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DUBAI: On a cold January morning in 2017, Salem and his wife, Umm Mohammed, watched as bulldozers flattened the modest shelters they had built for their four children. It was the second time in three years their home had been demolished.

“To demolish someone’s house is to wreck their life,” Umm Mohammed told the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs at the time.

Salem’s family was one of two displaced that winter, when the Israeli Civil Administration, accompanied by soldiers, demolished six structures in Jabal Al-Baba, a small Palestinian Bedouin hamlet perched on a hillside near the sprawling settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.

More than eight years later, the threat of forced displacement looms larger than ever. Some 22 families in Jabal Al-Baba have received demolition orders, giving them 60 days to destroy their own homes.

Israeli security forces, often accompanied by dogs, have repeatedly raided their dwellings at night.

“Where else could I go? There is nothing,” said Atallah Al-Jahalin, leader of the Bedouin community, in a recent interview with Reuters.

The families of Jabal Al-Baba are part of the Jahalin tribe, descendants of Bedouins driven from the Negev Desert during the 1948 Nakba.

They settled on privately owned Palestinian land under lease agreements and sustained a pastoral way of life centered on livestock and seasonal grazing.

Today, around 80 families — about 450 people — call the hamlet home, raising roughly 3,000 sheep and goats that remain their lifeline.

But this way of life is being steadily squeezed by Israel’s E1 settlement plan. The project aims to expand Ma’ale Adumim eastward toward Jerusalem, creating a contiguous bloc of Israeli settlements that would bisect the occupied West Bank and sever East Jerusalem from its Palestinian hinterland.

“You cannot have a Palestinian state with Israeli presence in E1,” Hagit Ofran, an Israeli peace activist and co-director of Settlement Watch at the nongovernmental organization Peace Now, told Arab News.

In August, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the final approval of some 3,400 housing units in E1. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed off on the move weeks later, cementing plans that critics say would make a viable Palestinian state impossible.

OCHA, the UN’s humanitarian office, is “particularly worried” about “the devastating humanitarian impact this plan could have, first and foremost on Palestinians in that area, alongside implications for the wider occupied Palestinian territory,” a spokesperson told Arab News.

The blueprint includes construction of a bypass road — dubbed the “Fabric of Life Road” or “Sovereignty Road” — to divert Palestinian traffic away from the Jerusalem-Jericho corridor. The road would cut off Jabal Al-Baba from the nearby town of Al-Eizariya, the hub for education, healthcare, and commerce.

“We are dependent on Al-Eizariya for education as the children go to school there, for health, for everything; our economic situation is also tied to Al-Eizariya,” said Al-Jahalin.

OCHA warns the road scheme would “undermine territorial contiguity, increase travel times, and negatively affect people’s livelihoods and access to services.”

Israeli officials justify the evictions by citing “illegal structures” and security concerns. They have promoted relocation offers in Al-Eizariya or Jericho, presenting them as opportunities to improve infrastructure, education, and healthcare.

However, Bedouins view the proposals as thinly veiled attempts at dispossession.

The community recalls earlier relocations that tore apart their social fabric. A 2013 joint report by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA and Israeli NGO Bimkom described how families transferred to Al-Jabal village in the late 1990s endured worsening poverty, overcrowding, and restrictions on women’s movement.

“The allocation of a small parcel for each family and the connection to minimal infrastructure can lead to significant harm to human rights,” Bimkom warned.

For Bedouin families, resisting relocation is as much about identity as survival.

Since October 2023, more than 3,000 Bedouins — mostly women and children — have been displaced from at least 46 West Bank communities due to settler violence and military-backed demolitions, according to UN figures.

Settler attacks are now a daily occurrence. In Ras Ein Al-Auja alone, more than 50 incidents were recorded in 2025, including the establishment of an illegal outpost that blocked access to grazing land and water.

The UN counts an average of four settler assaults each day. Nearly 2,900 Palestinians have been uprooted since early 2023, most linked to outpost expansion.

Meanwhile, some 700,000 Jewish settlers now live among 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. International law deems the settlements illegal, but Israel asserts historical and religious claims to what it calls Judea and Samaria.

The International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that Israel’s separation wall inside occupied territory was unlawful and must be dismantled.

OCHA says Israeli plans to extend the barrier around E1 would only deepen movement restrictions and entrench fragmentation.

“There is also a longstanding Israeli plan to encircle the E1 area with additional sections of the 712-km-long barrier,” the UN spokesperson said.

Ofran of Peace Now urged the US to intervene. “The simplest solution is if the Americans would want it to stop. The problem is that they don’t.”

She also called on governments to send symbolic but powerful messages by excluding Israel from international events such as sports tournaments. It would send a “clear message,” without hurting Israel’s economy or security, she said.

Still, Ofran is realistic about the current political climate. “Our government is totally crazy; they don’t care about the lives of the Israelis, the hostages, the soldiers and so they don’t care about public opinion,” she said.

“Under these circumstances, it’s very hard,” she added, though she remains hopeful that international recognition of Palestine — now by more than 150 countries — could shape Israeli debate. “It’s a simple right of Palestinians,” she said.

Polling suggests nearly half of Israelis support a US-backed framework that includes recognizing a Palestinian state in exchange for normalization with Arab countries.

“Nearly half of the Israeli public supports a regional-political-security framework that includes an agreement to establish a Palestinian state,” Ron Gerlitz, director of the aChord Center at Hebrew University, said in a January statement.

For families like Salem’s, however, the debate over statehood feels distant as they brace for another round of demolitions.

More than 65,000 Palestinians have been killed and 168,000 injured since the war in Gaza began last October, according to Palestinian health officials. Against that backdrop, Jabal Al-Baba’s plight has struggled to attract sustained global attention.

Still, the community clings to hope that international pressure could halt the E1 project. Ofran believes the tide could yet turn. “Israelis will kick this government out,” she said. And if the next leadership recognizes the E1 plan as a “horrible mistake,” she added, “they will block it.”

Until then, Jabal Al-Baba’s residents live under the shadow of demolition orders, determined to hold on to their hillside homes — a stand not just for survival, but for identity, continuity, and the future of Palestine itself.