Israeli settler violence is rapidly emptying Jordan Valley of Palestinians
Community members in Khirbet Samra loading their flock into trucks before their departure on 1 March 2025
Dikla Taylor-Sheinman and Georgia Gee report in +972 on 19 March 2025:
On the first day of Ramadan, Yasser Abu Aram sat and stared despondently at his plot of land in Khirbet Samra in the occupied West Bank. Months of relentless harassment by young Israeli settlers — who stole his livestock and encircled the small shepherding community day and night — had taken their toll.
“Everything that is happening here is also happening in the surrounding communities,” Abu Aram told +972 Magazine. “Today it’s me. Tomorrow it’s someone else.”
Abu Aram is one of the approximately 60,000 Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley, which runs along the eastern flank of the West Bank and makes up nearly 30 percent of the territory. The residents of Khirbet Samra are descendants of Bedouin tribes displaced from the Naqab/Negev desert in 1948; Abu Aram’s family was uprooted twice over in the West Bank before settling in Khirbet Samra in 2005.
Now, following a surge in settler attacks, as well as the establishment in February of a new outpost on the hill overlooking the community, Abu Aram has decided to leave the place he has called home for the past two decades.
“The land became one with our family; the mountain is one of us,” Abu Aram said. “It holds our memories.” He and his family packed up their belongings on March 1; now, all that remains of his home are scattered remnants, and a graffiti-covered sign left behind by the settlers — who tauntingly call themselves “Shabab Samra,” Arabic for “Youth of Samra.”