After more than a decade of appeals that went unanswered, Suleiman Ghawanmeh told CNN that he has run out of words. For years, he spoke publicly and repeatedly in an effort to prevent the expulsion of his community. His final plea failed, resulting in his expulsion from his homeland as well.
“I am angry with the world… nobody listens to us… it’s as if we are not human beings,” Ghawanmeh told CNN.
Ras Ein al-Auja, the Palestinian village where he lived in the occupied West Bank, has since been emptied. Its residents were forced out following a sustained campaign of settler violence that has intensified markedly over the past two years.
Escalating settler violence
According to the Israeli organisation B’Tselem, violence against the Palestinian community, once the largest shepherding village in the West Bank, reached a critical point this month, compelling families to abandon their homes.
Residents and activists say armed and masked settlers, many of them teenagers, carried out near-daily incursions into the village. Nearly 120 extended families, more than 800 people, were subjected to intimidation and fear until all had left by the end of January.
Ghawanmeh, 44, and his family were the final residents to depart, leaving on Sunday.
‘A tool of the occupation’
Ghawanmeh rejected the notion that isolated incidents drove the forcible displacement.
“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.
B’Tselem reports that Ras Ein al-Auja is the 46th Palestinian shepherding community in the West Bank to be forcibly displaced since October 7, 2023, describing the pattern as a form of “ethnic cleansing”.
‘The Third Nakba’
Community members say harassment by settlers dates back to 2010, but worsened dramatically after October 7, 2023.
Since April 2024, settlers have set up four new illegal outposts around Ras Ein al-Auja, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), effectively surrounding the village.
Residents, activists, and video footage obtained by CNN show that settlers from these outposts sabotaged water supplies, cut electricity lines, stole thousands of livestock, and vandalised homes and sheep pens, often while Israeli occupation forces either stood by or failed to intervene.
CNN attempted to speak with settlers at one of the outposts, but was turned away.
“We don’t accept journalists,” one young Israeli settler said before escorting the crew off the land.
Another settler began filming the journalists and called the police.
Ghawanmeh said such actions would not be possible without political backing.
“If settlers did not enjoy the backing of the Israeli government and support from governments around the world, his community would not have been forced to leave,” he stressed.
Leaving with nothing behind
As families dismantled their homes, Ghawanmeh and his brothers pulled apart metal structures in hopes of rebuilding elsewhere. Women and children loaded what they could onto pickup trucks, while belongings that could not be moved were burned.
“I don’t want them to benefit from anything of ours,” Ghawanmeh said, referring to the Israeli settlers.
Men spray-painted messages such as “the last displacement 2026” and “the third Nakba” onto the remains of buildings, invoking the 1948 Nakba.
In the aftermath of World War 1, the West, in particular Britain and France, carved the Middle East in a way that served their interests, sowing the seeds of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The 1948 Nakba marked the beginning of Palestine’s plight, as tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and forcibly displaced from their homes, with their basic rights and freedom infringed upon day after day.
A history of repeated expulsions
Ghawanmeh’s family was first displaced in 1948 from a village near Beer al-Sabe’, then again in 1967 following the Six-Day War. Now, for the third time, they find themselves uprooted.
The family is currently camped about two miles from Ras Ein al-Auja, uncertain where they will be able to settle next.
Ras Ein al-Auja is located in the southern Jordan Valley. In June 2024, “Israel” designated approximately 3,000 acres in the area as “state land”, including the village itself, marking the largest Palestinian land usurpation since the Oslo Accords, according to the Israeli watchdog Peace Now.
The move bars Palestinians from accessing or using the land. Peace Now describes the policy as “one of the main methods by which the State of Israel seeks to assert control over land in the occupied territories.”
A systematic policy
Haitham Zayed, 25, who had lived in Ras Ein al-Auja his entire life, said the displacement reflected a broader strategy.
“What happened to the village was part of a ‘systematic policy’ by the Israeli government to ‘empty Palestinian land of Palestinians,’” he stressed.
As intimidation escalated, Zayed initially insisted he would 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 was forced to leave.
“There is no more life in Ras Ein al-Auja,” he wrote in a text message. “We are reliving the Nakba.”
