The many ways Israeli settlers steal Palestinian homes | Israel-Palestine conflict News

On Monday, Ghassan Abdel Basset and his family left their home in the occupied West Bank to visit a relative.

They were going to break their fast together during the holy month of Ramadan.

Later that evening, their neighbours informed them that Israeli settlers had invaded their home.

Ghassan hurried back to confront the settlers, but the Israeli army intervened to block him and his family from getting back to their house.

The settlers claimed they bought the home, but the Abdel Basset family never put it up for sale.

“The settlers claim they bought the house from someone, but nobody gave this person the legal right to sell our house,” Ghassan told Al Jazeera.

“God willing, we will follow the legal procedures [in Israel], and the law will take its course,” he added.

Accelerated expulsion

Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory is illegal under international law. As an occupier, Israel is not allowed to transfer its citizens into occupied territory or enforce its national laws there.

However, more than 750,000 Israeli settlers live in illegal settlements in the West Bank, and many have forged property deeds to provide a veneer of legality to confiscate Palestinian homes.

This is one of several strategies that state-backed settlers use to uproot Palestinians, according to analysts, Palestinians and local rights groups.

Settlers – backed by the Israeli state – also vandalise homes, 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 settlers currently control 14 percent of Palestinian land in the West Bank.

About half of this land has been confiscated since Israel’s most recent government came to power in December 2022, marking a serious escalation.

Since Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, its far-right government has stepped up land annexations and evictions in the West Bank, rights groups, local monitors and analysts told Al Jazeera.

“There are a lot of tools settlers use to cause the displacement of Palestinians,” said Diana Mardi, a researcher with Bimkom, an Israeli human rights group.

“They tend to use violence to get Palestinians to reach a point where they feel they have to leave their homes,” she told Al Jazeera.

Bedouins and farmers at risk

Farmers and Bedouin communities are most at risk from attacks and evictions by Israeli settlers.

The report by Peace Now and Kerem Navot found that at least 60 percent of Palestinian herder communities have been uprooted from their lands since 2022.

On top of that, 14 illegal outposts have been erected on land that Palestinian farmers, herders and Bedouins used to live on.

The report added that settlers tend to use animal herding to encroach on Palestinian land and intimidate farmers, a technique known as grazing.

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Leith, a Palestinian farmer who did not disclose his last name for fear of reprisals, said settlers often try to take over farmland in his village east of Ramallah in this way.

He added that the settlers often vandalise crops and block Palestinians from tending to their land in his village.

After facing constant threats and attacks by settlers, who are often protected by the Israeli army, Palestinians often abandon their livelihoods.

“To protect their families, they have to leave the area. Many of them have children that they need to keep safe, but they lose their main source of income [from farming] when they leave,” Mardi explained.

“The settlers are trying to take over our land,” Leath said. “When the army is present with armed settlers, that means it’s not easy. It’s not easy for us to resist.”

‘Animals have more rights than us’

United States President Donald Trump’s administration has further emboldened Israel’s settler movement, said Omar Rahman, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.

Rahman stressed that settlers benefit from a climate of impunity when they attack Palestinians and steal their land, yet Trump has abandoned any pretext of supporting human rights globally or backing aspirations for an independent Palestinian state.

“The other aspect is that Trump is surrounded by people who are not just backers of Israel but of ‘Greater Israel’. That means they believe the land biblically belongs [exclusively] to Israelis,” Rahman told Al Jazeera.

After Trump was inaugurated on January 20, he quickly signed an executive order to lift sanctions on settlers whom the previous administration deemed to be “extremists” and responsible for undermining the two-state solution.

The order was issued one day after a temporary ceasefire came into effect in the Gaza Strip to pause what United Nations experts and legal scholars say is a campaign of Israeli genocide against Palestinians.

The next day, settler attacks surged across the West Bank.

Palestinians expelled from their homes or uprooted from their farms are trickling into nearby villages or relocating to urban centres that are under the ostensible control of the Palestinian Authority, the entity governing major cities in the West Bank and engaged in security cooperation with Israel.

Leith said five or six families have moved into his village after settlers expelled them from their farms – all after October 7, 2023, the day the Gaza war began.

He promised to never leave his village despite growing fear of settler attacks and despite what he sees as Western apathy towards Palestinians and their plight.

“Nobody cares about human rights. Human rights is just one big lie,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Animals have more rights than us.”