West Bank Israeli settlers push on with annexation of Bedouin land

Israeli settlers are pushing ahead with a largely unnoticed de facto annexation of vast areas of rural land in the occupied West Bank, which has already seen the almost total displacement of Bedouin people.

- Peter Beaumont

While settler activity, including violence, has long been well documented in the section of the West Bank designated by the 1993 Oslo accords as under both Israeli security and administrative control - the so-called Area C of the occupied territory, including the south Hebron Hills - settlers have switched their focus to mostly rural Area B, which was designated to be under initially Palestinian civil control.

All three of the Oslo areas - Area A being the major Palestinian cities - were intended to be transferred to a future Palestinian state.

At a time when the US president, Donald Trump, has talked about the relocation of Palestinians from Gaza, in effect endorsing its ethnic cleansing, a process of displacement is already advancing in Area B as West Bank Palestinians come under pressure from settlers and their far-right political backers in Israel.

In one section of Area B in the arid desert hills between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea near the Israel settlement of Tko'a all evidence of Bedouin who once lived there appears to have been erased, while in a second area those that remain are being harassed by settler violence.

In a landscape of deep wadis and dusty limestone escarpments, Bedouin shepherds until recently grazed flocks on the low-lying plants that appear in the winter months, or on seasonally cultivated forage crops in the flat valley bottoms.