Violent settlers are rapidly erecting new outposts and relentlessly harassing Wadi Qelt residents. After another family fled last week, only a handful of residents remain, living under constant threat
ideon Levyand Alex Levac. November 29, 2025
They stood opposite one another. On the top of the hill three settler teenagers and below them two youths and an adult. They are from the same generation and the same nation. The physical distance between them may have been a number of meters, the height of the rise in the hill, but the mental, cultural, moral and religious distance is almost infinite. All are Israeli Jews, but they’re divided by an abyss. Up on top is a brand-new settler shack; below, yet another abandoned enclave of shepherds.
The three bearded youths with long sidelocks and large kippas stood on high gazing down, plotting evil. A few days beforehand they had erected the shack up there, after stealing the corrugated tin from the homes of the Bedouin shepherds, who fled in fear. Every day, the people at the bottom of the hill relate, the invaders swoop down into their valley, harassing and threatening them.
Below, in the now-empty enclave, sat three members of the Arab-Israeli grassroots movement Standing Together, plotting good. They had arrived with one goal: to protect the remains of the herdsmen’s homes, which the settlers covet. The activists show up on weekends and/or whenever the Bedouin, for whom they are the sole source of protection, summon them. This week they arrived following the appearance of the new shack.
Related Articles
- Raised in the heart of the settler right, they’re determined to revive Israel’s left Itay Mashiach
- Israeli chefs wax lyrical about the land – while settlers set it ablaze Ronit Vered
- Erased: Israeli settlers’ brutal war on Palestinian communities in the West Bank Hagar Shezaf
Wadi Qelt is on the edge of the Jordan Valley and the desert. Members of the Al-Ka’abneh tribe, 15 families, 80 souls, have been living here since 1983 in an area they call Al-Hathrurah. The website of B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories explains that after Israel’s establishment the community was expelled from the Negev, moved to the Hebron area and from there to areas east of Jerusalem, in Wadi Qelt. Since settling there they have been expelled at least twice: once in the wake of the establishment of the Kfar Adumim settlement, and again when another settlement, Mitzpeh Yericho (Jericho), was built. In 2018 the Lechatchila Farm outpost was established, in 2022 another outpost was added, and the life of the shepherds became an ongoing nightmare. Since the war erupted in the Gaza Strip in 2023, four more outposts have sprouted up around them, and life has become impossible. Many people have left.
To take a journey through Wadi Qelt, as we did last Monday, is, simply, to encounter proliferating illegal outposts and abandoned pastoralist communities. Here, as elsewhere in the West Bank, the population transfer is as quiet as it is methodical; here too the war is waged daily – a war for land, for pasture and for life.
A large Star of David dominates Canaan Farm in the northern West Bank, and its well designed homes. Not far away, to the east, is Ein Prat Farm. We are with B’Tselem field researcher Amer Aruri, who receives on his cellphone a video that was shot that morning in the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar showing a few lambs lying on their side, groaning with pain, their legs broken. They had apparently been run over by a settler near Khan al-Ahmar. There’s also a photo of the vehicle that was involved, whose driver will never be punished, of course.
We’re driving on the remains of what was once a paved road, of which only fragments are left; the rest is a rough dirt path. This used to be the main Jordanian highway to Jericho. We pass two shacks, a red pickup, a solar water heater and a mobile home, in another nameless outpost. The Jahalin tribe of Bedouin live on the south side of the new highway to Jericho; the Ka’abneh, on the north side. Three weeks ago, in the dead of night, a settler bulldozer hurtled into one of the Jahalin enclaves on the other side of the road and demolished three abandoned huts of shepherds who had fled for their lives. Israeli volunteers rebuilt the huts the next day.
Fenced-off rocky terrain, adorned by Israeli flags, abuts the rough road; no one knows why this plot was fenced off and by whose authority.
The settlers come at night and enter the homes, turn on the lights and frighten the children. They start to scream: ‘Get out of here, Arab sons of dogs.’ Every night. They wear clothes of soldiers and steal sheep, sever water pipes, steal women’s gold, steal money.
Ahmed Ka’abaneh
In the valley below is Lechatchila Farm, whose name no one actually seems to know, other than the veteran and well-informed researcher of settlements Dror Etkes, from the Kerem Navot humanitarian NGO, which monitors developments in Israeli land policy in the West Bank. At the center of this outpost is a structure topped by a sign that reads: “Kingdom of kohanim [priests]. Training facility for kohanim.” “Get out of here,” the trainee priests shout at us. It’s their land; they are its lords and masters.
At the end of the road we’re on – how unusual – there is a red sign, apparently the handiwork of settlers, in Hebrew: “Stop, dangerous road! This road leads to Area A” – i.e., the part of the West Bank administered exclusively by the Palestinian Authority, according to the Oslo Accords; there’s a locked barrier behind it. A few hundred meters away is Chen Bamidbar, the desert recreation center run by Mitzpeh Yeriho, which offers attractive B&Bs on stolen land. The settlement’s swimming pool is also visible. Since the war in Gaza, entry to this entire area has been for Jews only. Before that, Palestinians from the nearby villages used to come here.
We pass the abandoned Bedouin shepherding community mentioned above and see the three Israelis sitting on the porch of a rundown home: Nati Hanadari, from Moshav Kahal in northern Israel, the adult among the three, and two youths, Zaki Shalom from Rehovot and Itamar from Jerusalem (who did not want his picture taken or his surname revealed), have been here, on and off, for two months. The Standing Together activists are guarding the abandoned Bedouin community in which eight families lived until recently. Six left last summer, one the week before last and one remains.
The three activists, who are affable and impressive – embodiments of eretz yisrael hayafa, the beautiful Land of Israel – relate that the level of harassment they have witnessed since they arrived in the area has been mounting. The settlers had pastured their sheep in the fields and would even sometimes in bring them into the houses, threatening and intimidating the residents, sometimes also stealing and vandalizing property. Because this small but determined trio is here mostly only on weekends, the settlers now confine their abuse to the other days of the week.
A month ago, a local resident was married and the next day his father was arrested. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back: The whole family left. That’s the method, Hanadari explains: Settlers throw stones at the shepherds, call the police, who arrive at the scene and arrest – guess who? A few weeks ago, the moshavnik from the Galilee adds, uniformed settlers from security squads showed up and arrested 18 people. They stripped and humiliated them, before releasing them a few hours later.
Last Wednesday, the three relate, they were summoned to this spot after hearing that the settlers had erected their tin shack on the hill. They got here quickly, but the two last families had already fled to the Jericho area. In addition to the three men there are a few cats roaming around, which they feed; also left behind are objects representing the life that was – a child’s bicycle and a television; the huts and animal pens are empty. “We are here so that the settlers won’t invade, won’t steal, won’t win,” Hanadari declares.
The three are not armed – “We have hands,” one of the teenagers says with a smile. Sometimes they are also called to help other communities in the area, to repair a water pipe that was sabotaged by a settler, or to have a cup of tea or coffee with the shepherds.
Just before we visited, settlers had descended from the outpost above. Hanadari called the police and was told that this is a “public area” and that “no offense was being committed.” The young activist Itamar is wearing a black sweat suit with a skull and crossbones on the back – the uniform of the St. Pauli soccer team from Hamburg. It is identified with the struggle against racism; its fans come from the anarchist and anti-nationalist German left.
After a few minutes’ drive we reach the home of the sole remaining family here. Ahmed Ka’abaneh, 40, who has four children, works in Palestinian-owned date groves outside Jericho. He says was born a half-hour’s drive away, but in 2006 settlers from Mitzpeh Yeriho burned his home and the family had to move here.
What’s going on here? Ahmed replies in his broken Hebrew: “The settlers come at night and enter the homes, turn on the lights and frighten the children. They start to scream: ‘Get out of here, Arab sons of dogs.’ Every night. They wear clothes of soldiers and steal sheep, sever water pipes, steal women’s gold, steal money; from my neighbor they stole 200 goats. Settlers in the clothes of the army and the police. They are all Ben-Gvir and Smotrich” – a reference to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Why are you staying on, we ask. “Let Ben-Gvir and Smotrich leave. I am waiting for them to burn me, too, me and the children. I am not leaving.” And what do you think about those who have left? “Anyone who leaves has no strength. He doesn’t have the strength to not sleep all night either. They throw stones, steal and lie, and the police have their back. They help them.”
A few days before, Ahmed relates, settlers had taken their goats into his house. “We call the police six, seven times. They say they’re coming and don’t come. And if they do come they go to Mitzpeh Yeriho, and there some supervising officer takes them to a different place. That’s how the police are, because of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.”
Ahmed has saved recordings of his conversations with duty officers on his phone. “There are a lot of stories here lately,” he says. When did the settlers last come? “On Saturday. They said: ‘We will kill all the Bedouin, we will burn all the Bedouin.’ They say our friends are in Gaza, that because of us there is Hamas and we need to be punished. Do you think settlers are regular people? No! They are part of ISIS. They burn, they steal, and they all look alike. Maybe they will take a child and burn him. They are the second ISIS.”
Do you have sheep? “Sheep? Heaven forbid. Sheep get stolen. Once a thief would come at night. Now a thief comes in the day.”