Jihad Suleiman Al-Sawafta, 46, has lived on his farm in the occupied West Bank village of Bardala his entire life. But when Israeli settlers showed up in December, Al-Sawafta said his land, and his livelihood, shrank to a fraction of its former self. “They crowded the area. They took thousands of dunams (1,000 square meters) from Bardala and its grazing lands,” he said, referring to his Palestinian town in the northern part of the West Bank. He added that the Jordan Valley, a fertile strip of land long considered the West Bank’s breadbasket, had been “largely emptied”of its Palestinian residents. Herding outposts like the one set up on Al-Sawafta’s land are often established by Israeli settlers on hilltops with a few caravans and sometimes livestock to mark their claim. Monitoring groups say they are notorious for swallowing up vast swathes of land and prohibiting Palestinian residents from moving freely. The…
