For the last three years or so, the pastoral West Bank village of Ras al-‘Ain was my home away from home, its Bedouin people an extended family. Israeli settlers living in illegal outposts adjacent to the village assaulted it daily throughout these years and have now finally overwhelmed it. All the families have taken apart their houses and left.

Ras al-‘Ain was the last large Palestinian village in the southern Jordan Valley. The others, including the twin village of Mu‘arrajat two miles away, had been destroyed and their people expelled in a highly effective campaign of ethnic cleansing backed by the Israeli government. For many decades roughly a thousand people lived in Ras al-‘Ain. They belonged to three Bedouin tribes—Rashaida, Jahalin, and Ka‘abneh—that united in the hope that together they could withstand settler violence. Most of the villagers were shepherds, surviving in a subsistence economy. On the night of March 7, 2025, dozens of heavily armed settlers under the protection of the police and the army invaded Ras al-‘Ain and stole at least a thousand, and possibly as many as 1,500, of the villagers’ sheep and goats. We have excellent video documentation, taken by two remarkably courageous activists, of that raid. The Palestinian owners submitted a formal complaint to the police, with the video documentation, but—as usual these days—within a few hours the police closed the file on the grounds that there was no supporting evidence. A thousand sheep are worth some two million Israeli shekels. The economic foundation of the village was devastated.

Still, most of the families held on. The village was on privately owned Palestinian land that under Israeli law should have been off limits to the settlers. No Israeli official, however, was prepared to enforce the law. The police have been turned into a vicious ultranationalist militia under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the serial criminal (dozens of indictments and several convictions) and hate-monger appointed minister of national security by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There is also no succor from the Israeli civil courts. After the theft of the sheep, those who remained in the village still had to deal with the daily incursions of the settlers, including beatings, curses, threats, harassment, pepper spray, and more theft. Our activists—all of us Gandhian-style nonviolent resisters—did what we could to block the violence, with some success.

In late December 2025, the settlers plowed a large expanse of the village land—plowing in the West Bank is a claim to possession—and created the rudiments of another illegal outpost inside Ras al-‘Ain, not far from an outpost set up earlier a little farther south. The plowing was preceded by a day of particularly savage attacks on Palestinians, journalists who came to report, and our activists. The settlers also besieged several of the houses bordering the plowed field and the outpost, blocking the residents’ access to food, water, and electricity. As our friend Salameh told me, “We have nothing left—no money, no food, no water, no medicines, no rest, and no hope.” Within a few days of this torment, the families began the excruciating business of demolishing their houses. I witnessed it. It was perhaps the hardest day I have known in twenty-some years in the occupied West Bank.

A few families managed to stay on, braving the danger. Settler gangs roamed the village freely, exulting in their victory over what they call “the enemy”—the peaceful people of Ras al-‘Ain. Daily and nightly attacks on Palestinian homes and families continued. By now the village has been emptied of its people. If you’d like to witness human evil at its worst, come with me any day to the West Bank.