Suleiman Ghawanmeh is tired of talking. For more than 10 years, he spoke until he was hoarse, until he realized that his words could not prevent his community from being expelled.
After his last plea for help had no effect, he too left.
“I’m angry at the world… no one listens to us… it’s like we’re not human beings,” he told CNN.
His village, Ras Ein al-Auja, in the West Bank, has been wiped off the map – emptied of its Palestinian residents after a , which lasted years and intensified in the last two years.
Ongoing violence against what was once the West Bank’s largest pastoralist community has increased sharply this month, forcing families to flee their homes, according to Israeli rights group B’Tselem.
many of them teenagers, invaded the Ras Ein al-Auja community daily, according to residents and activists, terrorizing the almost 120 extended families (more than 800 people in total) who lived there. At the end of January, harassment forced them all to leave.
Ghawanmeh, 44, and his family were the last to leave, on Sunday (25).
“We weren’t displaced because a herdsman or a settler attacked us. No. The issue is bigger than that. The herdsman is a tool – an instrument,” he said.
Ras Ein al-Auja is the 46th pastoralist community in the country to be forcibly displaced since October 7, 2023, according to B’Tselem, which classifies it as a form of “ethnic cleansing”.
In response to the increase in settler attacks last year, the Israeli army said in a statement that it “considers violence of any kind severely and condemns it as it undermines security in the region.”
But that’s not how residents describe the military’s role on the ground.
Harassment against the community has worsened over the years
have been harassing residents of Ras Ein al-Auja since 2010, according to community members.
After the and subsequent offensive in Gaza, residents say the situation has only gotten worse.
Settlers have built four new illegal settlements around the village since April 2024, according to OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), surrounding Palestinian homes.
According to residents, activists and videos obtained by CNNcolonizers, allegedly from these settlements, stole or damaged water reservoirs, compromising the community’s access to water and harming their livelihood.
They cut electricity lines, stole thousands of cattle, and vandalized sheep pens and Palestinian properties – all with the support or inaction of the
A CNN Went to one of the four settlements to talk to the settlers, but two men refused to answer our questions.
“We don’t accept journalists,” declared a young Israeli settler before kicking us off the property.
Another settler arrived shortly after and began filming before calling the police. The two refused to answer questions about the alleged harassment of Palestinians in Ras Ein al-Auja.
Ghawanmeh said that if the settlers had not had the support of the Israeli government and many governments around the world, his community would not have needed to leave.
He and his brothers spent the entire day dismantling their homes, tearing apart metal panels to rebuild elsewhere – wherever they could find a place to settle.
Women and children packed their belongings, piling mattresses and tarps into pickup trucks. Everything that could not be transported was burned.
“I don’t want them to benefit from anything that is ours,” Ghawanmeh said of the settlers.
In between arduous tasks, men spray-painted the words “the last displacement 2026” and “the third Nakba” on metal sheds – a reference to the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, of 1948, when approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what is now Israel.
Ghawanmeh’s own family was displaced from a village near Be’er Sheva in southern Israel at that time and forcibly transferred to Ramallah.
They were displaced again in 1967 after the Six Day War.
Now, forced to leave their homes for the third time, they are camped about three kilometers from their village, unsure of where they will go next.
Israel tries to exert control over land in occupied territories
Ras Ein al-Auja is located in the south of the Jordan Valley.
In June 2024, Israel declared about 3,000 acres of the Jordan Valley, including Ras Ein al-Auja, as state land, the largest Palestinian land grab since the Oslo Accords, according to Israeli settlement monitoring organization Peace Now.
This means that the land is no longer considered private property of the Palestinians and they are therefore prevented from using or accessing it.
Peace Now states that this is “one of the main methods by which the State of Israel seeks to exercise control over land in the occupied territories.”
Haitham Zayed, 25, who has lived in Ras Ein al-Auja his entire life, said what happened to his village is part of a “systematic policy” by the Israeli government to “empty Palestinian lands of Palestinians.”
Two weeks ago, when some families in his village began to leave due to intensifying intimidation from settlers, he vowed to stay.
“Do you think if I go somewhere else I will be safe from the settlers or the army? There is no place in the West Bank that is safe from the settlers or the army,” he said at the time.
Two days later, he told the CNN that he had no other option but to leave.
“There is no more life in Ras Ein al-Auja,” he wrote in a text message. “We are reviving the Nakba.”
