Dror Etkes, founder of Israeli NGO Kerem Navot, said Smotrich\u2019s description of his \u201cmethod\u201d was spot-on \u2013 except for one omission. \u201cThe political discourse skips the [Palestinian] expulsion chapter,\u201d said Etkes, suggesting Smotrich and other politicians avoid doing so explicitly to avoid potential scrutiny from international criminal courts. \u201cThey want it to happen, and they know that it happens, and they let it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Haaretz reported that Metzoke Eretz is one of 19 outposts legalised by the Netanyahu government after nearby Palestinians were violently expelled.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/View-from-Muhammads-looking-out-towards-the-outpost-seen-on-hill-in-background-1791321948.jpeg\")
The view from Muhammad Ghawanmeh\u2019s home in al-Awsaj, looking out towards an Israeli outpost on a hill in the background [Al Jazeera]\u2018Not a single moment of joy\u2019<\/p>\n
Jamal Mleihat, Alia\u2019s 45-year-old uncle, sits with eight relatives nestled inside a bare concrete-block house on the ridge in al-Awsaj, with his daughter Sewar hanging off his lap.<\/p>\n
Below the ridge, rows of young trees climb a cultivated slope towards a factory at the foot of the hills. The ridge itself is rock and dust, now home to about 25 families from al-Muarrajat, among others forcibly displaced in the past three years.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore October 7 [2023 Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel\u2019s subsequent genocidal war on Gaza], we were in the pastures \u2013 no harassment, we moved around freely,\u201d said Jamal, a father of seven. \u201cWe had healthcare. We had a school. We had water in the same encampment. Life was a million times better than this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since October 7, the Israeli government has stepped up its raids on the occupied West Bank, while settlers have largely been given free rein to pursue a pogrom against Palestinians, with little pushback from within Israel.<\/p>\n
Just below Jamal\u2019s shelter, alone on a slope, Muhammad Ghawanmeh lives with his wife and seven children. His toilet does not work; he relies on water tanks and has almost no electricity. The rocky track to the Mleihats\u2019 area is too steep to drive. He built a fence around the house after recent settler attacks, and now faces constant drone surveillance from Israeli settlers.<\/p>\n
Ghawanmeh is from Ras Ein al-Auja<\/a>, which had been the largest Bedouin community in the central Jordan Valley \u2013 so robust that humanitarian coordinators told Al Jazeera in October 2023 that the village\u2019s displacement was unlikely. Instead, its more than 600 Palestinian inhabitants experienced the largest single-community expulsion<\/a> of Bedouins in the last three years, after repeated attacks by settlers from four surrounding outposts.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom my childhood, the land was open. The water was open. We were living happily. We\u2019d graze 10 kilometres, 15 kilometres with the sheep, and come back,\u201d he said. \u201cToday we can\u2019t go 500 metres from the house.\u201d<\/p>\n His flock has shrunk from about 300 to roughly 100 physically thinning sheep, which he now must buy fodder for, instead of letting them graze on the land, which he now says is largely forbidden by Israeli settlers and the army.<\/p>\n A few hundred metres beyond Ghawanmeh\u2019s fence, a white trailer and a few containers mark an Israeli outpost, established about six months ago on a hill overlooking Highway 90 and the displaced families along the ridge. Two months ago, Ghawanmeh said, soldiers came to his house and told him he could no longer pass to the highway. The settlers, he said, \u201care with the army\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cYou leave this place, go to another one, and it follows you \u2013 the same problem, unsolved,\u201d Ghawanmeh said. \u201cEvery three months, there\u2019s a displacement operation.\u201d<\/p>\n Al-Awsaj barely existed as an inhabited place before, but Bedouin from different depopulated communities have now converged on this barren ridge, overlooking land largely declared \u2013 again \u2013 off-limits to grazing.<\/p>\n Allegra Pacheco, head of the West Bank Protection Consortium, calls al-Awsaj \u201cbasically a refugee camp, an internally displaced camp, that we see in other countries. But here, there\u2019s no safe space. Wherever people like in al-Awsaj go, they\u2019re chased by settlers or their tents are demolished by the Israelis.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been very painful to get the authorities, the Palestinian authorities, the international leaders, to recognise that this is a mass displacement happening in front of us, and people have nowhere to go,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Project of forced transfer<\/p>\n![\"Jamal](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Jamal-Mleihat-with-his-daughter-Sewar-1791322462.jpeg\")
Jamal Mleihat with his daughter Sewar in al-Awsaj in the occupied West Bank [Al Jazeera]\u2018Nothing was left except this\u2019<\/p>\n