Ras Ain Al Awja, West Bank
—
Suleiman Gawanme is tired of talking. For more than a decade, he spoke hoarsely to himself until he realized that his words could not save his community from being kicked out. After a final plea for help was in vain, he too left.
“I feel angry at the world…no one listens to us…like we’re not human,” he told CNN.
His village, Ras Ain al-Awja, in the occupied West Bank, is now erased and devoid of Palestinian residents after a years-long campaign of persistent harassment by settlers that intensified in the past two years.
Violence against what was once the West Bank’s largest shepherd community increased significantly this month, forcing families to abandon their homes, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said.
Armed and masked settlers, many of them teenagers, poured into Ras Ain al-Awja daily, terrorizing the nearly 120 extended families living there, totaling more than 800 people, residents and activists said. By the end of January, the harassment had forced all of them to resign.
Gawanme, 44, and her family were the last to leave on Sunday.
“We did not evacuate because shepherds and settlers attacked us. No, the problem is bigger than that. Shepherds are a tool, a means of occupation,” he said.
Ras Ain al-Awja is the 46th West Bank shepherd community to be forcibly relocated since October 7, 2023, according to B’Tselem, which he calls a form of “ethnic cleansing.”
Following a rise in attacks on settlers last year, the Israeli military said in a statement that it “sternly views and condemns all types of violence as undermining regional security.”
But that’s not how residents describe the military’s role on the ground.
According to community members, Jewish settlers have been harassing residents of Ras Ain al-Awja since 2010. After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 and subsequent attacks on Gaza, residents claim that the situation will only get worse. Since April 2024, settlers have built four new illegal settlements around the village and are closing in on Palestinian homes, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Settlers believed to be from these outposts have stolen or damaged water tanks, endangering communities’ access to water and destroying their livelihoods, according to residents, activists, and videos obtained by CNN. They cut power lines, stole thousands of livestock, and destroyed sheepfolds and Palestinian property, all with the aid or inaction of Israeli forces.
CNN drove to one of the four outposts to speak with the settlers, but the two men there refused to answer our questions.
“We don’t accept journalists,” one young Israeli settler told us before leaving the compound.
Another settler soon arrived and began filming before calling the police. Both men declined to answer questions about the reported harassment of Palestinians in Ras Ain al-Awja.
Gawangmeh said his community would not have had to leave if the settlers had not been supported by the Israeli government and many governments around the world.
He and his brothers spent all day dismantling the house, ripping out the metal panels, and rebuilding it elsewhere, wherever they could settle.
Women and children loaded mattresses and tarpaulins into pickup trucks and stuffed them with belongings. What could not be transported was burned instead.
“We don’t want them to profit from what’s ours,” Ngawanme said of the settlers.
In between painstaking tasks, the men spray-painted the words “2026 Final Evacuation” and “Third Nakba” on the metal huts. It is a reference to the 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe,” in which approximately 700,000 Palestinians were displaced or expelled from their homes in what is now Israel.
Gawanmeh’s own family was uprooted from their village near Beersheba in southern Israel at the time and deported to Ramallah. They were again displaced in 1967 after the Six Day War.
Now forced to flee their homes for the third time, they are camping about two miles from their village and don’t know where to go next.
Ras Ain al-Awja is located in the southern Jordan Valley. In June 2024, Israel declared approximately 3,000 acres of the Jordan Valley, including Ras Ain al-Awja, state land, according to Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now. This would be the largest seizure of Palestinian land since the Oslo Accords.
This means that the land is no longer considered private Palestinian property and therefore cannot be used or accessed by Palestinians. Peace Now says this is “one of the main means by which the State of Israel seeks to assert control over occupied land.”
Haitham Zayed, 25, a lifelong resident of Ras Ain al-Awja, said what happened to his village was part of the Israeli government’s “systematic policy” to “empty Palestinian land.”
Two weeks ago, when some families in the village began to leave due to growing threats from settlers, he vowed to stay.
“Do you think if I go somewhere else I will be safe from settlers and troops? There is no place in the West Bank that is safe from settlers and troops,” he said at the time.
Two days later, he told CNN he had no choice but to leave.
“There is no life left in Ras Ain al-Awja,” he texted. “We are reliving the Nakba.”
