With IDF Soldiers and Settlers Expelling Palestinians, the West Bank Is Seeing a Creeping Nakba
Tuesday, August 12, 2025 at 10:52PM Haaretz Editorial 13 August 2025
Palestinians look at Israeli soldiers in the Israeli settlement of Karmel, during the Thursday funeral of Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen, killed by an Israeli settler.Credit: Mosab Shawer/AFP
There's no way, and there won't be one, to justify or defend what Israel is doing in the West Bank. Under the cover of the war in Gaza and with the full backing of the IDF, Israel's settlement enterprise, from government officials to the youngest member of the radical, often violent "hilltop youth," has been given free rein. They are driving out Palestinian residents and seizing more and more of their land.
As reported by Haaretz on Tuesday, yet another Palestinian shepherding community of about 100 near Ramallah was forcibly expelled from their village after settlers threatened the residents and demanded they leave. The residents of Ein Ayub are the latest victims of West Bank settlers, who have seized the Gaza war as an opportunity to carry out their own mass displacement – a creeping Nakba.
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Also in July, residents of the Palestinian village of Deir Alla in the southern West Bank fled after settlers set fire to buildings in their village. A few days earlier, settlers had arrived and established an illegal outpost in one of the village's structures. The villagers reported the outpost's construction to the IDF, but it was not evacuated.
In May, residents of the Bedouin village of Mughayyir al-Deir were forced to flee less than a week after a settler outpost was erected adjacent to their village.
The expulsion from Ein Ayub wasn't an isolated incident, but part of a routine pattern of settler terror enabled by the state. It began in early July with preparations to establish a settler outpost-farm nearby and escalated into a systematic campaign of intimidation aimed at forcing Palestinians from their villages.
This is the reality in the West Bank under Israeli occupation: When a Palestinian village vanishes, a settler outpost takes its place.
Abdullah Jahalin, an Ein Ayub resident, told Haaretz of a familiar pattern of violent displacement: Settlers broke into the village and gave the residents 24 hours to leave. Anyone who dared to ask why was beaten. Then masked men in IDF uniforms appeared, issuing a one-week ultimatum, and on the same day, settlers torched a community building.
According to Jahalin, a drone also flew over the village, urging the residents to leave. In a video recorded by an activist, the drone can be heard sounding the message, "Keep whining, maybe Mohammed will help you."
When the residents had already begun packing, soldiers arrived with a military closed-area order demanding immediate evacuation. The IDF was quick to call it a so-called misunderstanding and misidentification, but on the ground, as Jahalin said, soldiers and settlers pointed guns at his head and ordered him to leave. Only late at night did an officer tell them they could stay. By then, many residents had already left.
"The army is playing a game," he said. "They come once it's all over and pretend nothing happened, after watching the village empty out."
A resident of Mughayyir al-Deir, a village that was completely displaced, was asked in an interview with Haaretz's Hebrew edition why he left. He replied, "The settlers come, they beat us, they shoot. That's it, they won." Terrifyingly, in the absence of any real opposition or resistance to the occupation, he seems to be right.
The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.
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