Repeated assaults and harassment by Israeli settlers and forces has surged since the war on Gaza began in October 2023.
At least 50 Palestinian families from a Bedouin community in the occupied West Bank have fled their homes, following repeated assaults and harassment from Israeli settlers under the protection of Israeli forces, according to media reports and a local rights group.
Thirty Palestinian families were forcibly displaced on Friday morning from the Arab Mleihat Bedouin community, northwest of Jericho, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported, while 20 others were displaced on Thursday.
Before the forced displacement, the community was home to 85 families, numbering about 500 people.
A Palestinian rights group, the Al-Baidar Organization for the Defense of Bedouin Rights, said the families were forced to leave after years trying to defend themselves “without any support”. Attacks by Israeli forces and Israelis from illegal settlements have surged across the occupied West Bank since Israel’s war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023.
Alia Mleihat told Wafa that her family was forced to flee to the Aqbat Jabr refugee camp, south of Jericho, after armed settlers threatened her and other families at gunpoint.
Separately, Mahmoud Mleihat, a 50-year-old father of seven from the community, told the Reuters news agency that they could not take it any more, so they decided to leave.
“The settlers are armed and attack us, and the [Israeli] military protects them. We can’t do anything to stop them,” he said.
Hassan Mleihat, director of the Al-Baidar Organization, said families in the community began dismantling their tents, following sustained provocation and attacks by Israeli settlers and the army.
Footage posted on social media and verified by media’s Sanad agency showed trucks loaded with possessions driving away from the area at night.
Hassan told Wafa that the attacks also threatened to erase the community, and “open the way for illegal colonial expansion”.
‘We want to protect our children’
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented repeated acts of violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in Mu’arrajat, near Jericho, where the Mleihat tribe lives.
In 2024, settlers armed with clubs stormed a Palestinian school, while in 2023, armed settlers blocked the path of vehicles carrying Palestinians, with some firing into the air and others hurling stones at the vehicles.
“We want to protect our children, and we’ve decided to leave,” Mahmoud said, describing it as a great injustice.
He had lived in the community since he was 10, Mahmoud said.
Alia Mleihat told Reuters the Bedouin community, which had lived there for 40 years, would now be scattered across different parts of the Jordan Valley, including nearby Jericho.
“People are demolishing their own homes with their own hands, leaving this village they’ve lived in for decades, the place where their dreams were built,” she said, describing the forced displacement of 30 families as a “new Nakba”.
The Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes during 1948 at the birth of the state of Israel.
Israel’s military has not yet commented on the settler harassment faced by the Bedouin families or about the families leaving their community.
Asked about violence in the occupied West Bank, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told reporters on Monday that any acts of violence by civilians were unacceptable and that individuals should not take the law into their own hands.
Activists say Israeli settlement expansion has accelerated in recent years, displacing Palestinians, who have remained on their land under military occupation since Israel captured the occupied West Bank in the 1967 war.
Most countries consider Israeli settlements illegal and a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which ban settling civilians on occupied land.
