‘We are reliving the Nakba’: A Palestinian community says it’s being erased as Israeli settler violence intensifies

By Zeena Saifi, Jeremy Diamond, Cyril Theophilos, CNN

Ras Ein al-Auja, West Bank (CNN) — Suleiman Ghawanmeh is tired of talking. For over 10 years, he talked himself hoarse until he realized his words could not save his community from being driven out. After his final appeal for help came to nothing, he, too, left.

“I am angry with the world… nobody listens to us… it’s as if we are not human beings,” he told CNN.

His village of Ras Ein al-Auja in the occupied West Bank has now been erased – emptied of its Palestinian residents after a years-long campaign of relentless settler harassment that has intensified over the past two years.

The ongoing violence against what was once the largest shepherding community in the West Bank increased markedly this month, forcing families to abandon their homes, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Armed and masked settlers, many of them teenagers, descended on the Ras Ein al-Auja daily, residents and activists say, terrorizing the nearly 120 extended families – more than 800 people in total – who lived there. By the end of January, that harassment forced them all to leave.

Ghawanmeh, 44, and his family were the last to go on Sunday.

“We didn’t get displaced because a shepherd or a settler attacked us. No. The issue is bigger than that. The shepherd is a tool – a means of the occupation,” he said.

Ras Ein al-Auja is the 46th shepherding community in the West Bank to be forcibly displaced since October 7th 2023, according to B’Tselem, which calls this a form of “ethnic cleansing.”

In response to the uptick in settler attacks last year, the Israeli military said in a statement that it “views violence of any kind with severity and condemns it, as it harms security in the area.”

But that is not how residents describe the military’s role on the ground.

‘The third Nakba’

Jewish settlers have been harassing the residents of Ras Ein al-Auja since 2010, according to members of the community. After the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 and the ensuing offensive in Gaza, residents say matters only worsened. Settlers have built four new illegal settlement outposts around the village since April 2024, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), closing in on Palestinian homes.

According to residents, activists and videos obtained by CNN, settlers believed to be from those outposts stole or damaged water tanks, compromising the community’s access to water and undermining its livelihood. They cut electricity lines, stole thousands of livestock and vandalized sheep pens and Palestinian property – all with the support or inaction of the Israeli military.

CNN drove up to one of the four outposts to speak with the settlers, but two men there refused to respond to our questions.

“We don’t accept journalists,” one young Israeli settler told us before walking us off the property.

Another settler soon arrived and began filming before calling the police. Both men refused to address questions about their reported harassment of the Palestinians in Ras Ein al-Auja.

Ghawanmeh said if the settlers didn’t enjoy the support of the Israeli government and many governments around the world, his community would not have had to leave.

He and his brothers spent all day dismantling their homes, pulling apart metal panels to rebuild elsewhere – wherever they can find a place to settle.

Women and children packed away their belongings, piling mattresses and tarps into pickup trucks. Whatever could not be transported was burned instead.

“I don’t want them to benefit from anything of ours,” Ghawanmeh said of the settlers.

In between the laborious tasks, men spray painted the words “the last displacement 2026” and “the third Nakba” onto metal sheds – a reference to the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of 1948, when roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what is now Israel.

Ghawanmeh’s own family was displaced from a village near Be’er Sheva in southern Israel at that time and forcibly transferred to Ramallah. They were displaced again in 1967 after the Six Day War.

Now, forced from their home for a third time, they are camped out about two miles from their village, unsure of where they can go next.

‘No place’ that is safe

Ras Ein al-Auja is located in the southern Jordan Valley. In June 2024, Israel declared about 3,000 acres of the Jordan Valley, including Ras Ein al-Auja, to be state land – the largest seizure of Palestinian land since the Oslo Accords, according to Israeli settlement watchdog organization Peace Now.

That means the land is no longer considered privately owned by Palestinians, and therefore they are prevented from using it or accessing it. Peace Now says this is “one of the main methods by which the State of Israel seeks to assert control over land in the occupied territories.”

Haitham Zayed, a 25-year-old who has lived in Ras Ein al-Auja his entire life, said what had happened to his village was part of a “systematic policy” by the Israeli government to “empty Palestinian land of Palestinians.”

Two weeks ago, when some families from his village began leaving as the intimidation by settlers intensified, he vowed to stay.

“Do you think if I go somewhere else, it will be safe from the settlers or the army? There is no place in the West Bank that is safe from the settlers or the army,” he said at the time.

Two days later, he told CNN he had no other option but to leave.

“There is no more life in Ras Ein al-Auja,” he sent in a text message. “We are reliving the Nakba.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.