'Land without laws': Israeli settlers force Bedouins from West Bank community |
As relentless harassment from Israeli settlers drove his brothers from their Bedouin community in the central occupied West Bank, Ahmed Kaabneh remained determined to stay on the land his family had lived on for generations.
But when a handful of young settlers constructed a shack around 100 metres above his home and started intimidating his children, 45-year-old Kaabneh said he had no choice but to flee too.
As with scores of Bedouin communities across the West Bank, the small cluster of wood and metal houses where Kaabneh's father and grandfather had lived now lies empty.
"It is very difficult... because you leave an area where you lived for 45 years. Not a day or two or three, but nearly a lifetime," Kaabneh told AFP at his family's new makeshift house in the rocky hills north of Jericho.
"But what can you do? They are the strong ones and we are the weak, and we have no power."
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967, and violence there has soared since the Gaza war erupted in October 2023 following Hamas's attack on Israel.
Some 3,200 Palestinians from dozens of Bedouin and herding communities have been forced from their homes by settler violence and movement........