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 landscape of scarred 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 faces a campaign of systematic destruction by Israeli settlers.
“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. His frustration is shared by his neighbor, Mohammad Salah, whose home entrance is now blocked by a pile of rubble more than two meters high. The destruction is not merely an act of random violence but a calculated effort to erase the presence of Palestinian families who have held these lands for generations.
The current wave of destruction follows a pattern established in February, when the first major settler attack tore through the area. During that initial assault, homes were demolished, property was looted, and residents were terrorized. This summer, the work resumed under the guise of “clearing” the ruins those earlier attacks had left behind. In the process, Israeli excavators have dumped massive piles of debris directly in front of remaining homes, effectively trapping families inside their own properties.
“How am I supposed to get into my own house?” Salah recalled asking the settler operating the machinery. The response was chilling in its indifference: “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 involves the destruction of gardens, orchards, and structural integrity, further pushing families toward total displacement.
Residents and legal experts argue that what is unfolding is a subversion of normal legal processes that has effectively erased the line between settler ambition and state authority. No official demolition order has ever been presented to the residents—no paper a lawyer can hold up in court. “Not an official order,” Salah noted. “This is a state with no law. No decency in it. A state of thugs.”
The central figure in these operations is reportedly associated with Armonot Farm, an Israeli settler outpost built without authorization on a ridge overlooking Ein al-Duyuk in the summer of 2024. When contacted for comment, the owner, Herbst, hung up the phone. Al Jazeera also reached out to Israeli authorities for comment regarding the allegations of state complicity, but received no response.
The neighborhood, known locally as Stih, sits just meters from the ruins of the Hasmonean and Herodian winter palaces, an area of significant historical and strategic interest. Palestinian residents describe a coordinated effort to clear the land. Ali Kaabneh, a 40-year-old Bedouin herder, recounted the terror of the February 10 attack, during which he and his wife were forced out of their home by masked settlers. “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 gone. Many Bedouin families have lived since then in the ruins of their partially destroyed homes, or without shelter at all. For months afterward, there was a tense calm, during which settlers nonetheless carried out thefts of property and intimidation. However, behind the scenes, developments continued. In March, the Israeli military issued a seizure order for a strip of Palestinian land for an unspecified purpose, signaling that the state was aligning its administrative power with the settlers’ territorial goals.
That “calm” ended on July 19, when Herbst arrived with a bulldozer. By the afternoon, 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, and orchards. Lawyer Tawfiq Jabareen filed for emergency injunctions at Israel’s High Court on July 23 and July 29, but the destruction continued unabated.
The state’s own court filings, obtained by Al Jazeera, revealed that a state-backed arrangement granting Israeli settlers agricultural use of the land predated the February attacks. Following the initial demolition of Palestinian homes, the Binyamin Regional Council requested that the state authorize the “clearing” of the area. This effectively provided a legal veneer for the settlers to continue their work, even while some of the Palestinian homes were under longstanding court injunctions 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,” legal filings state. The disparity in power is stark, and for residents like Salah, the psychological toll is immense. “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,” he said. “These settlers don’t try to speak with you. They only speak in the language of power.”
For those remaining in Ein al-Duyuk, the future is increasingly uncertain. The constant presence of heavy machinery and the lack of legal recourse have left families feeling abandoned by the systems meant to protect property rights. “I feel like I’m weak,” Salah admitted. “I always told my kids: If you don’t make trouble, nobody will bother you. What am I supposed to say to him now?” As the rubble piles grow, the residents continue to document the destruction, hoping that the evidence of their displacement will eventually force a reckoning with the authorities who have allowed the situation to escalate.
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.
The neighbourhood below, known locally as Stih, sits a few dozen metres from the ruins of the Hasmonean and Herodian winter palaces, an archaeological site Israel’s government has designated a flagship for a planned network of “Judeo-centric” heritage parks across the West Bank.
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.
“But whoever wanted to fix his wall, [Herbst] would come to him and stop him.”
In March, the Israeli military issued a seizure order for a strip of Palestinian land for an access route to the archaeological site – an order not handed to affected residents until weeks after it was issued – part of a sharp increase in such orders that Israeli NGOs Emek Shaveh and Kerem Navot say now overwhelmingly serve settler rather than security interests.
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.
What came back, on the night of July 30, was the state’s own account of how Herbst came to be there – a filing, which Al Jazeera obtained, that revealed an extraordinary example of the state deputising settlers to carry out demolitions and land takeover.
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.
They believe imposing facts on the ground is stronger than any court decision.”
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.
If you don’t cause problems, the government won’t come after you.
And my son says to me, ‘Dad, you’re a liar.
He gestured at the razed land adjacent to their home, on the other side of the rubble.
He looked up towards the hillside above – Herbst’s excavator visible on the slope of the now-legalised settlement.
