‘We are reliving the Nakba’: A Palestinian community says it’s being erased as Israeli settler violence intensifies

Ras Ein al-Auja, West Bank — 

Suleiman Ghawanmeh is tired of talking. For over 10 years, he talked himself hoarse until he realized his words could not save his community from being driven out. After his final appeal for help came to nothing, he, too, left.

“I am angry with the world… nobody listens to us… it’s as if we are not human beings,” he told CNN.

His village of Ras Ein al-Auja in the occupied West Bank has now been erased – emptied of its Palestinian residents after a years-long campaign of relentless settler harassment that has intensified over the past two years.

The ongoing violence against what was once the largest shepherding community in the West Bank increased markedly this month, forcing families to abandon their homes, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Armed and masked settlers, many of them teenagers, descended on the Ras Ein al-Auja daily, residents and activists say, terrorizing the nearly 120 extended families – more than 800 people in total – who lived there. By the end of January, that harassment forced them all to leave.

A Bedouin man gathers plastic sheeting as families begin to gather their belongings to leave their homes after continues harassment from Israeli right-wing settlers in Ras Ein al-Auja, near the city of Jericho in the Israel-occupied Palestinian West Bank on January 11, 2026. 

Ilia Yefimovich/AFP/Getty Images

Ghawanmeh, 44, and his family were the last to go on Sunday.

“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.

Ras Ein al-Auja is the 46th shepherding community in the West Bank to be forcibly displaced since October 7th 2023, according to B’Tselem, which calls this a form of “ethnic cleansing.”

In response to the uptick in settler attacks last year, the Israeli military said in a statement that it “views violence of any kind with severity and condemns it, as it harms security in the area.”

But that is not how residents describe the military’s role on the ground.

‘The third Nakba’

Jewish settlers have been harassing the residents of Ras Ein al-Auja since 2010, according to members of the community. After the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 and the ensuing offensive in Gaza, residents say matters only worsened. Settlers have built four new illegal settlement outposts around the village since April 2024, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), closing in on Palestinian homes.

According to residents, activists and videos obtained by CNN, settlers believed to be from those outposts stole or damaged water tanks, compromising the community’s access to water and undermining its livelihood. They cut electricity lines, stole thousands of livestock and vandalized sheep pens and Palestinian property – all with the support or inaction of the Israeli military.

Men help dismantle a house as a Bedouin family pack their belongings and leave their home after months of harassment from a nearby illegal Israeli settler outpost in Ras Ein al-Auja, near Jericho in the Israel-occupied Palestinian West Bank on January 8, 2026. 

John Wessels/AFP/Getty Images

CNN drove up to one of the four outposts to speak with the settlers, but two men there refused to respond to our questions.

“We don’t accept journalists,” one young Israeli settler told us before walking us off the property.

Another settler soon arrived and began filming before calling the police. Both men refused to address questions about their reported harassment of the Palestinians in Ras Ein al-Auja.

Ghawanmeh said if the settlers didn’t enjoy the support of the Israeli government and many governments around the world, his community would not have had to leave.

He and his brothers spent all day dismantling their homes, pulling apart metal panels to rebuild elsewhere – wherever they can find a place to settle.

Women and children packed away their belongings, piling mattresses and tarps into pickup trucks. Whatever could not be transported was burned instead.