895 Palestinians were driven from 69 communities.

Pastoral colonization is driven largely by settler groups such as the Hilltop Youth. Their ideology is explicit: a “Jewish state” across a “Greater Israel,” built through the expulsion of Palestinians from their land.

On the ground, this ideology takes the form of a caravan, tent, or sheep pen placed on a hilltop, beside a spring, or near Palestinian grazing land. From there, settlers expand far beyond the outpost itself, blocking Palestinian families from water, pastures, farmland, and olive groves.

What begins as a small settler presence becomes a regime of daily coercion: threats, beatings, arson, livestock theft, and military-backed intimidation. Once families are forced out, the land is folded into the settlement project, while the occupation works to turn the theft into a permanent colonial fact.

We Will Not Leave

Despite the siege, the cut water, the destroyed olive trees, and the sleepless nights, the 26 families of Arab Abu Faza’a have not left their land — and they will not.

“They want to provoke us — to create a problem, then call in the police and the army to force us out. But we are staying. No one will leave.”

— Abu Hudhayfa, Arab Abu Faza’a al-Ka’abneh