Israeli settlers are driving Palestinian shepherds from their grazing lands

Settler attacks in the Jordan Valley have forced growing numbers of Palestinian communities to flee their villages.

Mukhlis Masa’id of Khirbet Yarza in the occupied West Bank has lived in a state of sorrow since settlers intensified their attacks on his Jordan Valley community three years ago.

He and other local Palestinians have seen settlers destroy their crops, attack their homes, and assault shepherds and farmers working the grazing lands around the village, with growing ferocity and incidence.

Fourteen families, about 100 Palestinians in total, called this region home until increasing violent settler activity forced them to consider their future here. Early this year, locals decided they had had enough with the near-daily settler attacks, so they gathered their surviving livestock and left the village.

This sustained targeting of agriculture in the area – on which almost the entire community relies – appears to be part of an organised and systematic campaign of intimidation by settlers, intended to drive whole Palestinian farming communities from their land.

“The settlers have many means of communication among themselves. When they attack the shepherds, dozens of them gather to intimidate them. Meanwhile, we have no means of transportation to reach the shepherds and try to protect them. Our roads are also rough and unpaved, unlike the roads used by the settlers,” Masa’id told Al Jazeera.

The settlers didn’t stop there; they stole hundreds of sheep and cattle, the lifeblood of this northern West Bank community.

“We feel like we’ve lost a son. What happened to us is the worst thing that could ever happen – to leave the homes we’ve lived in all our lives, homes we hoped our children and grandchildren would live in too,” he told us.

The settler attacks intensified from October 2023, months after a new Israeli government came to power with far-right ministers – who led or are part of settler movements – appointed to key posts. The campaign continued until the community had fled their homes in March 2026, but even then, their troubles did not end.

“Dozens of sheep died from diseases after we moved. When we left, we had to leave the fodder in the rain because there was nowhere else to store it, and it spoiled,” Masa’id said.

“Now, we graze the remaining livestock in cramped, overcrowded areas like the countryside around Tubas. Nothing we’re living now resembles our life in Yirza.”

The pattern of repeated attacks by settlers doesn’t only target Area C, the part of the occupied West Bank fully under Israeli control and which makes up more than 60