Israel’s new separation wall will sever Jordan Valley from rest of West Bank
“This mountain is the only place where I can breathe, the only place where I’m allowed to graze,” said Tawfiq Bani Odeh, a resident of the Palestinian village of Atuf who comes to Mount Tammun every day with his hundreds-strong flock of sheep.
In Area C of the occupied West Bank, which Israel is rapidly cleansing of its Palestinian inhabitants, few places like Mount Tammun remain: some 50,000 dunams (over 1,200 acres) of open, elevated, and green land where Palestinians — particularly shepherds — can roam freely without harassment from Israeli settlers and soldiers.
Now, however, Israel is threatening to close off the area, expel its Palestinian communities, and effectively annex it.
On the mountain overlooking the Palestinian town of Tammun, plans are underway to establish a new Jewish settlement — one of 19 announced last year by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. The plan includes rebuilding Ganim and Kadim, two of four settlements in the northern West Bank that were dismantled during Israel’s so-called “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005.
The fate of the area was further sealed last August, when Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, head of the Israeli army’s Central Command, signed nine “land seizure” orders for the construction of a new barrier cutting right through Mount Tammun.
The orders clear one section — running from the Tayasir checkpoint to the Hamra checkpoint — of what will eventually be a 300-mile barrier spanning all the way from the occupied Golan Heights to the Red Sea, at a cost of NIS 5.5 billion (nearly $1.8 billion).
The stated goal of the project, which is known as “Crimson Thread,” is to prevent the smuggling of weapons from the West Bank’s eastern border with Jordan and thwart terrorism. “This is a project based on a clear security need, for shaping the terrain and controlling and monitoring vehicular movement between the eastern border and the valley, and the five villages [Tubas, Tammun, Far’a, Tayasir, and Aqaba] and Judea and Samaria,” an Israeli army spokesperson told +972 in response to an inquiry.
“The lands in the Mount Tammun area are, in their overwhelming majority, state lands,” the spokesperson continued, adding that the seizure orders “were signed through an orderly legal process and distributed lawfully,” and that “demolition orders were issued to those who did not operate in the area according to the law.”
But according to Dror Etkes, who leads the watchdog group Kerem Navot and monitors Israeli land policy and settlement activity in the West Bank, only about 3,500 dunams of the land in this area has been declared state land. “Most of the area that Palestinians will not be able to enter at all, or only with serious problems, has not been declared state land,” he said, “and a large part of it is located in Area B” — which is ostensibly under the civil control of the Palestinian Authority.
In practice, according to a petition filed by several local councils and over 100 residents to Israel’s High Court, the barrier will sever the Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank; cut Palestinians off from roughly 50,000 dunams of their land (777 dunams of which will be seized and razed for the construction); prevent around 900 residents to the east of the barrier from receiving municipal services, including health clinics, schools, and employment opportunities; and force several communities to leave.
Some of these communities have already received orders to evacuate. Others have already left.
‘A prison surrounded on all sides’
The effect on farmers will be particularly catastrophic. The Jordan Valley is nicknamed the “breadbasket of the West Bank” because of the extensive use of the area for agriculture and livestock farming. The petition states that the estimated direct damage from the barrier to the local communities will be “approximately $200 million per year.”
In the petition, residents also demand to know why the state did not propose a “less harmful” alternative to the barrier. They claim that the army did not publish the seizure orders “close to the time of their signing” in August: Until November, the state kept them a secret, meaning those affected had no idea that the government intended to take their land.
The plan includes the construction of a paved patrol road adjacent to the barrier, in addition to ditches and earth embankments in areas that the military deems necessary. In parallel, Israel is also relocating the Hamra checkpoint, which currently sits at a key crossroads connecting the Jordan Valley with the rest of the West Bank, to an area closer to the village of Ain Shibli east of Nablus, redirecting Palestinian traffic so that it doesn’t interfere with Israeli settlers driving on the Allon Road.
The relocation will also grant Moshe’s Farm, an internationally sanctioned outpost, control over additional land, after it already pushed out Palestinian families from the area following October 7. Once the barrier is constructed, Moshe’s Farm will be connected via the patrol road with Tzvi HaOfarim, another violent outpost established last year at the northern end of the barrier.
“The purpose of the barrier is to allow the most violent settlers to move quickly in the area east of the towns of Tammun and Tubas,” Etkes explained. In doing so, he said, Israel will enable those settlers “to take control of tens of thousands of dunams that will remain trapped east of the planned barrier.”
As Etkes notes, the few Palestinian communities that remain on what will become the “Israeli” side of the barrier — those that have so far withstood the surge in settler violence that has emptied much of the area already — will be largely cut off from the rest of the West Bank. Access to Palestinian cities and towns west of the Jordan Valley will only be possible through the Hamra and Tayasir checkpoints, which will have hours-long waits, rather than by foot as has been the case until now.
The wall will encircle the herding community of Khirbet Yarza with a fence, meaning residents will only be able to enter and leave their own village through a gate controlled by the Israeli army. The result, as the residents’ petition put it, will be a “prison surrounded on all sides.”
From road construction to expulsion
A half-hour drive from Mount Tammun along the winding dirt roads between Khirbet Atuf and Tammun brings you to Yarza, a small Palestinian community of six compounds housing a few dozen residents. In the distance, you can see the Tayasir checkpoint and the Tzvi HaOfarim outpost that settlers established next to it.
“This is a historical community that is thousands of years old, and we have lived in it for hundreds of years,” Hafez Mas’ad, 52, told +972. “I live here, and so did my father and grandfather. Now the settlers and the army come and tell us, ‘Get out of Yarza, this is a military area.’
“This is our land,” he continued. “We were born here, and it has been registered in our names for many years. Where will we go, to the moon? We have no other place.”
“We don’t know how we’ll leave and return when there’s a gate — to buy things, to get to schools, or in the event of an emergency,” Khaled Daraghmeh, a resident in his 60s, added.
On Jan. 15, the army began work on a road near the planned barrier on the western side of Mount Tammun. According to the army, the work is being carried out in accordance with a new seizure order (not one of Bluth’s original nine), and this road will become the access road to the new settlement set to be built there.
Ten days later, the High Court issued a temporary order prohibiting the state from “carrying out any irreversible action for the implementation of the [seizure] orders” until the state responds to the request for an interim injunction on Feb. 25. (An army spokesperson clarified that the court order “does not apply to the urgent security works the IDF is carrying out in this area.”) Despite this, residents report that work on the road has continued.
“The road paving was accompanied by the expulsion of Bedouin communities near the route,” Bilal Ghrayeb, a resident of Tammun, told +972. “The move was intended to threaten the livelihood of farmers by preventing access to grazing land, cutting off water sources, and severing agricultural roads used to bring fodder.”
Several shepherding communities in the area near the village of Atuf are already being severely impacted by the construction. “Ever since [the Israeli authorities] started working here on the wall, they have been threatening to force us out,” Abdel Karim Bani Odeh told +972. “Now they are preventing us from grazing up the mountain.
“The army comes two or three times a day to prevent us from going out to graze, issuing orders and telling us to leave. This land is registered, there are documents [to prove it], but they say, ‘The land is not yours, go to Tammun.’”
Close to the families’ residential compounds in this area are agricultural fields and greenhouses that are expected to be cut off by the barrier. The construction of the road — which residents were not informed about in advance — has already damaged a pipe that carried water to several small Palestinian communities.
“They didn’t tell us directly,” Odeh explained, “but we learned from the news that they wanted to establish a settlement here.”
‘They turn you into a settler on your own land’
On Feb. 9, the army demolished several homes in Al-Meite, a small community near the Tayasir checkpoint that is located on the eastern side of the planned barrier. The following day, several settlers arrived at the site with a herd of cows, entered the makeshift tent set up by a family whose home had been demolished the day before, and destroyed their food supplies.
“I have a grazing permit here,” one of the settlers told activists present at the site. “I don’t need to show the documents — talk to the local council.” That evening, the affected family fled. Over the weekend, a nearby structure was set on fire.
Since October 7, Israeli authorities and settlers have intensified their efforts to expel Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley. Home demolitions, road blockages, and settler outposts have completely erased at least six communities from this area.
“We’re not allowed to go 200 meters from the house to graze,” said Najia Basharat, a resident of Khallet Makhul, a community that several families have fled from due to settler activity (several homes in the community were also demolished by the Israeli army more than a decade ago). “The settlers harass the children and bother anyone who is herding,” Basharat continued.
This weekend, Basharat, her husband Yusuf, and one of their sons were arrested after a settler from a nearby outpost claimed that they were grazing in a firing zone and that they threw stones. In January, two men from the community were arrested and spent five days in detention after settlers entered the village’s agricultural land and pepper sprayed them.
Since the start of this year, settlers have established a new outpost near Al-Hadidiya, another small herding community in the area. The settlers have restricted the village’s grazing areas, raised Israeli flags around the community, and erected an enclosure for their animals adjacent to Palestinian homes.
“They cause a lot of problems,” said Aref Basharat, whose father’s home is in the community. “The settlers come and say, ‘Why are you here? This is an Israeli area. Leave.’ Several families have left since the outpost was established.
It has been a similar story for residents of Yarza since settlers erected the Tzvi HaOfarim outpost. “My grandfather and great-grandfather lived here,” Daraghmeh lamented. “I grew up here, went to school here, grazed our sheep here, planted and harvested here, got married and had children here. Now the settlers have come, and life has become very hard.”
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While settlers are able to enter Yarza nearly daily, activists have difficulty accessing it. In mid-January, when two Israeli activists and an American journalist attempted to enter the village from the Jordan Valley side, settlers blocked their path with a herd of cows and threw a stone at their car. Settlers followed the car into the community and physically attacked them. The army eventually arrived to escort the activists out.
Another resident, who did not want to be named, summed up the village’s experience in recent weeks: “They turn you into a settler on your own land, and the settler into a resident.”
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.
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