Illegal paramilitary Israeli colonizers attacked and forcibly expelled Palestinian shepherds from grazing lands in the al-Himma area of the northern Jordan Valley, in the occupied West Bank, on Monday.
Local sources reported that armed colonizers chased the shepherds off the pastures and pursued them to areas near their tents in the same region.
The northern Jordan Valley has witnessed a sharp escalation in colonizer violence, with armed colonizers routinely assaulting Palestinian civilians, preventing access to grazing lands, looting, and killing livestock, attacking private property, and storming residential tents.
As a result of these systematic attacks, more than 25 Palestinian families have been displaced from their homes in the northern Jordan Valley since last summer.
Three entire communities have been emptied, and others have seen a significant decline in population.
According to a report issued by the Wall & Colonization Resistance Commission in early August, colonizers’ attacks, enabled and protected by official Israeli institutions, have led to the forced displacement of 33 Bedouin communities since October 7, 2023.
In related news, Illegal paramilitary Israeli colonizers released their livestock among Palestinian homes in the village of Shallal al-Awja, north of Jericho, on Monday morning.
This deliberate violation is part of a broader campaign of daily provocations aimed at tightening control over the area and subjecting residents to coercive conditions that threaten forced displacement.
Such actions reflect the ongoing strategy of colonial expansion, where colonizers’ encroachments are used to destabilize Palestinian communities and assert dominance over land and resources.
On Sunday, Israeli colonizers burned Palestinian property near Salfit, in the central West Bank, and established illegal settlement outposts, while occupation soldiers assaulted an anti-settlement activist south of Hebron in the southern West Bank.
All of Israel’s colonies in the occupied West Bank, including those in and around occupied East Jerusalem, are illegal under International Law, the Fourth Geneva Convention in addition to various United Nations and Security Council resolutions. They also constitute war crimes under International Law.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory”.
