Under the cover of war, a total of 16 Palestinian villages in the West Bank — collectively home to over 1,000 people — have been entirely depopulated as a result of a surge in settler violence and pogroms against Palestinian herding communities. Separated from their communities and forced to live in tents on land belonging to other Palestinians, the displaced families are all demanding the same thing: to be able to return home.

On the day of the expulsion, the settlers refused to allow them to take anything from the burning village: her husband’s ID card, vehicles, mattresses, cell phones, bags of olives, keys — “and my clothes,” one of her sons adds. Everything was left behind, and much of it stolen… In the days leading up to her family’s decision to flee the village, Abiyat would sleep outside with her children, fearing that settlers would set their house on fire while they slept, as had happened to one of her neighbors.

Southeast of Ramallah, the 180 residents of the village of Wadi al-Siq were also forcibly displaced as a result of a settler pogrom. On Oct. 12, settlers and soldiers raided the village, shot at and drove out the women and children, before kidnapping three men, handcuffing them, stripping them naked, urinating on them, beating them until they bled, and sexually abusing them

Settlers have destroyed or burned homes in several of the villages that Palestinians were forced to abandon in recent months, making it impossible for their former residents to return. In this way, settlers are finishing the job of Israeli government policy that for years has sought to force Palestinians out of Area C: refusing to recognize their villages, preventing them from accessing water and electricity, and demolishing their homes. According to data provided by the Civil Administration — the bureaucratic arm of the occupation — to the Israeli planning rights NGO Bimkom, between 2016 and 2020, it issued 348 times more building permits to Israeli settlers than it did to Palestinians living in Area C.

Roey Zweig, an officer in the IDF Central Command — which is responsible for army units that operate in the West Bank and for construction in Area C — claimed, absurdly, that settler violence has actually decreased of late due to measures that the army has begun to implement. Throughout his remarks, Zweig — who, in 2022, while serving as the commander of the Samaria Brigade, said that “the settlement [project] and the army are one” — referred to the depopulated villages as “Palestinian outposts,” repackaging the term for Israeli hilltop communities in the West Bank that are ostensibly illegal even under Israeli law.