Arraba, occupied West Bank – As Kamal al-Uraidi drove a beat-up Volkswagen down the Arraba-Ya’bad road, an otherwise pleasant early September day was disrupted by the whirring clang of bulldozers and the snapping cracks of olive trees being ripped from the ground on both sides of the road. The destruction stretched for kilometres: Whole fields of olive groves razed, structures reduced to twisted metal, Israeli flags planted as far as the eye could see – all the way to the strategically significant Arraba Junction and even past the red pylons marking the boundary of Area A, which is technically under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Al-Uraidi passed the first bulldozer completing its destructive work on the al-Fari family’s land on Thursday.
Briefly, two Palestinian women from the family could be seen pleading with two soldiers, who kept them back from the machines finishing off the last of the family’s olive groves. The family later said their phones were confiscated during the uprooting so they could not film it and their IDs taken and photographed. A second bulldozer worked simultaneously further down the road, demolishing more olive trees; on another destroyed plot, families salvaged wood from uprooted trees.
Along the road, rubble of demolished homes and structures remained – days, weeks and months after the Israeli military first began widespread razing operations here. Such attacks have gathered pace after the launch of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in October 2023 and have become particularly violent in recent weeks. Experts say the attacks increasingly fit the definition of a pogrom.
In his office, Ahmed Arda, the mayor of Arraba, sat with his top button undone. His phone rings non-stop these days as his town is suddenly hemmed in, he said, by the Mevo Dotan settlement to the west, the newly founded Emek Dotan settlement to the north and several new Israeli settler outposts to the south. Israeli settlements and outposts across the West Bank are illegal under international law.
The Arraba military camp and four settlements in the northern West Bank were evacuated as part of Israel’s 2005 disengagement – leaving the area relatively free of settler infrastructure for two decades, except for Mevo Dotan to the west. After October 2023, Arda said 1,500 dunums (1.5sq km) of farmland west of Arraba and close to Mevo Dotan were rendered inaccessible by settlers – one dunam equals 1,000 square metres. But the situation has deteriorated dramatically since March, when the Israeli military announced the reoccupation of the Arraba military camp to the east.
Two months later, in May, the first moves came to establish Emek Dotan, a new religious settlement on 220 dunams (0.2sq km) of Arraba’s land to its north. Caravans and bulldozers soon arrived under military escort. On August 9, Emek Dotan was formally inaugurated, with a ceremony attended by Israeli ministers.
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