‘Destroying agriculture is the purpose’: How Israel is drying up the West Bank’s most fertile farmlands
Israeli military vehicles on Palestinian agricultural land in the Jordan valley near Tubas, 6 May 2015
Qassam Muaddi writes in Mondoweiss on 18 August 2026:
Agriculture in the northern West Bank could be on the verge of disappearing under the weight of Israeli land confiscation and the destruction of water wells. The Atouf area, in the Tubas governorate in the northeastern West Bank, and long known as the region’s “breadbasket,” has been targeted by settler attacks on its water lines. The settler raids complement the Israeli army’s ongoing infrastructure projects in the area, which have plowed through Palestinian farmlands and demolished wells.
For four months, thousands of Palestinian farmers in the Atouf plain have been unable to access water for their crops after settlers began attacking and damaging water lines, according to local residents. In recent weeks, the Israeli army has bulldozed farmland in Atouf as part of a military road project, further damaging water lines in the process. The army has also issued demolition orders for wells on the plain and has already demolished several.
The northern West Bank has been at the center of Israeli military orders and settler activity in recent months after the Israeli government allowed settlers to return to sites where four Israeli settlements had been evacuated in 2005. In a first since the Second Intifada, the Israeli army took over a neighborhood in the city of Jenin for military purposes inside Area A, which is the part of the West Bank that is supposedly under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Tubas has also seen its share of Israeli raids and settlement expansion, particularly given its strategic location overlooking the northern Jordan Valley. But the destruction of water sources on Tubas’s farmland carries deeper implications for Palestinian life in the area and across the West Bank, reaching beyond the issue of Palestinian geographic continuity and land ownership.