Monday, Ghassan Abdel Basset and his family left their house in the busy West Bank to visit a parent.
They were going to break their fast together during the sacred month of Ramadan.
Later in the evening, their neighbors informed them that the Israeli settlers had invaded their house.
Ghassan rushed to face the colonists, but the Israeli army intervened to block him and his family to return home.
The settlers said they bought the house, but the Abdel Basset family never put it on sale.
“The settlers claim to have bought someone’s house, but no one has given this person the legal right to sell our house,” Ghassan told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“God wants, we will follow the legal procedures (in Israel), and the law will follow his course,” he added.
Accelerated expulsion
The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory is illegal under international law. As a occupant, Israel is not authorized to transfer its citizens to an occupied territory or to apply its national laws.
However, more than 750,000 Israeli colonists live in illegal colonies in the West Bank, and many have forged acts of property to provide legality to confiscate Palestinian houses.
This is one of the many strategies that state -supported settlers use to uproot the Palestinians, according to analysts, Palestinians and local rights groups.
The settlers – supported by the Israeli state – also vandalize the houses, set up outposts, attack farmers, destroy crops and steal livestock under the supervision of the Israeli army.
According to a recent report by Peace Now and Kerem Navot, two Israeli human rights groups, Israeli colonists are currently controlling 14% of Palestinian land in the West Bank.
About half of these lands were confiscated since the most recent government in Israel came to power in December 2022, marking a serious escalation.
Since Israel began his genocidal war against Gaza in October 2023, his far -right government has intensified land annexions and the West Bank, said rights defenders, local monitors and analysts in Tel Aviv Tribune.
“There are a lot of tools that the settlers use to cause the movement of Palestinians,” said Diana Tuesday, a researcher at Bimkom, an Israeli human rights group.
“They tend to use violence to bring Palestinians to reach a point where they feel that they must leave their homes,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Bedouins and risky farmers
Bedouin farmers and communities are the most threatened by attacks and expulsions by Israeli colonists.
The Peace Now and Kerem Navot report found that at least 60% of the Palestinian Herder communities have been uprooted from their land since 2022.
In addition to this, 14 illegal outposts were erected on land on which farmers, breeders and Palestinian Bedouins lived.
The report added that the settlers tend to use animal breeding to encroach on Palestinian land and intimidate farmers, a technique known as grazing.
Leith, a Palestinian farmer who has not disclosed his family name for fear of reprisals, said the settlers often tried to take over the agricultural land in his village east of Ramallah in this way.
He added that the settlers often vandalize crops and prevent the Palestinians from taking care of their land in his village.
After having faced threats and constant attacks of settlers, which are often protected by the Israeli army, the Palestinians often abandon their livelihoods.
“To protect their families, they must leave the region. Many of them have children they need to keep themselves safe, but they lose their main source of income (agriculture) when they leave, “said on Tuesday.
“The settlers are trying to take control of our land,” said Leith. “When the army is present with armed settlers, it means that it is not easy. It’s not easy for us to resist. “
“Animals have more rights than us”
The administration of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, also encouraged the Israel settlers’ movement, said Omar Rahman, an expert in Israel-Palestine with the Middle East council on world affairs.
Rahman pointed out that the settlers benefit from a climate of impunity when they attack the Palestinians and fly their land, but Trump has abandoned any pretext of supporting human rights in the world or supporting aspirations to an independent Palestinian state.
“The other aspect is that Trump is surrounded by people who are not only donors of Israel but of” great Israel “. This means that they believe that the earth biblically belongs to the Israelis,” Rahman told Tel Aviv Tribune.
After Trump was inaugurated on January 20, he quickly signed a decree to raise sanctions against the colonists whom the previous administration considered “extremists” and responsible for the compromise of the two -state solution.
The ordinance was made one day after a temporary cease-fire entered into the Gaza Strip to interrupt what the United Nations experts and legal specialists say they are an Israeli genocide campaign against the Palestinians.
The next day, settlers’ attacks crossed the West Bank.
The Palestinians expelled from their houses or uprooted from their farms which flow in neighboring villages or move to urban centers which are under the ostensible control of the Palestinian Authority, the entity governing the major cities of the West Bank and engaged in security cooperation with Israel.
Leith said five or six families moved into his village after the settlers expelled them from their farms – all after October 7, 2023, the day the Gaza War began.
He promised never to leave his village despite the growing fear of the attacks of the colonists and despite what he considers a Western apathy towards the Palestinians and their fate.
“No one cares about human rights. Human rights is only a great lie,” he told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“Animals have more rights than us.”