In the last week, occupation forces have continued to harass the Palestinians of the Jordan Valley with threats, violence, extortion and yet more land grabs.

On Tuesday 23rd January a group of settlers, dug three children’s graves by Al Ka’abne community, just months after they painted dolls with blood and left them on the ground. Their message is clear, a direct threat to the children of the area and designed to drive the local population away.

The day before, on Monday 22nd, the Settlement Council and the occupation army confiscated 800 sheep from the Abu Issa family and his brothers who live in the Abel Al-Ajaj camp near the village of Al-Jiftlik and near the Massu’a settlement. The residents who owned the sheep were fined 150,000 shekels. For the people of Abel Al Ajaj, this is the just the latest attack they have endured in a 20-year campaign the occupation army and nearby settlers have collaborated on, attempting to drive them off their land. In 2004 a whole extended family were forced off their land at gunpoint. The settler’s from Massu’a then built a vast array of greenhouses on their land. This was followed by demolition orders and further land theft in 2008, a successful legal case in 2011 by Palestinian residents, followed by further demolition orders. Then demolitions in 2012, 2013 and 2014. Like many others in the Jordan Valley, this is a whole community under threat of extinction. With Israel’s new confidence, as the west backs its genocide in Gaza, the threat to these communities is looming larger.

Also, on 23rd January, in the northern Jordan Valley, the occupation army issued a military order to confiscate 91,395 dunums of land from the village of Tammoun. Their stated reason: for military purposes. This is a regular strategy, where the occupation gives a legal veneer to their theft by claiming they need the land for either military purposes (usually training) or for nature reserves. All of this land is owned by citizens of the town of Tammoun. It is part of the eastern lands of Al-Baqi’a and is located to the east of the village of Atuf. It comprises the basins of: Khallat Al-Rikab, Ras Al-Darna, Ras Al-Madhabir and the Jalama Makisma basin. Through its Kafkaesque apartheid laws, the occupation has created a system where Palestinian ownership is meaningless when the military demands the land.

On 26th January, settlers and Israeli ‘Park Rangers’ shot a Palestinian owned camel, claiming it was grazing in a national park. In the Jordan Valley large areas of Palestinian land have been confiscated and ‘repurposed’ as national parks in a deliberate policy to constrict the grazing land available to local Palestinian farmers.