Jericho, occupied West Bank – Where Palestinian homes once stood among orchards and swimming pools on the southwestern edge of Jericho, there is now only a desolate landscape of churned earth and broken concrete. Somewhere beneath the packed dirt lie entire houses, dumped into pits and smoothed over by heavy machinery. Only a few severed water pipes hint that anyone ever lived here, as the area of Ein al-Duyuk has been transformed into a site of systematic erasure.
“Why do you hide the crime you’re committing?” asked Khalil al-Razim, 60, a Jerusalemite who has spent his summers on a plot of land here for more than a decade. Beside his house, a pile of rubble more than two metres high blocks the entrance to the home of his neighbour, Mohammad Salah. Next to the debris, the remnants of a once-thriving garden serve as a stark reminder of the lives that were uprooted by the ongoing settler incursions.
Six months earlier, in February, the first major settler attack tore through the area, leaving homes demolished and residents terrified. This summer, the same work resumed under the guise of “clearing” the ruins those earlier attacks had left behind. In the process, the Israeli excavator dumped piles of rubble in front of Salah’s home, effectively sealing him out of his own property. “How am I supposed to get into my own house?” Salah recalled asking the settler operating the machine. The man’s response was cold and dismissive: “That’s not my problem, how you get into your house.”
Since July 19, settler-operated excavators have arrived on a near-daily basis. While the stated purpose is the “clearing of waste,” the reality on the ground involves far more destructive activity. No official order has ever been presented to the residents—no legal document a lawyer can hold up in court to challenge the demolition. “Not an official order,” Salah noted, highlighting the lawlessness that has come to define the area. What is unfolding here, according to residents, lawyers, and the state’s own court filings, is a subversion of normal legal processes that has effectively erased the line between settler ambition and state authority.
“This is a state with no law,” Salah said. “No decency in it. A state of thugs.” Al Jazeera reached out to Israeli authorities for comment, but received no response. A man named Herbst, who owns an Israeli settler outpost called Armonot Farm, was also reached by phone regarding the demolitions, but he hung up immediately after being identified as a reporter. Armonot Farm was built without authorisation on a ridge overlooking Ein al-Duyuk in the summer of 2024, serving as a base for the ongoing campaign against the Palestinian residents.
The neighbourhood, known locally as Stih, sits just metres from the ruins of the Hasmonean and Herodian winter palaces, an area of immense historical significance. In February, following a social media post, dozens of masked settlers descended on the area from the Armonot settlement and other nearby outposts. Ali Kaabneh, 40, a Bedouin herder, was inside his house when the February 10 attack began. “They started throwing stones at me,” he said. “They forced me and my wife out of the house. There were 13 families with me – they drove us out.” When the settlers withdrew eight hours later, Kaabneh’s 150 sheep had scattered, and his licensed tractor was stolen.
Many Bedouin families have lived since then in the ruins of their partially destroyed homes, or without any shelter at all. For months, there was a tense calm, during which settlers nonetheless carried out thefts of property and livestock. However, behind the scenes, the state was moving forward with its own agenda. In March, the Israeli military issued a seizure order for a strip of Palestinian land, ostensibly for infrastructure, but the true intent became clear in July when Herbst arrived with a bulldozer to bury the remaining rubble from the February attacks.
By the afternoon of July 19, the official narrative had shifted, according to Yael Sela, a cofounder of the Palestine Solidarity co-op. In the weeks since, residents and activists report that bulldozers have demolished or damaged additional houses, alleys, orchards, and gardens. Lawyer Tawfiq Jabareen filed for an emergency injunction at Israel’s High Court on July 23, and again on July 29, as the destruction intensified. The state’s response, filed on July 30, revealed that a state-backed arrangement granting Israeli settlers agricultural use of the land predated the February attacks.
The filing indicated that in May, the Binyamin Regional Council had asked the state to facilitate the “clearing” of the area. This is despite the fact that at least some of the Palestinian homes have been under a longstanding Israeli court injunction protecting them from demolition. “The settler has demolished, and continues to demolish, buildings and uproot trees, despite the existence of restraining orders from the court,” Jabareen argued in his filings. The legal battle continues, but for families like Salah’s, the damage is already done.
“She says to me, ‘We want to go back to our home.’ My kids say to me, ‘Why can’t we go back to our home?’ I don’t know what to say to them,” Salah said, describing the emotional toll on his children. He feels a profound sense of powerlessness against the settlers who operate with impunity. “These settlers don’t try to speak with you,” he added. “They only speak in the language of power.”
For residents, the experience has shattered their sense of security. “I always told my kids: If you don’t make trouble, nobody will bother you,” Salah reflected. “Now, what am I supposed to say to him?” The destruction of their homes is not just a loss of property; it is a calculated effort to displace them from land they have occupied for generations. The lack of accountability for the settlers, combined with the state’s apparent complicity in the legal filings, has left the community in a state of constant fear.
As the bulldozers continue to reshape the landscape of Ein al-Duyuk, the residents remain in limbo. They watch as their history is buried under piles of dirt and their future is dismantled by those who claim the land as their own. With no legal recourse and no protection from the authorities, the families of Jericho are left to wonder if they will ever be able to return to the homes that were once their sanctuary.
He has not responded to further attempts at contact.
It was initially illegal even under Israel’s own rules, but the Israeli cabinet formally recognised it as a settlement, under the name Daya, at the end of March.
On the morning of February 10, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu posted a video of himself at the ruins, Israeli flag in hand.
“Any place built on the heritage of the Jewish people,” he said, “we will destroy it.”
Two Palestinian communities sit side by side here, and both were hit that day: a group of Bedouins closest to the ruins, home to roughly a hundred people from the Kaabneh tribe, and the neighbourhood of mostly villa-style homes belonging to Palestinian families from elsewhere, including Salah’s and al-Razim’s.
In the neighbouring community, three homes were destroyed completely, according to Hussein Taha, a longtime resident.
That “calm” ended on July 19, at 8:30am, when Herbst arrived with a bulldozer – ostensibly to bury rubble from February’s attack, but soon damaging and destroying property well beyond it.
When residents and Israeli solidarity activists reached out to police, the military, the Palestinian District Coordination and Liaison Office (DCO) and the Civil Administration that day, they were told no one knew anything about it.
Soldiers escort Herbst and keep activists back, citing an ambiguous “closed zone”; no official order has been produced for locals, though activists attempting to enter and document the site have been arrested.
According to the state’s account, a March 2025 agreement was reached between Herbst and the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization to cultivate “state land” for agriculture.
Nonetheless, the Civil Administration approved the request.
The Jordan Valley Brigade commander, Colonel Gilad Shriki, then approved a military escort for Herbst.
The agreement instructed Herbst not to damage structures or trees and to stay within the allocated area – instructions that, residents and activists say, have been violated at every turn, under military escort.
“That is: the army circumvented the court’s decision and sent the settler to do the demolishing instead.”
“The Prosecution claims the [Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization] leased the land to the settler,” he said, “even though the Civil Administration itself had barred the settler from demolishing any building or any tree.”
“My analysis,” Jabareen said, “is that the army and the Civil Administration are now in the settlers’ grip, and there’s no longer any real difference between them.
Across the razed land, what remains standing is small strips of common-area vegetation belonging to no one in particular.
The state’s initial response suggests Herbst plans to begin cultivating the razed land as early as this week.
“Then this ‘kind settler’ wants to come and ‘clean up’ the area, cultivate it, and benefit from it, because he supposedly loves agriculture and green gardens.”
Due to the traditional system of ownership in the area, Palestinian-held land often remains undivided family inheritance, unregistrable under rules that demand proof no family can produce.
“But [they tell us to] bring proof.
Unable to safely reach their home and fearing settler attacks, Salah has moved his wife and four children into a rented apartment in Bethlehem, for 2,000 shekels ($667) a month, though he is unable to find work there.
Attempts to reason with the settlers have failed.
Salah glanced at his son accompanying him that day.
And my son says to me, ‘Dad, you’re a liar.
He looked up towards the hillside above – Herbst’s excavator visible on the slope of the now-legalised settlement.