In a single week, a new settler outpost erases an entire Palestinian community
After building on their land, Israeli settlers attacked and drove out residents of Maghayer Al-Dir, one of the last villages in the southern Jordan Valley.
On the morning of May 18, Israeli settlers established an illegal outpost inside the Palestinian shepherding community of Maghayer Al-Dir in Area C of the West Bank, just 100 meters from residents’ homes.
By midweek, before any violent confrontations or incidents of livestock theft, about half the Palestinian villagers had packed up their belongings and fled, with the rest preparing to do the same: families began loading sheep, furniture, animal feed and water tanks onto trucks under the setters’ watchful eyes.
But on Saturday afternoon, the settlers’ routine “walking tour” through the village escalated into an organized attack. Four settlers began shoving young Palestinians standing on the roofs of structures being dismantled. “[The settlers] were looking for a fight,” said Avishay Mohar, an activist and photographer who was on the scene.
The settlers and Palestinians began throwing stones at each other. Just when the confrontation seemed to have ended, the settlers called reinforcements: about 25 additional settlers — some masked, many armed with assault rifles and clubs — joined the attack on residents and international activists, who began fighting back.
One settler was struck in the head by a large stone, collapsed and lost consciousness. A Palestinian was also struck in the face by a rock. A second settler, reportedly a minor, seized the pistol from the vest of his passed-out friend and began firing into the air. “Another settler showed up with an M16 and started shooting at us,” Mohar recalled. As panic spread, residents ran frantically toward the neighboring village of Wadi Al-Siq, whose own population had been displaced months earlier during a surge in state-backed settler violence in October 2023.
Settlers pursued the fleeing residents into the valley, throwing stones and smashing their phones. They seized Mohar’s two cameras, phone, wallet, and power bank. From the ground, he saw the settlers beating up a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in the head with a club. Mohar began to feel dizzy from the beatings, struggling to lift his head off the ground. “I told the settlers ‘if you keep going, you’re going to kill me!’” They proceeded to beat him aggressively on his backside.
An Israeli settlers confronts activists in the Palestinian village of Maghayer Al-Dir, May 21, 2025. (Oren Ziv)
After the army finally showed up and called ambulances, the search for the 12 wounded — some of whom were found between 500 and 600 meters from the village — continued into the night. By the next morning, not a single resident remained in Maghayer Al-Dir. All 23 families, totaling around 150 people, had been forced to flee.
“The attack sent a message to Palestinian communities across the West Bank,” said Mohar. “Not only can you not stay — you can’t even leave quietly.”
‘Here too there will be Jews’
Since October 2023, over 60 Palestinian shepherding communities in the West Bank have been displaced, with at least 14 new outposts built on or near their ruins. One violently expelled community — Wadi Al-Siq — faced abuse that included sexual assault, leading to the disbandment of the Israeli army’s “Desert Frontier” unit.
As in the case of Maghayer Al-Dir, the establishment of pastoral settler outposts has been the primary factor driving Palestinians out of their homes in Area C. According to a recent report by NGOs Peace Now and Kerem Navot, Israeli settlers have used shepherding outposts to seize at least 786,000 dunams of land — about 14 percent of the entire area of the West Bank. In the last two and a half years, seven Palestinian shepherding communities neighboring Maghayer Al-Dir have been depopulated.
Palestinian residents packing their belongings to leave Maghayer Al-Dir, May 22, 2025. (Oren Ziv)
Maghayer Al-Dir was the last remaining Palestinian community in the Ramallah periphery located east of the Allon Road, a strategic north-south highway built by Israel in the 1970s to link settlements and prepare for the potential annexation of territory east of the road, along the Jordanian border. Originally from the Naqab/Negev, Maghayer Al-Dir’s families were expelled in 1948 to a different part of the Jordan Valley, before the state decided to construct a military base and displaced them once again to their most recent site.
In video footage taken by activist Itamar Greenberg on the day settlers established the new outpost, one settler can be heard boasting about the ethnic cleansing of Maghayer Al-Dir. “This is the last remaining spot — thank God we’ve driven everyone out … All of this area is just Jews,” the settler explained while gesturing towards the expanse to his left. Then the camera focuses on the site where the hilltop youth are busily constructing the outpost. “Here too there will be Jews.”
As +972 reported in August 2023, most of the communities in the territory between Ramallah and Jericho, an area of 150,000 dunams, were forced to flee during the previous months as settlers began rapidly constructing herding outposts and violently descending on residents, all with the backing of the Israeli army and state institutions. Now, only two Palestinian communities — M’arajat and Ras Al-Auja — remain in the entire southern Jordan Valley.
Even before the latest outpost was built, Maghayer Al-Dir was completely hemmed in by Israeli settlements and outposts. To the north lies the semi-authorized outpost of Mitzpe Dani; to the east, Ruach Ha’aretz (“Spirit of the Land”), established shortly before the war and later expanded; and to the south, near the now-depopulated village of Wadi Al-Siq, stands one of Neria Ben Pazi’s outposts. Though Ben Pazi was sanctioned by the British government last week for his role in building illegal outposts and forcing Palestinian Bedouin families from their homes, he was seen patrolling the village in the days leading up to the community’s forced departure.
Settlers playing with a soccer ball they found in Maghayer Al-Dir, May 22, 2025. (Oren Ziv)
“The settlers came prepared, with a plan, to take the land and expel us,” said one village resident who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal from settlers.
In recent years, settlers from the surrounding outposts began erecting fences which cut residents’ homes off from the main road leading to Maghayer Al-Dir. They also routinely stole water from the village well for their sheep.
Another resident who chose to remain anonymous explained that there is no daylight between the violence of the settlers and that of the state. “The problem is that today there is no law,” he told +972. “[The settlers] say, ‘We’re the government,’ and the police are with them.” He now plans to sell his flock of sheep, as settlers seize more and more land on which Palestinians used to graze their livestock.
“Last year, settlers entered the village and attacked my relatives,” he continued. “We tried to defend ourselves by filming it, and I was arrested. Luckily, the judge at Ofer [Military Court] released me, and asked the prosecution [sarcastically] if we were supposed to serve coffee to the settlers who invaded our homes.”
Familiar tactics
On Thursday, May 22, the Malihaat family spent the day packing. The settlers had erected their latest outpost inside of a sheep pen belonging to Ahmad Malihaat, the 58-year-old father of nine. Just hours after it was established, he said, the settlers “quickly tried to get to our sheep, so they could later claim [to the Israeli authorities] they were their sheep and take them.”
Ahmad Malihaat, May 21, 2025. (Oren Ziv)
It was a familiar tactic to the community: in early March, dozens of settlers armed with guns and clubs stole over 1,000 sheep from the shepherding community of Ras Ein Al-’Auja. Fearing a repeat, residents of Maghayer Al-Dir focused their initial efforts on evacuating livestock from the village in the days following the outpost’s construction.
Still, the Malihaat family testified that on Wednesday night, settlers managed to steal a donkey and 10 sacks of animal feed from them. Malihaat recalled that the settlers told him to go to Jordan or Iraq. “They want to expel us and the other Bedouin communities, and take the land one way or another.”
Despite receiving a Civil Administration order on May 18 to halt their construction activities, the settlers expanded the outpost in Maghayer Al-Dir day after day, pitching a large tent and hooking the site up to running water from a nearby outpost they erected shortly before the war.
As they collected their possessions and prepared to leave, Malihaat said he had barely slept or eaten since the outpost was erected. His diet, he said, consisted of “mostly cigarettes and water.” At that moment, he almost predicted the impending attack. “You don’t know what [the settlers] will do. Maybe they’ll beat your son and then call the police and arrest you or your son and you’ll have to pay NIS 20,000 bail.”
Malihaat is not sure where the family will decide to resettle. He noted that once a shepherding community is displaced, they occasionally receive temporary permission to settle on land owned by other Palestinian communities in Area B of the West Bank. But it is not a long-term solution.
“When your neighbor is good, everything is good, but they [the settlers] don’t want peace,” Malihaat concluded. “They want to expel, kill, and destroy your home.”
In response to +972’s inquiry, an Israeli army spokesperson said that the newly established outpost is located on state land and does not encroach on the area where the community resides.The Civil Administration also confirmed that a stop-work order was issued for the outpost, “for construction components established in the area that were built illegally.”
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.