Israeli campaign of West Bank destruction moves on to region’s food basket

Arraba, occupied West Bank – As Kamal al-Uraidi drove a beat-up Volkswagen down the Arraba-Ya’bad road, an otherwise pleasant early September day was disrupted by the whirring clang of bulldozers and the snapping cracks of olive trees being ripped from the ground on both sides of the road.

The destruction stretched for kilometres: Whole fields of olive groves razed, structures reduced to twisted metal, Israeli flags planted as far as the eye could see – all the way to the strategically significant Arraba Junction and even past the red pylons marking the boundary of Area A, which is technically under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Al-Uraidi passed the first bulldozer completing its destructive work on the al-Fari family’s land on Thursday. Briefly, two Palestinian women from the family could be seen pleading with two soldiers, who kept them back from the machines finishing off the last of the family’s olive groves. The family later said their phones were confiscated during the uprooting so they could not film it and their IDs taken and photographed.

A second bulldozer worked simultaneously further down the road, demolishing more olive trees; on another destroyed plot, families salvaged wood from uprooted trees. Along the road, rubble of demolished homes and structures remained – days, weeks and months after the Israeli military first began widespread razing operations here.

“This is a settlement plan – settlers over there, confiscations here, uprooting trees, Judaisation of the land, expelling people from this land – they want to drive people out,” al-Uraidi said. “Soon, there will be nothing left.”

Often backed by Israeli soldiers, settlers have long attacked Palestinian-owned homes, businesses and farmland across the occupied West Bank. Such attacks have gathered pace after the launch of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in October 2023 and have become particularly violent in recent weeks. Experts say the attacks increasingly fit the definition of a pogrom.

In his office, Ahmed Arda, the mayor of Arraba, sat with his top button undone. His phone rings non-stop these days as his town is suddenly hemmed in, he said, by the Mevo Dotan settlement to the west, the newly founded Emek Dotan settlement to the north and several new Israeli settler outposts to the south.

Israeli settlements and outposts across the West Bank are illegal under international law.