Jericho, occupied West Bank – Where Palestinian homes once stood among orchards and swimming pools on the southwestern edge of Jericho, there is now only a desolate, flattened expanse of earth. Somewhere beneath the packed dirt lie entire houses, dumped into pits and smoothed over. Only a few severed water pipes hint that anyone ever lived here, marking the erasure of a neighborhood that once served as a summer retreat for families.
“Why do you hide the crime you’re committing?” asked Khalil al-Razim, 60, a Jerusalemite who has spent his summers on a plot of land here in the area of Ein al-Duyuk for more than a decade. Beside al-Razim’s house, a pile of rubble more than two metres high blocks the entrance to the home of his neighbour, Mohammad Salah. Next to the debris, the landscape has been completely altered, with the soil churned and leveled to obscure the foundations of what were once functional family residences.
Six months earlier in February, during the first settler attack to tear through the area – with homes demolished and damaged, and residents attacked and robbed – a settler arrived with a bulldozer and began demolishing fences and houses in the neighbourhood, including parts of Salah’s home. The settler behind the attacks, identified by locals and in legal filings from the Israeli state as Hanan Herbst, is escorted by soldiers on every visit. He has not responded to further attempts at contact.
“How am I supposed to get into my own house?” Salah recalled asking the settler during the recent wave of destruction. “That’s not my problem, how you get into your house,” the man told him, according to Salah. “Can’t get into your house? Go around another way.” Since July 19, settler-operated excavators have kept coming on a near-daily basis – for the supposed purpose of “clearing waste”, but doing far more than that. No order has ever been shown to residents – no paper a lawyer can hold up in court. “Not an official order,” Salah said.
What is unfolding here, according to residents, lawyers and the state’s own court filings, is a subversion of normal legal processes that have all but erased the line between settler ambition and state authority. “This is a state with no law,” Salah said. “No decency in it. A state of thugs.” Al Jazeera reached out to Israeli authorities for comment, but received no response. Herbst was also reached by phone, but hung up after being told he was being contacted by Al Jazeera. Herbst owns an Israeli settler outpost called Armonot Farm, built without authorisation on a ridge overlooking Ein al-Duyuk in the summer of 2024.
The neighbourhood below, known locally as Stih, sits a few dozen metres from the ruins of the Hasmonean and Herodian winter palaces, an archaeological site. Within hours of a social media post, Palestinian residents said, dozens of masked settlers descended on the area from the Armonot settlement and other nearby outposts. Ali Kaabneh, 40, a Bedouin herder, was inside his house when the February 10 attack began. “They started throwing stones at me,” he said. “They forced me and my wife out of the house. There were 13 families with me – they drove us out.”
When the settlers withdrew roughly eight hours later, Kaabneh’s 150 sheep had scattered, and his licensed tractor was gone, driven up towards the outpost. Many of the Bedouin families have lived since then in the ruins of their partially destroyed homes, or without shelter at all. For months afterwards, there was a kind of calm, during which settlers nonetheless carried out thefts of people’s properties. But behind the scenes, developments continued. In March, the Israeli military issued a seizure order for a strip of Palestinian land for an access road.
That “calm” ended on July 19, at 8:30am, when Herbst arrived with a bulldozer – ostensibly to bury rubble from February’s attack, but soon began clearing more land. By afternoon, the official line had shifted, according to Yael Sela, a cofounder of the Palestine Solidarity co-op. In the weeks since, residents and activists say, the bulldozers have demolished or damaged additional houses, alleys, orchards and gardens. Lawyer Tawfiq Jabareen filed for an emergency injunction at Israel’s High Court on July 23, then again, urgently, on July 29, when the destruction intensified.
What came back, on the night of July 30, was the state’s own account of how Herbst came to be there – a filing, which Al Jazeera obtained, that revealed a state-backed arrangement granting Israeli settlers agricultural use of the land long predated February’s settler attack. Following February’s mass settler attack that demolished the Palestinian homes in the area, in May, the Binyamin Regional Council asked the military to allow the “clearing” of the site. At least some of the Palestinian homes in the area have been under a longstanding Israeli court injunction protecting them from demolitions.
“The settler has demolished, and continues to demolish, buildings and uproot trees, despite the existence of restraining orders from the court,” Jabareen argued in his filing. The Prosecution has yet to provide a definitive response to the ongoing destruction of property that remains under legal dispute. Meanwhile, the families remain in a state of limbo, watching as their history is buried under mounds of dirt and rubble, with no clear path to legal recourse or protection from the authorities who are supposed to enforce the law.
“She says to me, ‘We want to go back to our home.’ My kids say to me, ‘Why can’t we go back to our home?’ I don’t know what to say to them,” Salah explained, describing the emotional toll on his children. “These settlers don’t try to speak with you,” he added. “They only speak in the language of power.” The psychological impact on the community is profound, as they feel abandoned by the institutions that should protect their property rights.
“I feel like I’m weak,” he said. “I always told my kids: If you don’t make trouble, nobody will bother you. What am I supposed to say to him now?” The situation in Ein al-Duyuk serves as a stark example of the broader challenges faced by Palestinians in the West Bank, where the expansion of settler outposts often occurs in tandem with the systematic displacement of local communities, leaving families to navigate a reality where their homes are no longer safe and their legal rights are ignored.
It was initially illegal even under Israel’s own rules, but the Israeli cabinet formally recognised it as a settlement, under the name Daya, at the end of March.
On the morning of February 10, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu posted a video of himself at the ruins, Israeli flag in hand.
“Any place built on the heritage of the Jewish people,” he said, “we will destroy it.”
In the neighbouring community, three homes were destroyed completely, according to Hussein Taha, a longtime resident.
“But whoever wanted to fix his wall, [Herbst] would come to him and stop him.”
When residents and Israeli solidarity activists reached out to police, the military, the Palestinian District Coordination and Liaison Office (DCO) and the Civil Administration that day, they were told no one knew anything about it.
Soldiers escort Herbst and keep activists back, citing an ambiguous “closed zone”; no official order has been produced for locals, though activists attempting to enter and document the site have been arrested.
According to the state’s account, a March 2025 agreement was reached between Herbst and the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization to cultivate “state land” for agriculture.
Nonetheless, the Civil Administration approved the request.
The Jordan Valley Brigade commander, Colonel Gilad Shriki, then approved a military escort for Herbst.
“That is: the army circumvented the court’s decision and sent the settler to do the demolishing instead.”
“The Prosecution claims the [Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization] leased the land to the settler,” he said, “even though the Civil Administration itself had barred the settler from demolishing any building or any tree.”
“My analysis,” Jabareen said, “is that the army and the Civil Administration are now in the settlers’ grip, and there’s no longer any real difference between them.
They believe imposing facts on the ground is stronger than any court decision.”
Across the razed land, what remains standing is small strips of common-area vegetation belonging to no one in particular.
The state’s initial response suggests Herbst plans to begin cultivating the razed land as early as this week.
The state maintains the ground itself is state land, now allocated to Herbst for agricultural use – though, as Sela noted, no map or boundary of that allocation has ever been produced.
“The purpose of this act of destruction was to terrorise the Bedouin community, and to create the impression that this was an empty area with nobody living there – only piles of demolished concrete,” said Hussein Taha.
“Then this ‘kind settler’ wants to come and ‘clean up’ the area, cultivate it, and benefit from it, because he supposedly loves agriculture and green gardens.”
Due to the traditional system of ownership in the area, Palestinian-held land often remains undivided family inheritance, unregistrable under rules that demand proof no family can produce.
“But [they tell us to] bring proof.
Unable to safely reach their home and fearing settler attacks, Salah has moved his wife and four children into a rented apartment in Bethlehem, for 2,000 shekels ($667) a month, though he is unable to find work there.
“Any time I bring it up with my wife, she breaks down,” said Salah outside his blocked home.
Salah glanced at his son accompanying him that day.
If you don’t cause problems, the government won’t come after you.
And my son says to me, ‘Dad, you’re a liar.
He looked up towards the hillside above – Herbst’s excavator visible on the slope of the now-legalised settlement.
Source: Aljazeera
